fnegroni
Prominent Member
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- Jul 8, 2023
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- Location
- London, UK
- Driving
- MG4 SE SR
The drop in temperature is not so quick: I recently warmed up the pack, and then enabled intelligent battery heating and achieved 4mi/kwh without any special measures (nothing was on ECO) and the outside temp was hovering around 0. This was on a one hour journey back from work.It is worth noting that using the battery heater / cabin heater consumes a lot of energy already stored in the pack, unless you are hooked up to a A/C supply to help back fill the loss from the pack.
I always carry out charging on the cheap 5p off peak rate, to a SOC that suits the journey I am about to make.
If I then preheat the cabin & traction battery while still connected to the wall box, then I am consuming power at a much higher daily rate of 40p which defeats the object TBH.
If required, I will just preheat the cabin for 10 minutes using the cheap rate stored energy from the pack.
Some loss of range for sure, but I build this into the level of SOC that I require and it is way less expensive.
If it is extremely cold and you preheat the pack from home, then as you travel the pack temperature is going to drop quickly regardless.
Of course this will differ from person to person and their individual usage patterns / circumstances.
But purely on a personal basis, I don’t find any advantages of using the battery heater myself.
Preheating the pack in cold conditions just before carrying out a D/C rapid charge, should give you a faster charging rate, if time is really that important to you as a person who covers a lot of miles.
But if you are running low on range, this may not be a great idea as heating the pack from the traction pack will have a negative on your remaining range, just like using the cabin heater would.
The battery heater and coolant is very Efficient once the pack is fully warmed up, which takes about an hour, of which 20/30 minutes is actively pumping the coolant through the heater and battery pack, and the next half hour is allowing the pack to be heated uniformly by the coolant.
In the future all batteries will be immersion cooled/heated so this will be even more efficient.