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In reply to: Ecotricity Fast Charging ? New Problem?
I’ve had this happen before. I usually watch the percentage display for the first few Percent. 43kW charging gives 1 percent increase in about 20 seconds. I wouldn’t be surprised if the car charges at a lower rate to protect the battery if it’s too hot. It might not be the charger.
Mine was doing this too at a rapid charger. 43kw is a heck of a lot of power, the battery packs must get hot very quick hence cooking cutting on and off slot. I doubt 7kw at home is going to tax the batteries much… of course I’m just guessing as I have no home charger, but my work ones are 7kw units I believe and never heard a fan cutting in on them charging.
In reply to: Energy Saved: 0kwh?
Whats wrong with regen? Surely it is better to put power back into the battery as you come off the ‘gas’? If we anticipate whats going on in front of us and take our foot off the pedal at the right moment and avoid braking as much as possible, we are elongating range?
Regen braking is better than friction brakes, but it’s still wasteful.
The ideal would be to not use either brakes, but allow the car to roll to a stop on its own. Obviously this isn’t really practical.
However, sometimes you’ll lift of the throttle and slow down “too fast” and have to use more power to more the car forwards to where you actually need to stop. This is inefficient, because it’s taking three times as much power to move the car forward as you reclaimed from the regen.
In the case where you couldn’t have known you’d need to stop (eg. lights change), then regen is a benefit. Otherwise, it’d be better to not have the regen and allow the car to slow down more slowly (starting earlier).
There are other threads where this has been discussed at length 🙂
In reply to: Energy Saved: 0kwh?
Whats wrong with regen? Surely it is better to put power back into the battery as you come off the ‘gas’? If we anticipate whats going on in front of us and take our foot off the pedal at the right moment and avoid braking as much as possible, we are elongating range? We have to take our foot off the pedal anyway or we would just drive into the back of traffic. The byproduct of this is the car putting energy back into the battery. Turning it off would mean the car would still roll to a halt, but in that period of rolling is generating nothing. It’s just rolling.
In reply to: Energy Saved: 0kwh?
My town driving from home involves a few hills which take their toll on range, as does the heavy slow moving rush hour traffic, however overall i am hitting around 99 miles on a full charge though if i am local i tend to do some 80% top ups as its more friendly on the battery.
In the winter months i was getting 80 miles. My driving style is quite light on the right foot and always in eco mode.
My cruise speed for that is 55 mph which has tended to give good results and confirms what Dan has said aboveTopic: April's ZOE Brochure
New brochure is here:
http://brochures.renault.co.uk/PDF/Zoe.pdf
Haven’t been through it in detail yet; but some things I saw:
- Battery rental prices are the same (confirming the drop was not temporary, as some suggested)
- Guaranteed battery capacity remains at 75% for rental and 70% for owning
- ZE Interactive + ZE connect remaig at 12months + 36months
- Service plans are 3yr/4yr £399/£599 (still makes no sense to me, extra £200 for 1 year – more than the cost of a service?); I believe the £199 offer ended at the end of March
- Still mentions rapid charging at 30min; as far as I can see, there is no mention of the new motor!
Topic: Energy Saved: 0kwh?
I don’t know what the normal values are for this; but I’ve done 40odd miles and the trip report says 0kwh saved. Is this normal?
I haven’t used the brake pedal a huge amount in these 40 miles (except when lights have changed on me), but have slowed down by lifting of the throttle lots (and I’ve seen the white rings moving up the battery on the dash lots).
What are normal values people see? These 40 miles are mostly “around town”, though there’s a little stint on the motorway for a few miles at the start of my commute.
In reply to: Signed up
Check out @dafmeuk‘s charts here:
http://myrenaultzoe.com/index.php/topic/battery-rental-graphs/
I seems the difference is pretty small; so underestimating isn’t much worse than overestimating. There’s not a huge advantage to giving yourself a big buffer, as you’re paying almost as much for those extra miles you do’t use than it’d cost you for the extra ones you did use.
Obviously the quarterly rental is different; that’s ridiculous if you go over!
In reply to: Battery rental graphs
You may be on 7.5p excess, but unless Renault have changed the contract yet again, then its 30p a mile. (I’ve not got time to check that, but maybe worth re-working the graph accordingly)
But, I think its best to consider the battery rental as a fixed cost, along with the PCP (or HP) of the car.
If you factor the battery rental as a ‘fuel cost’ then the 600 quid a year for 7500 miles works out at 8p a mile if you do do the 7500 miles. Which if you look at it like that makes the car quite expensive to run.
However, if you say I’m buying a 10K car and renting a 6K battery, than that works out a lot cheaper than buying a 16K car, then its actually quite a good deal.
Topic: Battery rental graphs
On another thread I commented about how I thought the 7.5p per mile excess on the battery rental is pretty fair.
This gave me the idea to plot the following graphs to show the annual cost of battery rental plus excess versus annual mileage on each option.
All of these assume you’re going for the 36 month contracts rather than the 24 month.
The first includes the ZE Flex option with the 30p per mile excess, and the graph shows how you really need to make sure you don’t exceed your mileage.
The second omits the ZE Access rate and is just the four ZE Flex rates, and it shows that there’s relatively little difference between the tariffs even if you crank up the 7.5p excess.
Of course anyone on a PCP would also need to take into account their PCP excess on top before cranking up the miles.
