I would have thought that if you're charging at work then driving home the same day you should have no issues at all as the car isn't sitting at 100% for an extended period. I completely agree with you.
The need to keep a reasonable range in the car is important for most people, I think. Who knows what might come up at a moment's notice? Why on earth would I let the battery run down even to 20% in the normal scheme of things when it's sitting all night next to its charger cable? It's bonkers. (I hadn't intended to go anywhere yesterday, but then a tweet about a one-off Event Cinema performance had me scrambling into action. If the car had been sitting at 20% I'd have felt like a right plonker. The cinema I usually go to is 40 miles away.)
I have an SR and it's not even possible to stop the charge before 100% unless you intervene personally. That might mean waking up at four in the morning to get out your phone to stop the charge on the app! Not for me. So it gets charged to 100% every time and indeed they tell us the SR is absolutely fine doing that.
Last time I charged I just let it do its thing and balance at 100%. I then started to feel a bit guilty about not using the car for the next four days, despite having read somewhere that LFP batteries don't mind this in the slightest. But honestly, I can't be doing with all this faffing around. If a number of short trips get the car down to near 50% I'll just plug in the charger and charge. If I'm looking at a longer trip then I'll plug in and charge the day before. End of.
And since it seems to be agreed that the LPF battery is likely to last well beyond the lifetime of the car no matter what I do to it, I'm trying to get less concerned about all this.
Hi again Rolfe I can only but agree with the vast majority of what you have written above even the feeling of guilt when leaving it fully charged for 4 days not to often I would hope, true the LFP fitted in the SR should not come to much harm so your right to not be over concerned about it.
Now nobody wants to be Losing any beauty sleep myself included so in your ISMART App for the MG4 your correct you can’t set the amount of charge and then have it stop (we are talking MG4 SESR here before the owners of the LR and Trophy dive in) but Rolfe, in the app you can set a start and stop time see my pictures below which are from my wife’s MG4 SESR app on her Iphone.
So click on Charging Management and that will take you to the next page below
You will note here it says 80% just ignore that for the moment,
Click on Scheduled Charging that’s takes to the timer page next picture, and then in the top right Toggle Scheduled Charging which will go green then enter a start and end time and save it, don’t worry about the battery heating setting just ignore that, now back one page and you will see in my next picture the 80% has changed to 100% as you can’t control the percentage on the SESR so you need to Estimate the time needed to get where you want to be, and set the stop time which will stop the charge and jobs done (example on a granny charger around 2.4kws it would need around 5 hours for 10% to go in and 50-80% around 15 hours )so now you can continue with your beauty sleep.
Now when you plug in it will start the charger right away so set the starting time for around the same time as you plug in it will not control or delay the starting time as far as I know, but it will stop the charge and when it does the green light on the granny will be flashing as it is waiting for the car to charge again.
So below I have st an example for you to see once you have set the start and finish times
Once that’s done it will then ask for you password
So insert that and then you will get a little car doing a dance for a moment or two and then that will go of and the next screen will say success right at the bottom middle
So Rolfe if you do only want to charge to a set % this is how you can do it on the MG4 SESR hope this might help it may need a bit of practice and patience but it does work I have tried it on a 7kw but I will at some point but I bet it’s the same as the car is controlling the off time not the charging point.
Les.