When has it finished charging?

CuriousIslander

CuriousIslander

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I am sure this is covered elsewhere, but please accept my apologies as I can't find it.

I am not clear about the messages that I should get when charging is complete at 100%. I put my car on charge last night and it was on for over 9 hours (PodPoint 7kw unit). The message on the display read "Finished" when I opened the car this morning. However, when checking my smart meter (no smartphone and app) the car still seemed to be drawing about 500 watts of power. I think I have read somewhere that this should be less than that when the battery is fully balanced. Is this correct? Is there a different message that tells me when the battery is balanced? How long does balancing take?

Any words of wisdom will be gratefully received.
 
Not yet got mine but been here a while and I have a spreadsheet where I drop useful answers or links.

So this one is already answered here by AlanB
 
CuriousIslander said:
I am sure this is covered elsewhere, but please accept my apologies as I can't find it.

I am not clear about the messages that I should get when charging is complete at 100%. I put my car on charge last night and it was on for over 9 hours (PodPoint 7kw unit). The message on the display read "Finished" when I opened the car this morning. However, when checking my smart meter (no smartphone and app) the car still seemed to be drawing about 500 watts of power. I think I have read somewhere that this should be less than that when the battery is fully balanced. Is this correct? Is there a different message that tells me when the battery is balanced? How long does balancing take?

Any words of wisdom will be gratefully received.
Click to expand...
Sorry, ZS EV owners here so a little different.
But on the ZS EV the car will pull the max 7kw’s until it is about 97% charged, then drop down to 3.5 kw’s.
When it reaches 100% the car will report as fully charged, but that is when the balancing process commences.
It will still be pulling about 500 Watts at this point.
When it is reaching the end of the balancing cycle, the demand will then reduce to 300 Watts for a short time, then down to around 175 Watts.
At this point, you are very close to finishing.
When the pack is balanced, the car will automatically close down the wall box, back into the standby mode.
On the ZS EV with the latest BMS update, the balancing can take, around two hours ish.
However, this time will increase depending on your packs state of imbalance.
MG recommend that you should carry out a balance process about once a month.
Not sure how much the MG5 differs from the ZS EV in regards to the charge / balance timings, but I guess it will be fairly similar.
So, if you expected your charge time to 100% to take around 7 - 8 hours and you had not balanced for a while, then it COULD take another 2 hours to balance maybe ?.
 
Hi, how low was the percentage when you put it on charge?
If you do a lot of rapid DC charging then it will put the battery balance out more then connecting to an fast AC EVSE.
If you were down to 10% then 7 hours may not have been enough time and sitting at 500w draw would indicate it was still balancing.
 
Jomarkh said:
Hi, how low was the percentage when you put it on charge?
If you do a lot of rapid DC charging then it will put the battery balance out more then connecting to an fast AC EVSE.
If you were down to 10% then 7 hours may not have been enough time and sitting at 500w draw would indicate it was still balancing.
Click to expand...
It was down to 6%...... I was wondering about the 500w draw. My question is really whether "Finished" indicates "Finished and Balanced", or "Finished and not yet balanced".
 
When it says something like, "finished 100%" then it's still balancing.
When it's completed the charge and the balance it will say something like, "connected not charging" (or "uncharged" IIRC).
 
re balancing...
I have my MG5 LR about 2 months, do exclusively 50kW rapid charging, keep it in 20-80% range, and did my first battery balancing this morning.

Got the battery to 98% and then plugged the granny cable in at home. Estimated time to charge was about an hour. Came back after 90mins and the screen read "100% SOC, Charger Connected, Uncharged"

I understand from another thread (that I'll never find again) that this means the battery is balanced now.
 
Can your smart meter tell you what is using Watt (pun intended). Mine is not that smart so if I switch something on you can see the increase in the base load e.g. background say150w then put something else on and it shows 650w then the item just started is using 500w. Detecting if my PodPoint is still residually charging is not easy unless you switch everything else off, or at least know what the background load is. How are you guys accurately finding out what the charger is drawing. Smarter meter than mine?
 
My SR MG5 sometimes just charged, and other times carries on for a few hours balancing drawing somewhere between 500 and 200 watts. The app for my Wallbox Pulsar Plus shows how much power is being used, and alerts me when the charge has finished. I've not managed to work out why it sometimes balances, and sometimes doesn't!
 
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