Ot oh, charging to >4.0V will greatly reduce your battery capacity/life span. See my thread on Gen 4 installations into my 2002 e825. Another person has experience with this.
Yeah according to the Hybrid Autocenter page they’re rated to 1200 cycles at 0-100% or 5000 at 0-80%, but seeing as they’re already degraded to 60% of their original capacity it doesn’t make much sense to undercharge them since I don’t anticipate keeping them for 1200 cycles. Might as well eek out every bit of charge while using them. The extra 20% capacity is useful to me because It translates to roughly 20% extra range. With fresh Gen 4’s it would make sense to do the 80% charge because the range they should provide would be more than I typically need.
If you are using all the available range of a single charge then you have no choice but to continue with advancing the degrading of the remaining capacity.
But the best life expectancy comes from only charging lithium batteries to the capacity needed for the single use case. That’s not always convenient but we’re not talking about convenience.
I think the degradation is advanced because of something chemically occuring as stored charge increases in the batteries. Nissan Leafs and Tesla’s don’t charge to 100% SOC even when the indicators say they are at 100%. And Nissan says to just charge to 100% and use it while the Tesla geeks say to only charge to 100% if you are going to use it immediately after charging like while on a road trip.
I charge to 3.98V-4.00V every 2-3 days for convenience sake and battery life/capacity sake.
I’m anticipating having 10 of the Gen 4 modules to sell in the next week. They’re out of a 2018 Leaf with 5,000 miles on it and I’ll have 7 of them in my motorcycle so I should be able to gauge their capacity based on what I see from riding that.
Shoot me a message if you are interested. I’m planning to sell using the prices talked about here as a benchmark. I am based in New York and will be moving to San Francisco into early December and would prefer not to ship them so if you are along the route or can meet me that would be ideal.
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Hey Doug. My name is Reid and I’m new to this forum. I know this is an old post but I am looking into upgrading a GEM with some nissan leaf batteries as well. Would you be available and willing to give me some advice and guidance? This will be my first time doing a project of this nature so anything helps!
@reidc sounds good. Why don’t you start a separate thread on your project and include me with the ‘at sign’ as I have you here and I’ll add what I can. What I did was mostly based on the feedback across many other posts about what works and also how the charger works.
You will want to include information about your current GEM vehicle like year/model, motor, tires/wheel size if they’ve been upgraded along with the battery charger installed and the current state of the GEM as it is with Pb type batteries.
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Thats cool, I like it -
Gen2 Flux Capacitor?