(The battery and monitor thread )Car dead in the middle of the woods

[das mo]

Hi all.

Car is dead.

Battery was at 50% 2 hours back.
We now packed all together and car does not start.

Is there an Ineos support hotline I can call on a Sunday?

Thanks

 

[DCPU]

From FB - Aryn Abramowitch:

Added a victron shunt to monitor the AUX battery current and state of charge (no idea why there isn’t a shunt from factory!). The shunt fits perfectly onto the threaded bolts under the seat! It’s like they were put there exactly for this

Can you link to the FB page - from that photo I can't actually see the shunt?

 

[Arkaig]

Can you link to the FB page - from that photo I can't actually see the shunt?

Try this:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/3774825335877563/permalink/7420016534691740/

 

[Miki]

<snip>
And then I got a phone call, "please can you come to the port of Antwerp?". I said yes. That's almost 90 km one way, one hour drive, mostly motorway, speed mostly between 90km/h and 127 km/h.
Battery at start was about 12.37 Volt "60%". (See the data higher up this thread).


At midnight my battery voltage was 12.8 Volt:
And today at 18h30 it was still 12.68 Volt:


The Auxiliary battery showed

• at midnight 12.86 Volt
• at 18h30 (today, therefore after 18h30) 12.74 Volt
• a peak while driving at 14.98 Volt
• the rest of the pattern was quite similar to the main battery.

According to my car infoscreen

• state of charge was about 60% before going to Antwerp
• 84% when back home at 22h30 and 12.7 volt with the key in the ignition (motor off)

Fascinating Mr Jean, really good.
A peak voltage of 14.98 wouldn't suit a LiFePO4 battery.

It's also interesting that the 'smart' function of the alternator didn't kick in either ...

 

[Miki]

Or you have a very good memory or you use the search function in a very efficient manner

IActually neither

had one in my hands the other day. It's a chunky monkey.

That'll go down well in an international forum ... just for clarity he's not talking about a body part, he's just saying that it's of greater dimensions than one would expect.

 

[DCPU]

Try this:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/3774825335877563/permalink/7420016534691740/

Thanks.

This looks the place he's talking about, right by the grommet that has a habit of falling out and is difficult to retrieve:

 

[MarkH]

The Auxiliary battery showed

• at midnight 12.86 Volt
• at 18h30 (today, therefore after 18h30) 12.74 Volt
• a peak while driving at 14.98 Volt
• the rest of the pattern was quite similar to the main battery.

Good to actually see what's going on.
With the starter battery down at 60% the alternator seems to have kept up the charge rate, as you'd expect. It would keep charging until resistance in the battery rises and triggers it to wind back, which is around 80%, then it's a slow grind up from there.
Info screen got to 84% as it uses a shunt to measure amps in & out whereas your voltage/% monitor showed 100% as it can only correlate using voltage.
Did you note the aux voltage or percentage before the drive?

 

[Jean Mercier]

Did you note the aux voltage or percentage before the drive?

Yes, this was almost the same as the main battery, no significant difference.

 

[minidok]

Thanks.

This looks the place he's talking about, right by the grommet that has a habit of falling out and is difficult to retrieve:
View attachment 7824638

@DCPU I made exactly this
grommet falling out. how to retrieve it? It looks like I have to demount the fuel tank guard as it has been falling downwards. I can not reach it from the top nor do I see it.

 

[DCPU]

@minidok - I think it was @CountyV8 who identified the issue (?); I've not had it personally. Hopefully, he can remind us how he retrieved it... otherwise maybe just fit a new one?

 

[froggy]

The whole reason i went with the auxillary battery was to use it to power my fridge and camp lighting etc. Bit of a shame i can't use it for that purpose but perhaps there will be a work around in the future

I plugged my 40 litre engel into the rear 12v plug and camped in the recent crazy hot weather and the battery readout went from 96%to 78% in a couple of days and recharged fully on the way home a couple of hour drive. We are going to Spain for 6 weeks soon so will have a better idea I I need to make changes after that.

 

[KDJDGrenadier]

I plugged my 40 litre engel into the rear 12v plug and camped in the recent crazy hot weather and the battery readout went from 96%to 78% in a couple of days and recharged fully on the way home a couple of hour drive. We are going to Spain for 6 weeks soon so will have a better idea I I need to make changes after that.

froggy, i am pretty impressed with that result. I have a Bushman fridge and we are about to head off for a couple of weeks to Carnarvon Gorge. It's good to know how your engel went.

 

[bigleonski]

froggy, i am pretty impressed with that result. I have a Bushman fridge and we are about to head off for a couple of weeks to Carnarvon Gorge. It's good to know how your engel went.

Awesome spot - one of my all time favourite places. Are you doing the great walk or just spending time up the gorge? Mt Moffatt, Kaka Mundi and Salvator Rosa are also worth a visit.

 

[AnD3rew]

Awesome spot - one of my all time favourite places. Are you doing the great walk or just spending time up the gorge? Mt Moffatt, Kaka Mundi and Salvator Rosa are also worth a visit.

Also one of my favorites

 

[KDJDGrenadier]

Awesome spot - one of my all time favourite places. Are you doing the great walk or just spending time up the gorge? Mt Moffatt, Kaka Mundi and Salvator Rosa are also worth a visit.

We are spending a couple of days there and doing a few of the Gorge walks like the Moss Garden, Wards Canyon and the Ampitheatre. Looking forward to it and will check out the places you recommended.

 

[bigleonski]

We are spending a couple of days there and doing a few of the Gorge walks like the Moss Garden, Wards Canyon and the Ampitheatre. Looking forward to it and will check out the places you recommended.

Neither of the others are as spectacular but a more remote. Depending on where you are coming from / going to they may or may not suit but I love them for their remoteness. I’ve been fortunate to walk the gorge from Mt Moffatt down to the Carnarvon campsite along the river over a few days and that was amazing.
fYI it’s about 22km to do the whole gorge up and back including all the side tracks, but can be done in a day. Alternative is to walk up to the end straight up without detours, then make you way back looking at what you want to the first day. That way you cover everything you missed on day two and it’s not such a big day.
We lived in Emerald for a number of years and made multiple trips to the gorge each year - loved it, although carrying a 1 or 2 year old on your shoulders for the full trip tests you out a bit.

 

[emax]

As you know, I have some doubts about the SoC% readings of the China monitors. The reason is that they are only an interpretation of the voltage and not a calculation based on the charged/discharged currents and time of a battery.

@Lollo050968 kindly made his long-term recordings available to me and I made a graph out of them that seems to confirm my suspicion.

You see a rendering of around 11'000 value pairs. As it is an x/y plot, and the resolution of the voltage is only 0.01V, we have anyway only 12.30 to 14.95 values and thus coordinates which yield 265 line segments in the end - some of them actually being plotted twice on the same area.

The chart is not a timeline visualization but an x/y plot to fit all recorded voltage/SoC% tuples into a fixed grid. So it shows which percent values were shown at a particular voltage.

You see that the same voltage is interpreted as different SoC percentages. It would take some arithmetic algorithms to filter the charging/discharging differences high/low values out from the results and to calculate the averages - which I have done and describe in the following.

Such a diagram doesn't tell you the real problem as the amount of data and the continuous line in this x,y plot is misleading. Therefore, I have reformatted the input to a format which contains high, low and average in one single line for each distinct voltage value in the 11k records . For what I got from @Lollo050968 this finally boils down to 168 distinct voltages.

The diagram below shows the errors and the resulting averages which were calculated from all SoC% values for each voltage seen in the dataset.

Apparently there a some spikes which you should simply ignore.

As you can see, there are values without an error indication. These values actually have only one single record in the data set, so no error can be calculated. Also interesting is that there are many readings in the 12.5V to 13.2V range and also some in the 14.1 to 14.2V range but only a few in the other ranges.

Remember that this chart does not visualize the voltages but the SoC% values of the monitor.

While I'm tempted to interpret the results, I'll leave that to you for now, as I'm not sure I'm competent to do so.

factual correction
added text in italics​

 

[DCPU]

I'm going to have to read that again, slowly...

 

[emax]

I'm going to have to read that again, slowly...

And maybe a third time as I had a factual error in it. Is corrected now and error is left visible to document what was wrong.

 

[emax]

Let my give you an explanation with a reduced data set. It is simple. The only smart thing to sort everything correctly before you further process them, to summarize and reduce them to their core meaning and to visualize them the right way. But that's my job after all and at best the first semester week at the university.

This is basically what I got (stripped from irrelevant information such as date and time). Volts is first column, SoC% is second column:

Volt SoC%
12.33 67
12.36 67
12.36 69
12.37 68
12.39 73
12.39 74
12.40 66
12.40 67
12.40 71
12.40 72
...

For each distinct voltage, I collected the SoC% from the second column and stored the high and low values and calculated the averages.
For example, for 12.40V, low SoC% is 66, high is SoC% is 72. The average SoC% for 12.40 volt calculated from all values I found: (66+67+71+72)/numberOfValues = 69.

After processing, the resulting data for the above excerpt looks like so and contains one line for each voltage I found:

Volt Average Low High
12.33 67.00 67.00 67.00
12.36 68.00 67.00 69.00
12.37 68.00 68.00 68.00
12.39 73.50 73.00 74.00
12.40 69.00 66.00 72.00

Then, I plotted the consolidated data from my processing with GnuPlot which only takes a small script file to define what and how you want to plot it. The result is above.

• - All averages are indicated by the green line.
• - The vertical bars connnect the high and low value above and below each average value. This range is marked by a vertical bar and is given for each voltage which I have found in the data set.

In the graph you can see the first five graph coordinates showing exactly the lines above.

For some voltages, there are hundreds and even thousands of records with varying SoC%, but they all end up in one single line for each voltage.

If there are questions - just ask.

wording
typo​

 

[Jean Mercier]

As you know, I have some doubts about the SoC% readings of the China monitors. The reason is that they are only an interpretation of the voltage and not a calculation based on the charged/discharged currents and time of a battery.

@Lollo050968 kindly made his long-term recordings available to me and I made a graph out of them that seems to confirm my suspicion.

You see a rendering of around 11'000 value pairs. As it is an x/y plot, and the resolution of the voltage is only 0.01V, we have anyway only 12.30 to 14.95 values and thus coordinates which yield 265 line segments in the end - some of them actually being plotted twice on the same area.

The chart is not a timeline visualization but an x/y plot to fit all recorded voltage/SoC% tuples into a fixed grid. So it shows which percent values were shown at a particular voltage.

View attachment 7825708

You see that the same voltage is interpreted as different SoC percentages. It would take some arithmetic algorithms to filter the charging/discharging differences high/low values out from the results and to calculate the averages - which I have done and describe in the following.

Such a diagram doesn't tell you the real problem as the amount of data and the continuous line in this x,y plot is misleading. Therefore, I have reformatted the input to a format which contains high, low and average in one single line for each distinct voltage value in the 11k records . For what I got from @Lollo050968 this finally boils down to 168 distinct voltages.

The diagram below shows the errors and the resulting averages which were calculated from all SoC% values for each voltage seen in the dataset.

Apparently there a some spikes which you should simply ignore.

View attachment 7825733

As you can see, there are values without an error indication. These values actually have only one single record in the data set, so no error can be calculated. Also interesting is that there are many readings in the 12.5V to 13.2V range and also some in the 14.1 to 14.2V range but only a few in the other ranges.

Remember that this chart does not visualize the voltages but the SoC% values of the monitor.

While I'm tempted to interpret the results, I'll leave that to you for now, as I'm not sure I'm competent to do so.

factual correction
added text in italics​

I only see this post and your interesting conclusion now.
Does it mean that @Lollo050968 or somebody else did provide you the raw data of a China monitor?
I already searched several times if I could find the data on my cell phone to no avail, and I am sure it is somewhere there (and not only on a server in China), because I can even generate the graphs in airplane mode.

What was the name of the file?