How to preheat the battery for the quick charge?!

[KalleM]

I'm sick and tired on fighting how to get the battery heated up for a quick charge. How to do that? Do I need some ODB2 app to do that?

[Goaty]

I don’t think we’re able to influence this in the Enyaq. However I believe that rapid charging generally only happens when the battery is below 20% (edit: below 15% charge apparently) if you have 100kW+ charging capability on your Enyaq. Otherwise you’ll only be able to charge at a maximum of around 50kW/h.

Usually people use rapid chargers up to 80%, as the charge rate slows down considerably above 80% charge.

[Erakettu]

So far there are no automatic preheating options on Enyaq. Indeed the battery temp needs to be at around +20c to receive the most power in addition to battery state of charge (SOC) needs to be low. As stated before.

The OBD can help you monitor battery temps and some people try to manipulate temps before charging. You can do this by attempting a serie of accelerations and decelerations (with regen). This usually is not possible in traffic though and is not that effective either.

The battery will heat up when charging, but as the temps turn up so will SOC. When you have reached optimal heat, you may be out of optimal SOC and wont get max speeds anymore. Tough luck.

Some brands have auto heating when navigated to a charger, but enyaq does not. There is a bug with mercedes EQS, that if you navigate a long trip and use the chargers navigator suggests, it will preheat the battery. If you navigate to the charger itself, preheating wont occur. Not sure if anyone tested this on enyaq. (Though as far as i know, enyaqs navigator is not well up to date with charher data, so i would not rely on it myself)

Hope this train of thought provides some info.

[BioHzrd]

We currently don't have control over battery pre heating and I'm unsure if it's even on the cars software atm seeing as the early enyaq almost seem like development cars the way the software works.


As for rapid charging as Goaty said if you e sped higher rate rapid charging you won't get this unless the SOC is below 15%, I plugged mine in at 20% SOC the other day but only got 24.5kW so it's not set in stone what you get.

[Westy]

Wow you must have had a really cold battery. Was getting 40kwh at 75% yesterday. Mind you it’s crazy mild in England currently- no normal to be 14c late in December.

There’s a graph in one of the threads that shows the entail charging curve, it’s very similar to other EV curves. The exception being Fat E Tron, Taycan etc.

[BioHzrd]

Wow you must have had a really cold battery. Was getting 40kwh at 75% yesterday. Mind you it’s crazy mild in England currently- no normal to be 14c late in December.

There’s a graph in one of the threads that shows the entail charging curve, it’s very similar to other EV curves. The exception being Fat E Tron, Taycan etc.

We had just driven from Perth back to Dundee (20 miles at 70mph) then car possibly sat for 20 mins at home before I drove the 1.5m to the charging hub. Car was plugged in for 48 minutes and never peaked higher than 25kW it did drop down to 19kW at one point I checked.

Possibly load balancing from the site more than a car issue though. Will need to try it on a 50kW rapid when no one else is plugged in.

[Erakettu]

Indeed, you should memorize the charging curve so you can avoid paying for high power chargers, when you cant even utilize them.

Another issue some (korean) EVs have with charging is that you can not heat the cabin while heating the battery. If you plug in the car and sit waiting, the car will prioritize cabin heating instead of the battery and you will not get the maximum charging speeds. Instead, if you dont use the AC the battery will heat quicker and wilö charge faster. More info on TeslaBjorn youtube, kia ev6 and Ioniq5 videos, which have this issue.

Worth testing, too, I think.

[BioHzrd]

I set the cabin heating on my way back to the car while charging and it never dropped below 25kW might be a different story if I was getting the full 50kW charge.


My limited understanding behind the CCS plug was that additional two lower pins are the DC charge current and the type 2 is the comms and then AC current for any ancillary systems needed while charging. Possibly wrong though.

[KalleM]

I'm from Finland, so if there are cold periods usually the temp goes to around -20 celsius.

I heard that if you have the AC charger connected your battery is not preheated when you program the preheat functionality. So I'll be testing today so that, I'll drive the battery to under 15% and preheat the car before starting my trip.

Let's see what happens. I also ordered an ODB2 reader, but have not got it yet, so that I could see the battery temps.

[foot tapper]

I have tried pre-heating via the "Smart Schedules" tab on the MySkoda App.
This is about the only place I find anything on pre-heating other than on Skoda's own Youtube video explaining top tips for how to get better range when it's cold.
The Air Conditioning Smart Schedules tab crashes the moment I try to set "Plan 1" so I've given up on it until a software update arrives.
It seems that preheating does exist but we can't seem to access it yet.
Running the air conditioning for 30 mins to warm up the car via the "Air Conditioning (Beta)" tab on the MySkoda app does seem to be very beneficial, so long as the car is plugged into a mains charger at that point (!) Using it on 28th December plus possibly a slightly warmer day increased our range from 220 miles (on 100%) to 245 miles (on 100%).

Yesterday, we drove circa 200 miles and the temperature was noticeably warmer - circa 14C. We stopped at Rugby Services at Jn.1 of the M6. A 100kW Gridserve Tritium charger gave us 90kW at 40% state of charge. This was by far the best we have seen for weeks and weeks. It seems that every aspect of battery performance improves markedly once the outside temperature exceeds about 10C.

On the other hand, Rugby services is by far the best charging station for 10s of miles around (12 Superchargers + 12 Gridserve 100-350kW chargers), so drivers are attracted to it like bees to honey on travel days.
We saw two instances of driver charger queue rage in the space of 10 minutes. When there are more than 4 cars parked in a queue It is hard to tell the queue order to it's easy to get it wrong.
They may have to change the parking space layout to make queue order self-evident, or risk fisticuffs soon!