Recent content by KurtEndress

I believe the KLE charging electronics also get warm. It's certainly part of the cooling loop. I wonder whether more power is lost and heat generated in the battery or the KLE. It's possible it is cooling the electronics rather than the battery itself, though that's a minor point.

I had a slightly similar experience just yesterday. Two of the blue ePower segments disappeared giving me slightly reduced power. When I floored the accelerator I didn’t get the heavy foot nag warning. The outside temperature was 24 degrees F with the state of charge about 50%. The car was not...

A commercial panel like that is about 2 square meters and provides 200 to 300 watts of power when getting direct sun. When you are cruising along at highway speeds you are probably using 15 kW or more of power. So that panel would provide less than 2% of your power use on the highway. Not much...

If your point is that corporations are profit seeking soulless entities without our best interests at heart, why are you upset at BMW for caving in to the CARB and restricting the Rex? It’s the inevitable response or a corporation reacting to governmental carrot and stick. To be clear: I bought...

The CARB requires BMW and others to produce a certain number of ZEV cars or face a fine. It’s hardly fair to characterize complying with government requirements as greed and profit seeking. Yes, the system allows the manufacturers to swap ZEV credits so they don’t all have to produce these cars...

Take a deep breath and step away from the Caps Lock key. You could always look into coding your i3 to enable the battery hold function. It seems to be working for some in the US. Or you could try lobbying the CARB to loosen up a bit on the BEVx restriction that the battery has to be completely...

The neutral wire is white and the ground wire is green or bare. Both connect back to the same ground bus in the service panel. So the difference is a little esoteric and involves their intended use rather than what they connect to. Technically they are referred to as the "grounded neutral" and...

That discussion seems rather theoretical, based on a perfect engine, battery, wiring and electronics. I agree that in a perfect system it doesn't matter how hard you accelerate, the only penalty is drag at speed. I'm wondering if anyone has measured the effect in the real world with a real i3.

What is the cost of doing full power acceleration in the i3 in terms of efficiency and battery use? It’s certainly costly of fuel in an ICE, but there is an argument that it doesn’t make much difference in an EV as they are not nearly as inefficient at high power. I find it hard to believe...

That looks like a 240V plug adapter for the US. In the US BMW only supplies a portable “occasional use” 120V EVSE. The BMW 240V EVSE is a permanent mount unit without a plug, I believe. In the US if you want a portable 240V level 2 charger you’ll need to buy a third party EVSE. It would have a...

According to the High-voltage Components manual the EKK air conditioning compressor is driven by a three-phase synchronous motor that uses up to 4.5 kW of electrical power. There is probably also some power draw by the fans and some loss in the AC inverter that feeds the motor. Hopefully that...

I sincerely doubt there is any magic that EcoPro+ does that you couldn't do for yourself in comfort mode. Think of it as a one button way to turn off all the energy consuming extras like A/C, heat, seat warmers, etc. Instead of going through a checklist of things to turn off you use one switch...

22 kWh to recharge from 0% to 100% is the usual amount at 240V. Under certain conditions you may find it takes more than that, if its really cold out for example. I did my first overnight charge last night with my new level 2 charger. I was a little surprised when I looked at the TED graph this...

Car makers never want the speedometer to read below actual speed. There are laws in some areas about that. So they err on the side of reading high. Think of it as your margin of error.

A couple weeks ago I made careful note of my 120V charging. It took 8.5 hours to recharge from 58% SOC. That's replacing 7.9 kWh at an effective rate of 930 watts. Since it was drawing about 1400 watts from the wall that's about a 66% efficiency. That probably deserves more than a single test...