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Originally Posted by Hybrid-Battery-Repair
I'm not sure about your math. 3.6C * 6 cells is still 3.6C over a larger area. The question is how much of that heat will dissipate naturally.
I think the fan kicks in at 40C.
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A single cell that peaks early will generate enough heat to raise its temperature 22°C/hr. But my assumption here was that there's a good amount of heat conduction throughout a stick on the timescale of interest, so you could model the entire stick as a single thermal mass that rises at one sixth that rate.
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Originally Posted by JimIsbell
Since running the fan will cost less than $3 and take less than 10 minutes to implement in a charger, why not?
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Well, that depends on where you live, how you use the charger, and what your goals are.
If you live in the north, then your battery is colder than you like for 4-6mo out of the year. Charge and discharge performance drops off pretty badly as the temperature falls. Below 0°C out, sometimes regenerative braking is too weak to bother with.
If you're using the Insight as a PHEV in the flatlands, where your usage profile is "charge at home, discharge once" with little regen, you'll be interested to know the battery temperature rise will be minimal and the fan will probably never come on.
There's also the small fact that the battery fan draws 0.6A * 12V = 7W. Leaving that on for eight hours a day unnecessarily is like... leaving a light bulb on for four hours a night. I'm the kind of person who will look for an alternative to a 7W load if it's convenient and cheap.
