I've also seen the background trickle charge. It definitely does do this. I still think it's within the 20-80% capacity window of the BCM though. Gentle charges most definitely help, but you have to overcharge a NiMH battery to balance it.
I think the BCM keeps track of cycles, and does different things depending on where its at in its cycle maintenance routine. It definitely lets the battery charge to a higher voltage sometimes, while others it does not.
The car's computers are almost certainly smarter than we give them credit for, and we'll likely never fully understand all of their programming.
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Bumblebee Batteries, LLC - Helping your hybrid get from point A to point Bee!
I've also seen the background trickle charge. It definitely does do this. I still think it's within the 20-80% capacity window of the BCM though....
I don't think the 20-80% window is a cut and dried thing. Perhaps as I see it only because my battery is weak and worn. I'm pretty sure the car recently charged my battery full during a charge sequence after a negative recal; perhaps that's only possible because it IS a weak battery - so the car, charging as if the battery were normal, ends up charging it full... Check out the data/calculations at that link I posted...
To answer the questions in the replies, tire pressures were 38/38 front and 35/34 rear, but I have been running 43 front and 40 rear, so I added air to get back to those pressures. Mileage has not been affected and is typically the 52-58mpg range with a 54.8mpg lifetime. No work has been done to the car except an oil change with 0W-20 Mobil 1. The car is near sea level on an island in Puget Sound at elevations of 5-600ft nearly all of the time. Brakes are not dragging and this is a 5 spd car. When this behavior started about 3 months ago I noticed the significant increase in how often Assist kicked in and how little load caused Assist to kick in along with the rapid draining of the battery. Going up a hill that before would drain 4-5 bars from SOC now drains twice that. I did drive the car after adding air and there was no difference, Assist was still coming on too often. So what is going on here????
Check to make sure they didn't just pour in the whole 3 quarts instead of only 2.5 like they should have. The Insight is very fussy about oil level.
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Silver '00 MT
90.2 LMPG
80+ psi in RE92's for the past 2 years without incident
Calpod switch
Warm air mod
Grill block
EPS fuse removed
FAS/fuel injector interrupt circuit
grid charger
OBDII C&C gauge
my hunch about the 80-20 is it wasnt programed in the very begining. I say this only because i can rather easily get all the bars to full vs the standard 19. I realize, perhaps all 20 is 80% charged, and without measuring the volts i wont know-what i do know, with the old bcm, i can get 20 bars, the fan is rather aggresive (runs way more offten), my mpg goes up, and lean burn purges more (indicating to me the FR is rather high producing more nox quicker). I also wont get a regen untill it gets to 4 bars. The new bcm-regen at any charge level, impossible to charge "full" etc.
Yes, owners manual indicates only between the dots pg. 123 [with illustration] and Cautions re: potential engine damage [pg. 159] about overfilling.
Looking at the illustration, [if between the dots is a litre, then the distance to the line on the drawing indicating a level at the change in thickness of the stick] seems to indicate three quarts added.
The difference between about .1 liters/quarts is a pretty steep difference on the stick. I tried to see where things were at by filling to 2.5 quarts instead of 2.6 and it was just a hair over halfway between. 1/3 quart/liter maybe. Both units are very close in size, close enough IMHO to make the comparison.
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