How Many KWh to Charge the Volt?

[greencar]

Robert,
It would be interesting to know how efficient the 110V charger is. Maybe you could use it one night as a comparison.

Only my 240v Volt charger is hooked up to the dedicated TOU meter. My 110v outlet in my garage is hooked up to my regular house meter, so I couldn't give you an accurate kWh read if I charged with the 110v outlet.

[ClarksonCote]

I am one of the Volt CAB drivers and thought I could answer a question that has come up a few times on this website. The Volt does not tell you how many kWh are used in the EV mode, but I have a dedicated TOU meter for the Volt charger so I can measure the amount of kWh’s used to charge the vehicle. As an example, during my trip to the electric car meet up in Montclair, NJ yesterday, I drove 110.2 miles total and 44.5 were in EV mode and 65.7 using the gas generator. I burned 1.6 gallons of gas during the trip. But, to answer the kWh question, when I charged the car at home in the evening, the car took 12 kWh of electricty to charge the depleted battery.

You've helped answer another good question here too... You got 41MPG over your 65.7 miles on the generator. Not too shabby.

[hodginator]

This is great info. Can you post the information for a few days? Perhaps even with preconditioning? Thanks

[rhodomel]

Your charging efficiency of ~86% perhaps is a bit lower than expected but not excessively so.
Your TOU device, is it a smart meter or some sort of accessory at the breaker?
What is its resolution? (ie was it 12, 12.0, 12.00 kwh? )
WopOnTour

I think you all got the charging efficiency wrong, or perhaps some new information that I didn't know about.
It has been published that the Volt will maintain State Of Charges so that it depletes its battery by 50%, ie, between 30% and 80% SOC. And it has been known that the battery is 16 kWH and so we replenish 8 kWH.

Now if you used 12 kWH of energy to store a usable energy of 8 kWH, then the charging efficieny is way horrible than what all of you have implied!

Simple math: Efficiency = 8 kWH/ 12 kWH = 66.67%!!!

This is one bad battery and battery charging technology!

Anyone else noticed this?

Are we actually refilling 10.32 kWH (~86% efficiency) or 8 kWH of battery energy?

[WopOnTour]

I think you all got the charging efficiency wrong, or perhaps some new information that I didn't know about.
It has been published that the Volt will maintain State Of Charges so that it depletes its battery by 50%, ie, between 30% and 80% SOC. And it has been known that the battery is 16 kWH and so we replenish 8 kWH.

Now if you used 12 kWH of energy to store a usable energy of 8 kWH, then the charging efficieny is way horrible than what all of you have implied!

Simple math: Efficiency = 8 kWH/ 12 kWH = 66.67%!!!

This is one bad battery and battery charging technology!

Anyone else noticed this?

Are we actually refilling 10.32 kWH (~86% efficiency) or 8 kWH of battery energy?

It was revealed a few weeks ago that the Volt utilizes 65% (~10.4 kWh) of it's 16kWh capacity.
HTH
WOT

[rhodomel]

Thanks WOT. I somehow missed this very important info. So what SOC are they using as default for the 10.4 kWH depletion?

[ColinSummers]

I thought that 10.4kWH was before the ICE kicked in. I expect that you can run the battery way, way down if you work at it. I wish the charging message from OnStar told me how many kWH the charge took when it completed. Then I could compare to the meter to find out what percentage is charger inefficiency, conditioning the battery and conditioning the cabin.

[ClarksonCote]

I thought that 10.4kWH was before the ICE kicked in. I expect that you can run the battery way, way down if you work at it. I wish the charging message from OnStar told me how many kWH the charge took when it completed. Then I could compare to the meter to find out what percentage is charger inefficiency, conditioning the battery and conditioning the cabin.

To the best of my knowledge, you can't run the battery down further than the ~30% state of charge after that 10.4kWh has been depleted. The generator will turn on, and the car will limit power output; you'll even get a reduced power message on your screen if you're demanding more power than the generator can provide.

Then again, I'm just book smart, unlike some others who already have a Volt (points at Colin)

[MrEnergyCzar]

A Kill-A-Watt meter will measure exactly how many kwh you are putting into the volt when plugged into a 110v.... In the aforementioned scenario, you have to remember that after it's charged the vampire power still draws an unknown amount. The engineer told me that this vampire power is the same as 3 glade plug-ins.....this means nothing because we don't know which type of glade plug ins are being referred to.....

[hodginator]

A Kill-A-Watt meter will measure exactly how many kwh you are putting into the volt when plugged into a 110v.... In the aforementioned scenario, you have to remember that after it's charged the vampire power still draws an unknown amount. The engineer told me that this vampire power is the same as 3 glade plug-ins.....this means nothing because we don't know which type of glade plug ins are being referred to.....

I'll unplug a few night lights and call it even:-)