Emergency Backup Battery power

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Kiggulak

Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2016
Messages
12
I've heard of people with the Solar panel spoiler option on their Leaf tapping their 12V battery with an inverter. Since the Leaf uses the traction battery and solar panel to keep the leaf 12v charged people can effectively draw down the traction battery in emergencies through the inverter.

Could we do the same thing with the FFE? I've seen the complaints about the FFE's poor ability to maintain the 12v battery on the older models and that there have been service updates so I'm a bit nervous to experiment with my 2013 as I don't want to create issues with the 12v charging system.

Can we add solar trickle charging to the 12v battery and would the FFE redirect surplus to the traction battery?
 
Kiggulak said:
Can we add solar trickle charging to the 12v battery and would the FFE redirect surplus to the traction battery?
Yes/no: Yes a trickle charger probably wouldn't hurt anything and keep the 12V battery alive, but no you couldn't put a solar panel on the top of the car large enough to make any significant impact on the traction battery.

Even the Leaf people putting a small solar panel on are fooling themselves thinking it adds anything to the traction battery.
 
Yep the small solar panel chargers are only to keep the 12v battery level from discharging, it couldn't charge it much if it got discharged significantly.
In my garage I use a cheap small 12v battery maintainer unit (not solar) if I'm not going to drive the FFE for several days. It just clips to the 12v battery under the hood.
 
If you want, you can also collect a couple thousand 18650 cells ( You can get them from "dead"(but not really dead, usually it's just one bad cell or a bad BMS) laptop batteries or power tools. Just ask your local places that recycle batteries like Lowes, Home Depot, and even Waste Management. They'll be more than happy to give them to you for free, especially since they have to pay to recycle those batteries :lol: ) , which are not only used to make laptop batteries, but are used to make Tesla batteries. With those, you can look up videos on how to make a couple modules, and Walla! You can easily increase your range!
 
Kiggulak said:
I've heard of people with the Solar panel spoiler option on their Leaf tapping their 12V battery with an inverter. Since the Leaf uses the traction battery and solar panel to keep the leaf 12v charged people can effectively draw down the traction battery in emergencies through the inverter.

Theoretically, you should be able to hook up an inverter to the 12v system and draw down the traction battery IF THE CAR IS ON. The question is how many amps can the DC-DC converter safely provide. Projects like this that I've seen for the Leaf, IIRC, seem to target ~80-100 amps @ ~13-14v DC to feed the inverter. Not sure what the FFE would support. I'm guessing you could maybe get ~1kW @ 110v AC output??? Who knows. Also, you would have a bit of overhead from the car's electronics etc. 50w? 100w?
 
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