Battery Capacity after replacement due to coolant leak

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Dnland

New member
Joined
Aug 28, 2022
Messages
2
Hello Fellow FFE owners. Been a happy owner of a 2014 FFE for about 6 years bought mine at 2 years old with about 14k on it. Just passed 60k miles and 8 years.
Came back from a trip about a month ago to a dead 12v battery. When replacing the battery, noticed coolant was low. Like just below minimum low. Didn't think a lot about it. Just went down to ford and picked up some of the correct coolant and topped it off.
Didn't think much about it. Car running fine. Have had zero problems since replaced the SSN cracked harness issue back in 2016. It Just kept bugging me since I hadn't noticed any coolant on garage floor so got underneath to check for evidence of leaks and found none so started to think where did it go. Only place I could think was in the battery pack. So checked on our forum and realized from numerous other posts, this is a thing that's a known problem and sounds like my battery was maybe days of weeks from bricking itself. I immediately took it to ford even though they said they couldn't look at it for a few weeks.
Been watching my 8 year battery warranty clock tick down which expired early this month. I was lucky here as when I got it in a WEEK before by battery warranty expired.
So flash forward to this last friday. Been a pretty big pain dealing with ford and car was in shop over a month but consider myself super lucky that I happened to notice coolant when I did. If warranty is up soon, CHECK YOUR
COOLANT LEVEL!
Anyway, they replace with the following:
Ford CM5Z-10B759-TARM REMAN BATTERY
I noticed that the part number appeared to be same as the one for the 17-18 33.5kwh batteries even though the oem one for a 2014 I think is 23kwh?
I picked it up friday and took battery to 0% so I could recharge and so I could see what size battery I got. Crossed fingers it was 33.5 which it seem some forum members reported previously while others got smaller battery.
I used my KillAWatt meter and charged at 120/level 1 till it now is at 100%.
My Killawatt registered 24.54 kwh.
About two months ago when I last checked my old battery since I knew warranty was coming up I got 91% charge (SOC) of original 23kwh which I thought was fantastic for a 8 year old battery with 60k on it.
According to my math, 24.54 out
Of 33.5 would only be 73% of the pack available rather than 91% I was getting with my
Old pack.
Now, I'm grateful that first I noticed problem and then that ford, after some wrangling, agreed to fix it and my pack now has more kwh in it than my old one did however, if I'm only getting 73%, seems like ford put a very heavily cycled, just above the warranty, 70% capacity pack from some totaled car or something and as I understand how these packs work, if it's already down to 73%, it is probably a 33kwh pack but is used and basically about to crash and soon I may be getting significantly less kwh than now.
Since I got 24.5kwh, I assume there's no way that I got the smaller pack but since it's only 24kwh, I'm thinking they gave me a junk 33kwh pack that weighs more than my old pack.
Anyway, does anyone know what a "reman" pack really means? If they're selling these things for $16k or so is anyone buying one getting screwed? Are these ramanufactures packs used or taken out of other cars or built out Of used cells?
Does this comform to the warranty requirements? If my engine on a ICE car blew up, they don't do a warranty replacement with a used Engine.
Anyway, for those who got screwed when the coolant leak happened just after their warranty expired which seems to maybe be somewhat common but if someone decides to get theirs fixed or if this is truly a warranty fix, can they just give you a used battery? Any ideas from the technical side to Explain the 24.5kwh number?
Thanks guys. This forum literally may have saved me $20k and for that I am eternally grateful for all of you!
 
Anyway, does anyone know what a "reman" pack really means?
Remanufactured, for battery packs, usually means replacing out of spec cells with good ones, if not all of them.

If they're selling these things for $16k or so is anyone buying one getting screwed?
If they are not selling it at full price or advertising it as having more capacity than it does, I don't see why they would be.

Are these ramanufactures packs used or taken out of other cars or built out Of used cells?
Any packs that have been replaced go back to Ford for recycling if they haven't been destroyed in an accident. The fact that they are not field serviceable does not mean they can't otherwise be repaired by the manufacturer. Pulling apart a pack to do cell level rework is not reasonable for dealership service.

Does this comform to the warranty requirements?
That's up to Ford

If my engine on a ICE car blew up, they don't do a warranty replacement with a used Engine.
If it's a years old car with tens of thousands of miles on the engine they could absolutely justify giving you a refurbished engine as a replacement in that scenario.

Anyway, for those who got screwed when the coolant leak happened just after their warranty expired which seems to maybe be somewhat common but if someone decides to get theirs fixed or if this is truly a warranty fix, can they just give you a used battery?
A used battery could probably be installed, but Ford does not sell used "as is" batteries.

Any ideas from the technical side to Explain the 24.5kwh number?
The watts out of the wall does not directly translate to the amount of energy that was stored in the battery. ANY additional energy use (cooling cycling) or waste heat will inflate that number.

23kWh is the full cell capacity of a new pack. Fully charged is actually 95% SoC of the raw cells. Fully discharged is 1kWh above 5% SoC of the raw cells. So a brand new pack would have about 19.7kWh total energy from 100 down to 0 on the gauge.

Charge it all the way up, clear your trip meter and then drive/run the heat until it gets to zero and look at the total energy on the trip meter. That's your available capacity.

It's extremely unlikely you have a 33.5kWh remanufactured pack that's at or below 23kWh. It is possible a 33.5kWh pack was remanufactured to the 23kWh spec and would effectively be the same. All the accessory components are the same between them, the only difference is the actual pouch cells they use.
 
What Anti-Climax said, and also this.
Charging up at Level 1 is not as efficient as Level 2 or Level 3.
There are losses associated with charging.
So the KillaWatt measured 24.54 kW.
A quick check on Google showed that level 1 charging is 83.8% to 74.2% efficient. From IEEE.
Meaning, of 24.54 kW consumed, 20.56 kW to 18.2 kW were actually put into the battery. Average is 19.38 kW.
So before jumping to conclusions that you got a bad deal, you might try the discharge that Anti-climax suggested.
Then you could see the actual capacity of your pack. Alternatively, you could use Forscan and an adapter.
 
Fold down the rear seat, passenger side, and there should be a sticker behind the big plastic cover indicating the capacity of the battery....unless it got fiddled with before it was installed in the car. It is at the passenger side. The panel just pops off. I did get a new 33.5 for my 2012 Focus and it is tagged as a 33.5 and I definitely get more that 76 miles of range. But I also know it had to be reprogrammed for the increased capacity.

Anyway, shouldn't matter, but you can check that piece of evidence and see what is there stuck to the battery.
 
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