As every year, it is time to check the total capacity of TW560’s battery pack.
After carefully balancing the pack, which took me the better part of a weekend, I was ready for a full day’s worth of TWIKEing. The pack health is excellent. Most cells are in-sync down to the millivolt – only 3 cells were a fraction off, which was easily fixed with balancing.
My trip took me to Basel, the French Jura – all the way to La Chaux de Fonds…and back.
The topography in the Jura is very hilly – this will have an impact on my overall consumption today.
The trip itself was very relaxing. There was some rain, however. This had an additional effect on my consumption and forced me to change the exact routing of my return from smaller roads to larger, more direct roads.
Ambient temperatures were around 19°C – the pack didn’t heat up during use and closely followed ambient temperatures.
And now, with further ado – how far did I get and, more importantly how much energy was I able to get from the pack?
I drove all the way to my arbitrary cut-off OCV of 300V. In theory, a TWIKE can drive with a voltage all the way down to 265V – the decline in the ability of a cell to produce any current past 300V makes driving at lower voltages impractical.
My consumption for today is low by normal TWIKE use standards. With the right weather and topography, I can get as low as 33Wh/km … not today.
And here we are: 15.703kWh – I’m very happy with this result, as it shows that the pack itself is still in good health and the decline has slowed considerably.
| Date | Wh Capacity | Loss since last check |
Total loss | 38.5Wh | 55.5Wh |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11.08.16 | 17,722 | 460km | 319km | ||
| 01.05.17 | 17,172 | -3.10% | -3.10% | 446km | 309km |
| 10.09.18 | 16,601 | -3.32% | -6.33% | 431km | 299km |
| 16.03.19 | 15,916 | -4.12% | -10.19% | 413km | 287km |
| 17.07.19 | 15,873 | -0.27% | -10.43% | 412km | 286km |
| 28.02.21 | 15,758 | -0.72% | -11.08% | 409km | 283km |
| 22.05.22 | 15,703 | −0.34% | -11.13% | 408km | 282km |
For all the people driving a TWIKE with a DFC3.0 controller, it’s very easy to set one of the most important settings for long batter life: max charge voltage.
Since a full charge is bad for batteries and I very rarely need full capacity, I usually charge my TWIKE only to 3.85V cell charge. This is considerably lower than the max voltage of 4.2V suggested by the cell manufacturer. I usually drive in the range of 3.85-3.55V before recharging. This has definitely had a very good effect on the total capacity of the pack!
I am still convinced that the investment in this pack was a very good one!