Why does the PHEV stop charging for 5 minutes?

Why does the PHEV stop charging for 5 minutes during it's charging session? Take a look at this graph and you can see that the draw dropped way down at 10:45am for exactly 5 minutes. I see this happen every day, but it's not always at the same time (though it's always for exactly 5 minutes). Anybody know what it's doing during that 5 minutes?

Having a sit down with a nice cup of tea? .

Probably something to do with cell balancing or thermal issues? Far too clever for it's own good, this car!

what does the dot spacing on the graph indicate?
(the double dots starting at about 9:50 in your graph)

HappyHeyoka said:

what does the dot spacing on the graph indicate?
(the double dots starting at about 9:50 in your graph)

Click to expand...

Good question. I’m not sure. I think each dot is just a data point. But I’m not sure why the frequency of data points would suddenly increase.

Regulo said:

Having a sit down with a nice cup of tea? .

Probably something to do with cell balancing or thermal issues? Far too clever for it's own good, this car!

Click to expand...

Good answer

Considering that the thermal management it is relative "poor" in our PHEV ... the 5min stop above is 99.9% due to balancing

Other users did report the same "issue" that charging process was "paused" multiple times (at least 2 times was shown in a single charging graph) .. still the reported pause was around 20min

I believe that based on the "charging speed" and the level of unbalance, the car may decide to pause the charging process, until the balancing of the cells it is inside the configured limits ... my bet is that our PHEV try to keep the balancing level inside the 0.005V (5mV) range between the higher and lowest cell.

Definitely the PHEV charging process should take care that never, under any condition, the voltage level of a single cells should be above 4.10v

I think i was the first to document this phenomena. When you interrupt the charging process and start it up again, the pause is skipped :shock: . By now, there is one charger in the market that has a specific phev program that detects this pause and is able to skip it by temporarily interrupting the charge process. All in an attempt to cut charging time. Personally, I am not yet convinced that this is such a good idee.

There must be a good reason for it, otherwise why would Mitsu incorporate it? To push continuous charging by fooling the control program seems a bit of a gamble on long-term battery health, in my opinion. I'll leave it well alone, as I'm not that bothered with saving 5 minutes anyway!

Yeah, I’m not looking to skip it as it’s only 5 minutes. But I’m wondering exactly why it happens and what it’s doing during that time.

On the flipside: Mitsubishi recommends an AC charge once every ... 2 weeks? Apparently because AC charges allow for the cells to be balanced where DC charges do not. So, if you use AC charging all the time and NOT skip the pauses once every 2 weeks?

Just got my SEL this weekend and was wondering the same.
I charge with a Juicebox Pro 40 and I was very surprised to see these pauses in my graphs.
eMotorWerks support just said it was car side, so I'm relieved to find this thread and see there's no issue here

Marc

Be not concerned. They did the same 3 years ago: http://www.myoutlanderphev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1270&p=13897&hilit=pause#p13897