Clarity failed to start...

Yes

 

Same battery. I misremembered the colors. I'll bring my meter with me next time.

 

Tomorrow we return to the house where the Clarity has been garaged, unplugged, since March 14th. The first step will be to measure the voltage on the 12V battery.

 

Good luck! I, for one, am looking forward to your battery voltage report. Hopefully, there was no parasitic activity and your Clarity will pretend you never left town.

You've spent most of the summer on this forum discussing Claritys without having access to yours. Now you can give your regular old car a rest and enjoy your Clarity PHEV again.

Don't forget to check the cabin air filter and post a photo if you find anything interesting.

 

Thanks! (I think). Posted my pick at the What's in Your Cabin (Filter) thread.

 

Yes, I’ve put everyone at risk by going from memory. It has been very pleasant driving the truck, and it has been put to good use. The Jeep is a pleasure to drive as well.

The Clarity would have been fine all spring and summer. And even the last week, being that it is a PHEV. On Tuesday, here in southern Oregon, a few folks decided it might be thrilling to start some fires on a hot windy day after 3 months without rain. 600 homes and 100 businesses were destroyed while 2 lives were lost.

We are fortunate to have not been directly in the path. Today is the 5th day without power and it may be out for another week or two. The solar panels and batteries were doing fine with keeping the essential circuits powered, until the heavy smoke settled in from another fire and reduced output by 60-70%. We’ve been running the generator the past 2 days.

Charging a car would have been out of the question and the days are getting shorter. It certainly would not have been fun to seek out a public charging station and killing time by choking on smoke while dining outside or wandering through a mall wearing a mask.

Fill it up with regular. They even pump the gas here.

 

I've seen disturbing photos of the dark skies in mid-day. Are you losing power due to the smoke blocking the sunlight or are the ashes sticking to your panels--or both?

 

The panels are pretty clean, not much ash here. The smoke is more like heavy fog, just more orange.

 

Well, at least you could drive it to the pump! Glad at least you and your family are fine, it seems the whole west is shrouded in smoke. We're having sort of a "nuclear winter" down here in LA, the forecast was in the 105-106 F and we never got past 84 here in SF valley. Solar generation pretty impaired since I heard the smoke expands even to Las Vegas, and winds are pretty lazy too. I drove through Palm Springs last Sunday and only a few of the many windmills there were working. The worst part is that many of the fires were started either by sheer stupidity (the "gender revealing party" in San Bernardino) or by pure evil like these arsonists caught red-handed. Last year it was the same crap. What kind of monster is capable of doing such things? But for some reason we never find out why they did it or if they were sentenced or even prosecuted. Keep safe man!

 

After 6 months the battery was completely drained. It metered 1.1V. I checked it several times. The other car (Jeep) battery was 12.6V after the drive today. I even checked a few AAA batteries that metered 1.8V.

I connected the NoCo lithium jump pack and the horn started honking. Disabled the horn, started the car, disconnected the jump pack and metered the battery at 14.6V. The car remained powered up while I checked the pollen filter. Perfectly clean.

After letting the HV battery charge the 12V battery for a few more minutes, I took the car for a 20 mile drive in EV, mostly freeway at 65-70mph. The idea being to give the battery some more charge time and to drain the HV battery a bit so I could plug in and charge up both the HV and 12V for a few hours. The battery metered 12.7V after the short drive and 13.3V after the charger was plugged in.

I left the car with the HV battery fully charged. It was charged on Friday, 3/13, with the expectation of going to work on Monday, 3/16. Yes, I know, storing the battery fully charged isn’t recommended. The gauge showed that it was still fully charged. EV range showed 37 miles.

Tomorrow I have a 44-45 mile round trip planned which will be attempted in EV. I’ll follow up tomorrow with info on whether or not the car starts in the morning, how much EV range is achieved, if I get a new battery, etc.

 

Thanks. Yes, the PHEV would have been unaffected by the loss of grid power.

Having just driven the southern most 27 miles in Oregon and all of California down to the 210 and out to Monrovia, I can attest that I am currently in the cleanest air of the past 700 miles.

What we could see of the devastation from the Almeda fire in southern Oregon was apocalyptic. It was actually 2 separate fires, both started by humans. The first began in the north part of Ashland, the second one was set at the south end of Phoenix. A homeless man was arrested and jailed for intentionally starting the second, according to several eyewitnesses. Looking at the burn map it appears likely that the first fire would have been contained before reaching Phoenix had the second fire not been set. There has been no information released about who may have started the first fire.

This has been a problem all summer along the Bear Creek Greenway, which is the center of the path of the fire. The entire length has become a homeless encampment and there are calls almost daily to put out fires. This really isn’t the place to discuss the matter. I do agree that it is a sick individual that intentionally sets these destructive fires. And then there are the irresponsible idiots that start them by accident.

 

Welcome back to your Clarity! It's good to know the DC-to-DC converter charges the 12-Volt battery when the Clarity is plugged in, even if the Clarity is not turned "On."

 

This morning the battery was at 12.6V with the L1 cable still attached. The green charge indicator light was off, so I suspect that there was no charging voltage being applied to the 12V battery. Voltage remained at 12.6V with the cable disconnected. I don’t know, if, when, how, 12V charging occurs once the HV battery is charged and the car is parked with the cable attached. The light was off, so I’m going with “nothing was happening”.

Temp was 68F, EV Range showed 43. I drove 44 miles in EV. Roughly 40 of those miles were on the freeway at speeds between 50-75mph. The other 4 miles were on surface streets. Remaining EV Range showed 3 miles.

All in all, I’m pleased that the car covered 40 miles at high speed, plus 4 miles on city streets and had 3 miles remaining. It seems the EV Range estimate needs to relearn my driving habits. Yesterday it showed 37, this morning 43, tomorrow I expect to see upper 40’s. For the moment, I’m convinced that leaving the HV battery fully charged for 6 months caused no harm.

The most perplexing aspect is that the battery was down to 1.1V. That just doesn’t seem to follow a normal discharge rate for a 12V flooded battery. Particularly, after it was previously left to sit for a month and the voltage was 12.45V. The doors did not unlock automatically, the anti-theft device indicated that it had lost power and needed to be reset. I metered the battery a few times and tested the meter on several other batteries to confirm proper function.

What is also interesting is that the battery seems to have recovered, which seems nearly impossible from such a state of discharge. I recently attempted to revive a motorcycle battery that was down to 7V with no success after a week of repeated charges. I don’t plan to repeat this test, so some things may remain mysteries. I’ll update if the 12V battery fails in the near future.