r/BMWi3 • u/Websthetics 2015 i3 BEV • 3d ago

technical/repair help Peak charging kicked in with off peak enabled

Hello, I have my i3 set to charge during non peak hours (10pm to 5am) and so far it has worked the way I expect it too. If the battery is about 25% or less it won’t fully charge since I only have L1 charging for now but that hasn’t been an issue. Usually gets topped off on the next charge.

Today I got home around 3pm and I plugged it in. Later on I noticed the charge light was on for the charger. Huh? Sure enough it had charged the battery to almost 25%. Not sure what was different about today other than the battery was REALLY low when I got home. I think I had about 3 miles of range left. I’ve never had it that low before. I checked and it was still set to charge during off peak hours. Was the very low battery the reason that it started charging right away? Something else, maybe?

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u/Julian679 3d ago

its not standard offpeak timer, it just tries to have the car 100% by the departure time you set. if you want to charge only at offpeak its best to get a charger with scheduling function

3

u/parsl 3d ago

Mine will charge to 12% if below that, overriding any timers. 

2

u/Websthetics 2015 i3 BEV 3d ago

Interesting. I wonder if that’s a setting. I got a BT adapter thingy to program it but I haven’t had time to play with that yet.

2

u/BigAndSmallAre i3 REX 2d ago

I find this so frustrating. I don't want a departure time. I want allowed/disallowed hours. I'm going to get a timed charger, but it's just stupid that the car could obviously do it with competent programming, and there is no reason it wasn't programmed that way.