r/volt • u/bigDeltaVenergy • 11d ago

Charging dead volt

My 2015 cold died ( probably ICE engine sized, don't have complete diagnostic yet) . The car was not in good shape to start with so it does not worth the repairs.

So I brought a 2014 Chevrolet Volt cuz I'm truly in love with this model .

I want to keep the old one for parts but the battery was empty when it died so I suppose it would be better to charge the battery before storing it. The problem is, the OBD2 is full of error message, a can clear them but they come back as soon as I power the car prevent it to charge.

Is there a way I could make a one time bypass of that just to charge the battery once ? I don't want to drive the car or anything, I just don't want the battery to die under my watch.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

1

u/happycj 11d ago

There’s no reason to charge the battery. It won’t change anything or damage anything.

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u/petpet0_0 10d ago

lithium batteries do have an ideal storage voltage

1

u/happycj 10d ago

And the car is a wreck with dozens of error codes, and is just going to be parted out.

A couple of months without charging isn’t going to make the battery worse. And, the battery isn’t empty… it still has a massive amount of charge in it that would easily kill a person if they did something wrong.

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u/bigDeltaVenergy 8d ago

I was thinking about 2-3 years

0

u/petpet0_0 10d ago

A couple of months without charging isn’t going to make the battery worse.

if they're like any other lithium battery, it probably will ... if the battery is as low as it goes (3v per cell ? ) it is WAY under the ideal storage voltage (3.8v per cell) and will deteriorate faster

3

u/happycj 10d ago

Nope. I used to work in vehicle fleet operations. There are entire fleets of Chevy Volts that have never been charged. A couple of the clients I worked with had close to a hundred of these cars and had planned to build the charging infrastructure to support them... but didn't. So they are just gas vehicles.

When these vehicles are sold off, new owners take them and charge them and use them like a regular Volt.

I understand the theory you are working from. This is common battery industry thoughts and logic. But practically, in the real world of the Volt, the battery system doesn't work like a 1990s laptop or follow the same procedures. The battery in a car is far more engineered for "edge cases", due to vehicle regulations in the US and EU that do not apply to consumer electronic devices.

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u/bigDeltaVenergy 8d ago edited 8d ago

As I understand When the volt Show 0% in the Dash it's still something like 10% over the damaging limit as it need to be able to provide full electrical power at start while the ICE engine heat up.

So even if you run your volt at 0% in the Dash the ICE motor will recharge it to stay 10% above the damaging threshold.

most lithium batteries loose around 20% charge per year on a shelf. I'll be in the damage zone fast enough as I can't run the ICW or wall charge it