I am curious as well as mine charges to 100% regardless of settings. I am looking for a 32amp level 2 charger too.

 

If you're using the battery regularly I wouldn't sweat it too much. Engineers typically build in some buffer (0% isn't actually 0%, 100% isn't always 100%) and I believe a bigger concern is if the battery just sits at 100% for weeks or months on end.

 

I think the 90% setting you mentioned is for the charging current and not for the maximum battery charge. If you reduce the charging current you will just increase the charging time (by 10% for 90% current).

I don't see a maximum battery charge setting and agree it would be nice to have one. Full EVs usually have such a setting. However, not all chargers are smart enough to recognize it (cheaper portable level 2 chargers often don't).

If I want to limit the maximum charge amount I look at the car's estimated charge time when I start charging and then set a kitchen timer for whatever percentage I want. It's not perfect, but I don't know anything much better. If you use the supplied 120V level 1 charger you could get a timer where you plug the charger in the timer and the timer is plugged in the AC socket.

It would be nice to know exactly what type of Lithium battery the Sportage PHEV uses. If they used Lithium Phosphate, then they better tolerate staying charged at 100% although for long term storage I'd still only charge to 50-60% if possible. Some lower cost EVs, such as the Tesla Model 3/Y standard range, are now offering Lithium Phosphate batteries. They are more stable and don't mind the extra charge as much as Lithium-ion (less likely to catch fire too), but they have about 20% less capacity.

I also agree that the Sportage PHEV may have a buffer where when the car says it has 100% charge it might really be at 90%. But I'm not certain of that.

 

I agree that there is probably a safety margin. Nevertheless, I generally limit charge to 90% and I just set an alarm on my phone at calculated time, to remind me. About once per month, I allow it to go to 100%. Also once per month I run it on highway in hybrid mode to get engine and oil good and hot, to condition them.

 

Yeah, I know you can't deplete the battery below 20%. To set up a timer seems like a hassle. There's a way to manually stop charging in the app, though I haven't tried it. Also my Emporia level 2 charger is not smart enough to detect the current charged percentage.

 

PHEV's are designed to be fully charged every time from everything I have researched. The video below is not from an expert, but from someone with a good amount of knowledge.

 

I charge it to 100% every time after driving. Due to the small battery of the PHEV as opposed to an EV it's not worth the trouble to top it off at around 80%.

 

I don't recall anything regarding to it in the manual. You would think they'll build a limiter in the car's UI if that's the case as I try to find this setting from starting this post. The dealership didn't mention anything to me. I use a level 2 charger at home as well. I don't let it charge overnight though.

 

I'm similar to paulaker in that I usually charge to 80% by looking at the estimated charge time when I plug in the car and subtract about 35 minutes (this is assuming you have at least a 32 amp level 2 charger, if not you adjust based on your total charge time). I then set an alarm for that time and it gets me close to 80% charge.

For my next drive, I'll either leave with 80% charge if it's a short drive, or I'll spend just 30 minutes (with my 32 amp L2 charger) to fully charge the car before leaving.

I'm not saying you have to do something like this, I'm just trying to prolong battery life as much as possible and from what I've read about lithium batteries this might help. Also, as I mentioned earlier, from OBD diagnostic data I saw it appears a 100% charge on the Kia Sportage PHEV is actually limited to about 95% by Kia's battery management system (BMS). My thought is if you leave the car charged at 100% for a day it's not a big deal, but I wouldn't leave it 100% charged for much longer than that.

I plan to start looking at just how many kWhrs it takes to charge from 15% (where the car switches from battery to gas) to 100% in order to further confirm the true battery capacity. Kia claims it's a 13.8 kWh battery, but I don't know if that is a full battery or the 85% of the battery used for electric only operation (and is a 5% buffer included as well?).

 

This notion is interesting because the battery has realistic potential to be fully charged and depleted daily. I question the longevity of the battery and how quickly the capacity of the battery might deteriorate. Unlike a full EV, which generally doesn't need to be charged daily and the precautions about charging to 80 or 90% and avoiding depleting below 20%, we do none of that with PHEVs.

 

Both EVs and PHEVs have a built-in cushion for longevity and are designed accordingly especially in comparison with a hybrid that has a pack designed for rapid small charging/discharging - the question is how much(true vs. usable capacity), and how the computer behaves.

So 0% and 100% of a battery isn’t actually 0 or 100%. It could be a big cushion like the Chevy Volt which is aging rather well on the battery front. (being a one-off though…)

 

That's where my thinking is....re: just ordered - in that based on where you drive, how much, you could literally be on the small electric battery and avoid using the hybrid altogether for many days, which is ideal for us.

So, potentially unlike a full EV, which generally doesn't need to be charged daily and there are some real issues in always going to 100%, maybe with PHEV is much less concern and potentially going to 100% with PHEV charge, say every month or so, is just fine.

I dunno. Still all new at this

 

I just left my northern home for a 4 month stay at our southern home. I did not take my new Sportage PHEV and explored charging and maintaining the 12 volt starter battery as well. My decision is to have a relative drive the car once every three weeks. I left it with a 80% charge and asked that she charge it lightly while checking the house. I usually leave our gas car hooked up to a battery tender but chose not to do so with the PHEV. I will let you know how it goes when I return north in late May. There really needs to be more dealer and KIA info on these questions...

 

Here is some more info about the Sportage PHEV battery capacity.

Kia specs the battery capacity as 13.8 kWh. When I drive in ECO EV mode, the engine kicks in when the displayed charge level drops to about 15% (this is ignoring when the engine starts in order to heat the car, which it usually doesn't do on warm summer days).

Today I charged my PHEV from 15% to 100% using a 32 amp L2 charger. That took about 1hr 45min and according to my charger it provided 13.0 kWh's of power to get to 100%. Previously I mentioned that my OBD analyzer indicated that there may be a 5% buffer in the battery which Kia is not using. Well, 13.8 kWh is 6% more than the 13 kWh my charger provided which is pretty close to that 5% buffer.

Now, how do you explain that other 15% which is not available for full electric use but is used for HEV mode? I looked up the battery size of the Kia Sportage HEV and it's rated by Kia at 1.49 kWh. If I add 1.49 kWh for the HEV to 13.8 kWh for the PHEV I get 15.29 kWh which I think may be close to the actual battery size of the Sportage PHEV.

As it turns out, 85% of 15.29 kWh rounds out to 13.0 kWh which is the same as what my charger reported when charging from 15% to 100% charge. So that supports my theory that the total PHEV battery size includes 1.49 kWh for HEV mode, 13 kWh for PHEV use, plus another 0.8 kWh buffer which is unused. There is probably another buffer on the low end of charge since I don't think the battery ever goes to 0% (unless something goes wrong) and I don't recall ever seeing it much below 12-14% charge.

It's winter and the ambient temperature was around 32 degrees when I charged the car. Temperature does affect the battery range (I'm seeing about 10-12% loss at that temp) but I'm not sure it affects the total charge I observed. I'll have to try this again on a warmer day. I am also going to use another charger to confirm it takes about 13 kWh to charge the PHEV from 15% to 100% charge on the car's display.

 

Neat info, does the charger account for potential transmission losses? (I don't have an idea what that % may be though.)

 

Last night I repeated charging the car from 15% to 100%. But this time I used a Level 1 charger at 12amps, 120V instead of the L2 32amp, 240V charger used last time. It took about 10hrs 56min to charge. However, the result throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the equation because the charger reported a total of 14.44 kWh to charge the car which would imply an even bigger battery in the Kia, a less efficient charger, or an inaccurate charger. The charging was done overnight in a garage and the temperature would have been a bit cooler this time.

One other factor to consider, and this could be a bigger one, is that you can hear the car go through a heating or cooling cycle as the car charges (you hear a fan cycling on/off during the charging which I'm pretty sure is to cool or heat the battery). So the charger has to supply power for that as well. That would imply a smaller battery in the Kia than what's reported by the charger.

Regarding what the charger measures (outgoing power from the charger or incoming energy from the AC socket) I'm not certain, but it would make the most sense to me that it would measure outgoing power since that's what we are most interested in. I've also read that L1 charging is less efficient than L2 charging by about 5% but I haven't tried to confirm that. A good experiment would be to use one of those AC sockets with power monitoring, plug the charger in that, and measure the power from the socket to compare to what the charger reports. I might try that someday.

Power Monitoring AC Socket

My L2 charger is an Emporium which is more of a brand name and they specialize in making products to measure power. My L1 charger is a cheap no-name one from Amazon.

If anyone else has a charger which measures the power supplied while charging, please let us know what you get while charging your PHEV from 15-100%.

 

That is the total power used to charge which includes charging losses. 120v level 1 charging can have 20% losses and even greater losses in the winter.

 

For reference, my Emporia L2 EVSC has logged that a full charge(0 EV range to 34 miles EV range) takes right around 12.7 kWh.

 

Thanks for the info!

That's pretty close to the 13 kWh my Emporia said it used to charge the PHEV from 15-100%, and tends to agree about the PHEV total battery capacity being more than Kia's 13.8 kWh spec. Apparently, that 13.8 kWh does not include the 15% reserved for HEV operation after the pure electric portion runs out, nor does it include any additional buffer which I think may be about another 5%, but could be larger.

 

Awesome. Seems like a small buffer is built-in.