Hi Lars-ss:

___I believe Hot_Georgia_2004 mentioned this some time ago. It works just like the Insight did. Get up to a particular speed, let off the accelerator just a touch and bingo, lean-burn is achieved. Your speed is maintained as well. Your next assignment if you wish to accept it is to maintain lean burn while accelerating up to that cruising speed … This message will self-destruct in 20 seconds

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net

 

Yes, I knew someone had tried to explain it to me, and I could not really grasp it until I drove the CVT and then compared the "feathering the pedal" method to my MT.

So now I expect to get Hypermiler status back within my next two tanks - this hot humid Phoenix summer with the A/C usage has killed me lately, but now I have a new (old) trick !!!

 

On a level surface I'll accellerate with Assist in the 36-40MPG range up to about 30, barely keeping the Assist on.

At 30MPH I jump to 60MPG and accellerate from there.
Once my target speed is reached ~45MPH I'll back off to the 80MPG range. If I'm still doing good I'll shoot for the 100MPG range (Or more).

Holding the 100MPG range can at times be tricky as the line sometimes like to jump around a little, so I drive with my Right shoe off for better throttle control.

 

It caught my attention when Wayne wrote:

I have read it tens if not hundreds of times how MT owners are laying into that pack for acceleration no matter the gear whereas the CVT owners have a bit of protection between their wishes and that CVT holding that kind of use (abuse?) back

What do us MT owners have to do to avoid abusing our pack? Is it more than just staying above 30% SoC? Or is it avoiding the 30-70 percent SoC swings that seem to happen so often.

I ride the pack up a long hill to work every day (in 5th gear), SoC goes from 70 to 30 every time, and back to 70 (there is a final flat stretch where it recharges with three-four charge bars). Am I going to burn my pack doing this?

Riding down the hill the pack routinely reaches 90% SoC.

Previous posts I have seen suggested that if I stay between 30 and 70 SoC that I was ok. I was already under the impression that riding the pack below 30% was something to be avoided. So when the four bars of auto-charge kicks in (at 30% SoC) I generally tend to let it charge itself and not mash the gas pedal to draw more out of the battery.

Kurt

 

One thing that I have begun to see on my 04 HCH MT, is that the assist will kick in (when the battery is > 70 percent) much earlier than it used to.

For example, the FCD may be at 80 when a long flat turns into a hill. I normally compensate by (gradually) pushing the FCD down to 64, to maintain speed on the upgrade. Just in the past two months have I seen the assist kick in (three bars or so) while the FCD was above 60 mpg. Of course, if you "punch" the pedal you see assist.

 

Hi Kmh3:

___There was a video posted in the YaHoo - Honda Hybrids group a few years back where some individual was ticked off because of recals. What he did was take a video of one. He ran his poor Insight up a ½ - 1 mile long climb in fifth gear and the pedal mashed. Well no $#%^ he was going to have problems. A well respected individual in the YaHoo group who received a new pack, BCM, and controller because of a manufacturer issue of some kind stated he will continue to ride the pack because the car was designed to do that. He has a point and I cannot blame him but it’s the 5-speed’s that are having pack problems. Very rarely do you ever hear of a CVT based Insight having a recal let alone the IMA light with pack replacement guaranteed afterwards. Honda has that CVT running the ICE at much higher RPM’s and minimal assist for much more of its acceleration then what the 5-speed did for whatever reason.

___I avoided assist 99.9% of the time and when I did see it, I was controlling it to either remove it or to its absolute minimum of 4-bars. Was that the way the car was designed? No, but the Insight’s packs are not getting any younger and there are many in need of replacement because they have been ridden (cycled up and down) from day 1 without anyway of knowing what amount of degradation had occurred. I have ~ 100 gauge cluster pics and the lowest in 3 or 4 is 18 of 20 bars. The flats of Illinois did help in that regard because I could get away without assist and still climb within the speed limits. Those in other areas with much higher elevations to climb, I can only help with my own Insight mountain climbing technique I used on the day I got rid of her but this technique was the only mountains she was ever subjected too … It was not a technique anyone would normally use given the below the limit speeds with flashers on during the climbs either

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net

 

Wayne,

I could not wait for my next tank to start measuring my new MPG capabilities after learning to properly use lean burn versus the cruise control sweet spots which I had been using.

I cleared my Trip A meter at 48.4 MPG and 361.6 miles yesterday afternoon leaving work.

As of this morning, factoring in an afternoon commute, a trip to the grocery store, and my morning commute, a total of 17 miles, my Trip A meter is sitting at a beautiful

59.8 MPG

Boo-Ya !!! Schla-BAM !!!

That's with no A/C usage at all yet, so it will for sure go down some before this tank is done, but it's a nice start !!!

 

Hi Lars-ss:

___Excellent job! These little wonders when pushed can reveal numbers thought unimaginable just a year ago. Almost 60 in your day to day grind? There are Insight’ers that wish they could achieve that kind of FE over a regular commute!

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net

 

Congrats lars-ss. I am impressed, that is quite an achievement just by using lean-burn. It is enough to motivate me to try to learn this really cool technique. :-)

Thanks for the info on MT pack cycling Wayne, it got me to thinking about it some more too:

Both MT and CVT owners have reported the classic 30-70 SoC cycling that the HCH computer seems to constantly subject the pack to. If you have never driven an MT let me point out that it is almost impossible to avoid this in city driving conditions. The IMA will give assist in any gear if you push the throttle to where mpg drops under ~40 mpg (and presumably if RPM is below a certain level but I need to test this). This means that even in 5th gear over rolling hills you will get assist. It is really easy to ride the pack up long hills with the MT. The car pretty much encourages you to do this, and it helps with mpg also. So short of a thread like this one it would never have occured to me to not do that. Which makes me kind of ashamed to admit that it should have occured to me because:

I have some background in using NiMh batteries, I have been a fan of rechargeables for over 20 years and am an electronics hobbyist. I have equipment that can measure discharge curves and charge capacities. I have a computer controlled charger that shows voltage and charge rates and I have observed what it does for maximum charge rate and maximum battery life.

I have some of the earliest NiMh batts made that are still trucking along at over 70 percent original capacity. Their peak voltage (at full charge) is off about 20 percent, but their voltage under load is pretty close to what the original was. Some of those early NiMH's I abused however (by overcharging) and they died, they would hold only about 10 percent of their original capacity when I finally chucked them.

Modern NiMH's claim 1000 full discharge cycles of useful service life. Chances are Honda's computer is calibrated to match those manufacturer claims and produce the bad-pack light based on the manufacturer specs. We are told that when the computer reports 100% SoC it is really around 80 (a good thing because rapid charging of an NiMH will damage it over about 80% SoC). So figure about 2000 such swings or about 7 years if you do one swing five days a week as us MT hill-climbing commuters must do. But imagine if someone has a commute that provokes two such cycles a day, then 3-5 years pack-life would be the expectation, ick. On a positive note, the 30-70 SoC band is the least damaging zone to rapid-charge an NiMH (anything under 70 is good, zero SoC does not hurt an NiMH unless you leave it there for a while as far as I know). So perhaps greater than 1000 cycles are possible under these conditions, I don't know.

I am not happy about replacing the pack at 7 years but it will be tolerable, especially if the price is only $1k as recently reported (rumors of $2k+ abounded for a while). And I can hope that Honda's engineers did their homework and that we will get ~10 years out of it as promised. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to go from 7 to 10 yrs if the 30-70 band significantly optimizes battery life (as I suspect it does).

I am guessing that you CVT guys could probably get twice the life out of a pack if I understand things correctly. The lights on trick sounds like it will increase pack life also as it eliminates those 30-70 SoC swings. So for those who want to get 15 years out of their pack (hg2004?) I think you might want to go back to lights-on if you notice your pack cycling overmuch. I am going to give the lights on thing a try and see if it can reduce pack cycling on my MT/HCH also.

Also, you want one of those swings every once in a while (once a week maybe?) to avoid the memory effect (NiMH doesn't suffer from this very much but discharging down to 30% SoC every so often is still necessary to maintain capacity and to let the computer recalibrate). In fact an old NiMH that has been kept at full charge for a prolonged period of time can usually recover near full capacity after a few discharge cycles.

Lastly, this is all theoretical at this point, and I am not an expert, so take it for what it is worth. :-)

 

Hi Kmh3:

___Excellent post … Many here know about the 1,000 cycle estimated life as well as the 20-80% actual vs. 0 - 100 as appears on the SoC gauge. What appears to be happening in the “real world” for those that ride their packs knowingly or not (more then they should imho) are recal events appearing at shorter and shorter intervals as the BCM loses track (per its algorithm) of what the estimated cap of the cells are. Once it starts from scratch and force charges the pack back up to a known voltage and estimated capacity, no-assist and vastly lower FE for the length of time the recal is being performed is the result. I have never seen one for myself other then that video a few years back but have read about it hundreds of times from the Insight enthusiasts over at IC and in the YaHoo Honda-Hybrid group. If the BCM’s algorithm declares a recal, you had better consider that there has been some degradation in the pack since new and it will not be getting better over the longer term unfortunately. Low and behold, even Prius I and II packs have a recal event although they call it something else. Fortunately, it appears that the Toyota solution is a bit more forgiving in the known capacity of the pack and a bit less forgiving in the cycle that it allows the pack to charged and discharged too.

___On a slightly better note, you can accelerate without Assist (I do not know about the HCH w/ a MT) but it is a rather painful acceleration. I have accelerated this way in Tbaleno’s a few months back and of course my own Insight 5-speed at all times. Because I live in a relatively flat part of the country, I could avoid pack use while climbing by using the DWL technique and I saw the same in Tom’s CVT based HCH while out on the highway just last week. Unfortunately, I know that it is not practical or available to everyone at all times given their own particular commute or travel route

___I have always recommended that hybrid drivers take special care of their packs under any and all circumstances. That piece of HW is darn expensive and if you want it to last, use it only when really necessary. If your commute forces a hard assist for a given amount of time, there really is not anything you can do about it but when you do not, back off on the go-pedal a tad. Increasing your pack’s longevity goes hand in hand with receiving higher FE as well …

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net