Last night I pushed my route a little too close for the range, ended up limping the last half mile home at 25mph - when I got home the Busvolt message was coming up along with the battery light on, and the range and battery indicator showing as zero.
I put the bike on charge around 6pm and went upstairs to bed, you can hear the bike charging just about from my room in the upstairs of the house.
I woke up in the night and noticed that the bike was still charging! This was about 2am, then it finally turned off at 3am. Now I know the firmware says that every 8 hours it will do an EC or something every 8 hours of riding which can prolong the charge time, but I am 100% sure that I have not done 8 hours of riding since the last full charge.
The bike seems normal and the range is fine this morning, so I am not sure whether its worth alerting Vectrix - I would have thought that 8-9 hours is too long even with the new firmware?
When new and when fully discharged it takes a looong time to recharge. Don't worry. Everything's fine.
My first Vectrix charge, with battery 1/2 full from the factory, it took 5+ hours to fully charge.
Each full discharge will take less time to fully charge until the battery is fully broken-in. It takes now (broken-in battery) 10 minutes, at CP charging, for each battery bar to charge.
Cool I will keep an eye on it :D
Its been fine today and no noticable drop in performance or range, my slight concern was a very weak cell causing it to never fully charge or something like that - would rather catch it sooner rather than later!
Your problem is universal....These are new technology for many of us, so we try to read and absorb every thing we can find, and unfortunately, we tend to put way too much confidence in what we read.
When we read that it takes 3.5 hours to charge the bike, we instantly assume there's a problem when the charger runs 5 or more hours. When we read that these bikes can get a range of 60 miles or more, we assume ours is broken because it gives up at 30miles.
Fact is, if you run your battery down, it will be hotter than normal, and this slows down the charge process, as the charger has to cool the battery to safe temps during charging, and the deader it is, the more it has to stop charging and cool, so at times, it can literally take all night to charge it. I learned early on to set my timer to run all night long, instead of my original idea of four hours.
Your bike is fine. Get on it and ride. :-)
Inclined to agree. The ONLY way you will stop the Vectrix from topping up or recharging over yhr anticipated/advertised 4 hour mark, is to use a timer that will kill the power to the plug after the set number of hours YOU decide.
I use off-peak power to recharce my Vectrix which becomes available at 0000 daily. Yet I could go to the garage and watch an EC countdown from 04:59 at 0700hrs (by this time iit had charged for 7 hours). Leave it plugged in and return at 0845hrs only to see it had re-started another 5 minute EC sequence. This time I was back on peak price power and not a happy bunny.
The timer cuts the feed at 0829 and has done so daily since August - I still get max range and no problems. I just don;t believe a thirsty Vextrix will recharge, switch off and STAY off of it's own accord. Mine certainly didn't!
- Raymond
Sorry undead, I get confused who has the new SW - do you?
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There is always a way if there is no other way!
I do, it was installed about 3 weeks or so ago.