A quick update on the rear seat issue.
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It works and looks quite good. Not sure how long it will last so if anyone has a better solution I am all ears.
I am not replacing the other side until it breaks.
Glad you got the seat lever fixed, after a fashion. Mine is working ok again so I'm just being careful with it, hoping that it doesn't decide to break completely!
I don't think this i-miev had ever been rapid charged so they had not noticed the chademo flap did not work (cable had become disconnected at the level end - apparently very common).
Yep, mine had that problem when I went to view it before purchase - I actually panicked because a few were apparently sold in the UK without Chademo so I thought there might be nothing under the hatch - but it was just the bowden cable had slipped off the bracket.
We have a heated driver's seat - switch was just not connected. Not found any reason to disable heated seat yet ....
Interesting - pretty sure mine doesn't have a heated seat - as well as no switch it only has very fine airbag wires under the seat, so I guess I am out of luck. I ended up buying electric seat covers and they make a big difference.
I am now scouring the internet for solutions to the dreadful heater - 17miles of predicted range lost with one click of the ac button! I used the tip from elsewhere on this forum of just using the fan on two clicks without heat to demist the windscreen but my wife is not impressed (but the heated seat saved the day).
Remember that the range prediction is based on you continuing to run the Heater/AC at the same level for the entire rest of the journey. So if you only need to run it for a few minutes to get the windows cleared and then you can turn it down (or off) you won't lose as much range as it says.
To conserve heater use in the winter I tend to keep the heater temperature up near maximum in freezing conditions but once the window is cleared I'll turn the fan down to about 2 or 3 clicks with the vents set to footwell and windscreen.
The energy consumption is more dependent on the fan speed than the temperature setting because the air velocity controls how much heat can be removed from the heater matrix. A low fan speed means it can keep the matrix hot with a lot less average power.
I prefer the feeling of a very gentle breeze of fairly hot air than a much faster breeze of only lukewarm air.
Having said that, I'm seriously considering fitting a something like a 5 kW webasto diesel parking heater to mine before next winter as winter range with heater use on my daily commute has been a bit tight.
If you do it right you can fit it under the bonnet near the battery and tap it into the normal heater fluid loop at the reservoir, after the PTC heater but before the heater matrix. There are many videos of people doing this online some with all the details necessary to replicate it.
The idea is you use the normal heater matrix and fan, but leave the heat control on the dash turned to the middle so the PTC heater doesn't activate. I reckon a 2 litre bottle of Diesel - which will also fit under the bonnet on the other side, would run the heater on full blast for at least 4 hours, and when you consider that it doesn't need to run full blast once it warms up you'd probably get about 6 hours driving time with a hot cabin...
You could also still choose to use the electric heater for shorter trips when you can spare the range, and save the diesel heater for long trips where you need the extra range.
Unfortunately this i-miev did not come with a remote to allow preheating. Do all i-mievs come with the car side electronics to allow preheating - ie is it worth hunting down a remote (or hack) to try activating the preheat?
Pre-heat wasn't available until about mid 2012 on the i-Miev (and never on the Peugeot Ion and Citroen C-Zero) and having looked at and compared the wiring diagrams for 2011 and 2012 i-Miev's (without and with pre-heat) it appears another ECU was added to control pre-heating, so an easy hack doesn't look likely, unless it is possible to obtain this ECU and plug it into an existing spare plug in the wiring loom!
I spent a few hours with a Lexia diagnostic tool and going over the wiring diagrams trying to work out how the interlocking for the heater works to see if there was any way to fool it into running the heater with the charge cable plugged in but I was unsuccessful.
While I don't think it is impossible, it is certainly not easy as there is complex interlocking between multiple ECU relating to charging, heater control and so on... doing a diagnostic dump of CAN bus communications would probably be the only way to figure out what messages control the interlocking but I don't have the equipment to do that.
If you manage to figure it out, let us know! One thing to keep in mind with pre-heat is that the heater on full power draws about 5kW, but the charger is only 3.6kW on a Type 2 or 2.2kW on a granny charger.
So unless you can command the heater to limit itself to the power available from the charger it will still drain the battery. I assume this is one of the tasks of the ECU that was added in the 2012 models - to make sure the heater is limited to the same power that the charger can provide when in preheat mode to avoid draining the battery.
My workaround for lack of preheat is to go out to the car about an hour before I'm due to leave, unplug it, put the spare key in, turn the heater up to maximum on the windscreen and turn on the rear window demister, lock the car with the other key, then come back 10-15 minutes later, turn it off and plug it back in.
The remaining 45 minutes is long enough to top the battery off to 100% again but not so long that the windscreen freezes up again. (Usually!) The car is cool by the time I go to drive it, but not ice cold like it would have been before I defrosted it.
