No, but my guess is: check the aux battery is ticked if he still has it in his car. I think Kia messed with the setting in recent updates, so maybe the on setting was lost.

 

Thanks Todor, is that a setting within the screens in the car, or something that he needs to set on the app?

 

My Soul Ev FE 21 my has just thrown this up when using the car this evening.
“warning voltage level low” or similar, I wasn’t driving it.
The main traction battery was charged to 100% and yesterday the wife did over 70 miles in trips before it went on charge overnight.
When is the 12v battery charged, is it done whenthe car is driven, or when the car is plugged in and charging overnight.
Other than the centre blue light flashing for 30 seconds or when charging has started, I’ve never seen it flash occasionally to top up the 12v battery.
The car is sat unplugged now on 100% ready for tomorrow but still showing this on the Kia Connect App?

Anyone have any ideas?
Car was new in May 21 and approximately 18K miles on the clock.

 

It should do it any time, car can be off and un plugged. This was a good enhancement on the old Soul EV that had to be on or plugged in to top up the 12v

 

Doesn’t seem to be doing it on mine, as it’s been stood all day, but has thrown up the message when she popped to the shops tonight. I’ll check it in the morning to see if things have changed, as it’s unplugged and going to be sat on the drive all night. 👌

 

My dad checked and the aux battery setting was off, so he’s turned it back on. Thanks again Todor hopefully this solves the issue

 

Let's hope it solves it!

@KDon check your setting as well, hope it works out!

 

I’m not sure which settings I need to check @Todor? Can you point me in the right direction please. 🤗
But the wife had driven about 3 miles this morning on the 12 miles to school and my little son rang to tell me the warning sign had gone off. 😀
I checked the App and all’s good on that as well now.
Perhaps it just needed a run to charge the 12v after being stood at 100% SOC yesterday.

 

I thought I'd go and nerd a bit with some monitoring of the car.
Here's the car turned fully on:

By convention the current from either the high voltage battery or the aux 12V battery positive when discharging and negative shows that the current is going the other way (charging).
So the above 3 readings show (from right to left), that the Low-voltage-DC-Converter is producing 14.44 Amps from the high-voltage battery, to service the "on" vehicle. 6.5 Amps are going into the 12V battery, and the LDC is producing 14.5V in order to power the 12V equipment and push 6.5 A into the 12V battery.

Contrast that to when the car is only turned on to the "ACC" position, where the high-voltage battery is not enabled, so all the car's normal electronics are supplied from just that 12V battery...

Nothing is coming out of the LDC. It is only the 12V battery which is supplying the needs of the car and a hefty 10.83A is being drawn. The battery is now "on-load" so the terminal volts are much lower, but my battery is probably quite well charged.
(The voltage would be higher if the car wasn't on in "ACCessory" mode, but then I wouldn't be able to read-out this figures)

The car hasn't moved for several days and has been idle on the street, so maybe that's why the charging current and voltage is a bit higher than it would be if the car had been running for a long time or been on charge.
I would expect the car to be using the charging current and voltage to determine the state of charge and adjust the voltage to achieve the desired current.

Of course our cars are never off because there's some electronics monitoring for a door button press, the remotes, checking the battery level or updating the UVO connected data. That's why the 12V is being very slowly drained and why Kia have the battery-saver process to periodically check the battery and perform 20 minutes of charging from the big battery. I think I recall someone on a forum saying the periodicity of the check & charge is about daily at an interval of about 24 hours from when you last stopped (it was either 23 hours and 30 mins or 24 hours and 20 mins, I forget). It won't always need to do it, so spotting the blue flashing lights is quite rare - I think it was several months before we saw it happen.

I don't think it is necessary to worry about taking regular journeys. The battery saver should be all you need. As I understand it, there are three times when the 12V battery is charged: when driving, when battery-saver is doing its stuff periodically (if needed) and when you are plugged charging.
I don't have home charging, so the car is neither on-charge nor running for long stretches of days.

12V battery problems seem likely to occur if the 12V battery is duff, if someone has been using the car in ACC mode and draining the battery or if there is something remaining on in the car which shouldn't be on (e.g. boot lid not closed or glove compartment, or something left plugged into the main centre USB socket which remains live 24x7.

The user manual says that the Aux Battery Saver+ can be automatically cancelled if it had operated too many times in succession. It seems like a sane idea, but only 10 seems a bit short, that would imply 10 nights of idle, which I might occasionally have reached, or imagine a car in an airport car park for a couple of weeks or more...
I don't fully trust the manual to reflect what newer software does! Another obscure thing I read (possibly about Soul or Niro or Kona) is that when you are driving the car to a very low SOC on the main battery it stops using the "LDC" to make ~12V from the main battery, so as to allow the high-voltage battery to get you as far as possible. Who would leave the car on a very low SOC for any significant time after running the main battery low?? But it's worth bearing in mind.

My bottom line:
I leave the car a lot and the 12V battery is just fine, no external charging, no gratuitous travels to "top up the battery" but I don't have gizmos plugged in that could accidentally drain the battery faster than Kia's 20 minute charges can keep up with.

 

Just checked, it’s set on Battery Saver + but as far as I know that is the default setting when these cars are sold.
👍

 

Just checked, it’s set on Battery Saver + but as far as I know that is the default setting when these cars are sold.
👍

I suppose you could turn it off then on again, but if your son reported that things were better perhaps there's no need. I think being plugged in and charging will also charge the 12V. The only time it isn't charged is for the 23 hours and 40 minutes when the car is switched off and the battery-saver feature isn't doing its 20 minute thing. If the battery has got lower than normal it could be that it could do with more than the 20 minutes, so you've got the choice of sitting in the car with it fully on (and charging from the big battery) or plugging it in for a normal wallbox charge.

You know that the centre USB is always powered? So anything plugged in there might draw a dribble.

 

Whatever recent update they made has caused the battery saver + to stop working in my 2020 Soul EV FE. 19 months and just under 10000 miles. Friday night ticked it off then on again. Overnight charged fine. Last night nothing again. Very frustrating. Is it worth reporting to Kia? or will they ignore the issue?

 

It is not on a timer or fixed schedule. I'm not sure what/how are you trying to catch it in the act?!?!

If you have seen it working recently, just leave it alone.

 

I had a flat12v battery. I am monitoring it with a BM2 voltage meter after having charged with a CTEK smart charger. The charging history shows that the 12v was not receiving an overnight top up from the battery saver. As I said, by resetting it it worked once and has now stopped again. 19 months of fault free ownership being spoiled by this issue. If you look several others have had problems in April so I am guessing a software update that is flakey.

 

You do realise that it is not "an overnight top-up" don't you?
Although we have no specification to refer to, people have observed that it only comes on for 20 minutes, and only if required. For most people, without any measurement device attached to the battery, their chances of catching sight of the blue light flashing at the right time are very slim, but obviously your monitoring would catch it.
It is thought to do the test-and-boost-if-necessary cycle about 24 hours after the car was last switched off. If it has reason to boost on consecutive days the period has been monitored to be not exactly 24 hours but either half an hour less or half an hour more (I forget).
So let's assume you stopped the car at 5pm. It might next check on the following days at 4.30, 4pm, 3.30 (and take no action), and at 3pm on the next day decide to actively boost.
I know that I have seen the car doing a bit of 12V boosting on 2-3 consecutive days, when we we had more hours of darkness. Other than that it seems very difficult to know when to watch or when to expect it to decide to charge.
So yes, Kia, it would be nice to know what the voltage threshold is for deciding to carry out a Battery Saver cycle and how the periodic pattern is defined to work.

Since I'm pretty sure that often many days pass without boosting and equally I've seen it boosting on consecutive (unused) days.... I suspect that the single cycle is just adequate to keep a car's 12V battery topped up, assuming it has only slowly dropped voltage since last normal use. I think a possible cause of flat batteries is an unusually flattened battery, which is only tested and boosted after ~24 hours, then the 20 minute cycle still leaves the battery too low. The next cycle is still playing catch-up because the last was inadequate. Kia's very limited "documentation" in the manual says that the battery saver+ behaviour will stop after too many operations

The Aux. Battery Saver+ activates maximum of 20 minutes. If the Aux. Battery Saver+ function activates more than 10 times consecutively when in the automatic mode, the function will stop activating, judging that there is a problem with the auxiliary battery. In this case, drive the vehicle for some period of time or if the auxiliary battery returns to normal, the function will start activating.

What on earth do they mean by "or if the auxiliary battery returns to normal, the function will start activating"! We also have to presume from the 10x limit that they don't expect to do it every day or it would stop after 10. I'm guessing that it expects 1x to be enough, perhaps a few more if cold or other factors are at play (e.g. someone has been in and out of the car, opening and closing doors a few times, maybe turned on to read some screens or take a photo etc, fetch the manual....)

There, that's my take on why I don't think, generally, it is easy for people to say "I haven't seen it work" or "it's not working". In your case @PJM, because you have a BM2, the worked once then stopped again is interesting. I think we should have expected 10x repeats around ~24hrs from the last one (assuming you didn't touch the car). I wonder if they have a lower threshold of 12V below which they don't do anything? Maybe the 24 hour wait before next check has it's counter reset every time you touch the car in some way, so even opening the door after 10 hours would mean the next check-cycle would be 24 hours later. Sorry, I don't have a battery monitor to check the idle speculation!
I think the strict 20 minute limit on boosting may be the cause of batteries not being recovered to "good" from rather depleted and too many unfinished tasks may cause it to stop altogether.

Sorry if I read too much into your line "not receiving an overnight top up"

 

I had assumed it was a daily top up from looking at MrEV‘s videos and some of the other BM2 charts that people have posted. I can think of no specific reason that my battery should have died. No unusual use or lack of use patterns. The reason I am suspicious is that first it missed a scheduled charge. Checking it had removed my schedule settings. A few days later we go out to a flat battery depleted to 5v. I wonder if 19 months and 10000 miles is the life of the 12v Rocket battery In the EV? Thanks for your input.

 

I have to point out that my text was against a situation where my car is never charged on any schedule (I don't have private off-street parking/charging - I have to drive it to get it charged). So in my case the Battery Saver+ is functioning to keep the 12V battery in a good condition despite the car not moving. For me that is every week of the year. For some people that is only when they go away on holiday and may worry that their high voltage and 12V batteries be fine on return (they should be, so long as the high voltage was left adequately charged and the BatterySaver+ was enabled).

As soon as we enter the realm of scheduled charging we really are adding new dimensions. As I understand it the scheduled charging will also cause the LDC, low voltage DC converter to be powered up and charging the 12V battery at the same time as the battery is charged. Battery Saver+ only really comes to the fore if the car hasn't been driven or charged for ~24 hours and the battery voltage is detected as needing a boost. It's for keeping the battery in a good state in the prolonged absence of driving or charging.
5V strikes me as horribly low - it makes me wonder if Kia do nothing when it is under a certain level. Someone who knows lead-acid better than me should probably comment on whether that is salvageable.

Sorry I can't really answer why it got so low, other than thinking of approximately 10 days of never succeeding in bringing the battery back to the correct voltage. 10 x 20 minutes might not have been enough.

 

You would think it was programmed to react and kick in at a sensible level let’s say 12.3v for example. I wonder if the voltage drops off a cliff too quickly for the software to kick in. The car had been driven foe several hours on the Saturday. Not used on the Sunday and dead on Monday morning. The HV battery had 79% charge.

 

Yeah, that's my direction of thought. It's not monitoring all of the time (well at least at regular enough periods). The ~24 hour period is too long. On the Saturday you might have hoped that it would be adequately recharged, but I don't think the level of recharging when driving is as fast as a car would be with alternator. If you parked with a still even slightly depleted battery we don't think the Kia battery management is going to even check for ~24 hours, so it will drop lower still in the first 24 hours after switch off (especially if it is an already damaged battery). ~24 hours later on Sunday it might have decided to try for 20 minutes (but 20 mins wasn't enough) or perhaps at the time the car tested the voltage it decided the battery level was "a lost cause".
Sorry only conjecture.
I've seen people reasonably say in the past "it can't be a software fault, because if it were we would all suffer".... but thinking about it a bit more you wonder if certain "edge cases", as software-types call them, might catch out Kia. The edge-case being that the battery isn't in a good way when you turn off and the car waiting ~24 hours before examining the battery is too long. Similarly 20 minutes of boosting might be enough to keep up with normal vampire drain, but not enough to catch-up with a more severely depleted battery. The process copes with 98% of normal use but might not be adequate for a battery which is more depleted than usual or has reached a condition where it doesn't charge as well.
[edit]
There are suggestions in other topics, re Hyundai Konas & older Ioniqs (which we share a lot of software hardware with) that the cars only charge the 12V battery for 30 minutes at the start of an AC or DC charge. They even go so far as to say only 30 minutes of being in the driving mode - which I find difficult to believe. What might be true is that the driving mode spends most time with the LDC producing a lower "float" voltage, adequate to meet the demands of the "on" systems, but not fast charging the 12V battery. In the past I have read assertions that when the car is in utility mode it holds the voltage higher for the full duration of Utility, and so the effect is that one hour of "Utility" does more charging than one hour of "Ready/driving".
All annoying conjecture. If some engineers were likeley to be at the Fully Charged Show it would make going there unmissable, but I suspect they only have slippery sales droids!

Kona discussion about float vs higher charging voltage with Util
Obviously there is the problem that time and software change just as there are Hyundai/Kia variations - it's all part of the murky pool of information from which we pull the welly-boot of possible truth!

 

In general EV’s 12v batteries are not used in the way they were designed for…. for ice vehicles. All explained here.

 

My in-car scheduled HV charge settings annoyingly keep reverting back to no schedule. This seems to be random. I set for charge 00.30-04.30 and it sometimes the schedule stays ok for days, then one day it’s reset back to no schedule And needs to be reconfigured again 🙁

 

But does this have anything to do with the topic "12V top-up not happening any more" ?
BatterySaver+ is about the car managing the 12V battery state from the high voltage battery - It's got nothing to do with scheduled AC charge.
Of course I agree that each period of AC charge will help the 12V state, but it is not a prerequisite it actually just muddies the water about whether the BatterySaver function is capable of doing its job on its own. There are cars (like mine) which NEVER get the periodic overnight AC charge. It would be the same for two or three weeks in airport car-parking.
The 12V battery state should be maintained from the high voltage battery. AC schedules are a distraction from that... mis-firing AC schedules are a double distraction.
Missing AC charging schedules may be an issue - yes - but next to nothing to do with 12V battery condition managed by BatterySaver+ which has some sort of scheduled operation, but that schedule is unrelated to any overnight AC charging schedule.
BatterySaver+ should do its job with no AC present for days/weeks.

The only way that I could see scheduled overnight off-peak charging adversely affecting things is if the BatterySaver+ sees the car as having "woken" for charge and the "off" at the end of the charge resets when BatterySaver is due to check e.g. maybe the time of "off" is where the clock starts counting from again in order to reach ~24 hours and time to do a 12V battery voltage check - If it has that effect I could see a mechanism for an every night AC charge to pretty much prevent BatterySaver+ from ever doing anything!
In that unlikely, silly, but possible event, the 12V battery might only get a modicum of charge from the first 30 minutes of AC being on... that could be worse than 20 mins of BatterySaver voltage. Worse still if the overnight AC schedule just comes on for a moment and ends almost immediately. No effective charging from AC and BatterySaver knocked back another 23.5 hours?
Dunno.
I'm 4 weeks from first service so I'm not rushing out to buy a battery monitor and be seen to tamper with the car!

Strikes me that an interesting experiment with a BM2 would be to put the car in Utility mode for an hour say, to catch the Utility level of voltage and give the battery a reasonable charge before starting the experiment, then turn the car off and leave it alone for as many days as possible, no door opening, definitely no scheduled charging, no external AC plugged in, just an idle car as though gone on holiday for a week.
The descent curve of the battery flattening might indicate how healthy the battery is (as per the Transport Evolved lady's video posted by @MikeProcter) if it drops by a volt or more in an hour that's not healthy if there is no significant load but just usual vampire load. You might try a Kia Connect query of the car's state and see if responding to Kia Connect to get the BMS battery SOC requires the car to "wake up" more than just the 24/7 vampire drain, but I suspect the BM2 sampling interval probably would miss the short wake-up to check and respond to Connect. After that it is just a question of seeing if the voltage gets spiked up to 14+ volts every ~23.5 hours from when turned off, or whether it has to be below a certain level before activating. If it does activate, does the 12V battery voltage afterwards sit higher than before the 20 minutes of charging (obviously we would hope that it does), does that higher level hold-up through the next 23.5 hours? Are we on a losing battle with 20 minute daily boosts? Or can the car boost some days and take some days off? Every time it skips having to run we know that the car will reset the count of successive runs of boosting. If it has to boost on 10 consecutive occasions it is going to stop (or maybe stop before if the 12V is too low)

 

I had it on the CTEK overnight and it was up to fully charged this morning. Looking at the BM2 log it did a 20 minute charge from the HV battery at 10:59hrs for 20 minutes this morning. It’s not the HV charge that is the issue it’s the 12v.

 

Have you ordered a replacement yet?

 

So this "on the CTEC overnight" means you had a 12V battery charger connected across the battery terminals and car overnight. I wonder what effect that might have if the car energises the low voltage DC-DC converter to make some 13-14V power to power up systems. I'd be content to jump start the battery of an EV for a few minutes so as to get the main systems "on". I'd be content to stick a battery charger/conditioner across the terminals of an ICE car's battery because without starting the engine nothing is going to produce power to conflict with the output of the CTEK. Not sure I like the idea of connecting what is essentially a power supply across the battery of an EV where there is in effect another power supply waiting to come on. The LDC would come on if you started the car, but will also come on for BatterySaver+
Connecting the output of a power supply to the output of a power supply is generally not a good idea.

If I felt that I had a low 12V battery I would either turn it on for a while, more likely put it in "utility" for an hour or two and check the voltage after that. If I really wanted to stick the battery on a charger I'd disconnect the battery from the car so the charger was only across the battery terminals.
An ICE is just a "load" when connected to a charger. An EV has the potential to be another power supply.

Hey I have no idea how much monitoring/analysis Kia does in getting the BMS to understand the state of health of the 12V battery, but I would be concerned that any analysis logic in the car for monitoring the 12V battery is going to have a rather distorted view of the battery's health if it gets to see the sort of high-ish voltage of a battery which is on charge if the car doesn't think it is charging. Isn't such a sample going to look like "this is a highly charged battery".

Regardless of all that (just me being a bit risk averse) the fact that the Soul decided to perform a boost goes to show (I think) that it doesn't rate the battery voltage. What did the BM2 say the voltage was just before the 20 minute cycle. Presumably the BM2 can give you data for a graph of rapid fall of voltage from when you stopped the charger to when the 20 minute cycle took over.

 

it did not cause any issues with a fault light on the CTEK. It went up to 14.71v. It settled at 13.01v. I have just been out in it and it has settled at 12.89v when switched off. I note that when it charged previously for the overnight 20minutes the CTEK was not connected and it peaked at 14.68v. Looks like the CTEK magde no difference. As to the auxiliary charge programme on the Soul does anyone actually know what causes it to charge or not to charge? I thought it was based on time rather than battery condition. I assume this as otherwise in theory it would have kicked in to top up the battery when it nose dived for the first time and none of us would have this problem to deal with. I have not ordered a new battery yet as I am going to have a word with the supplying dealer first.

 

12V batteries are under warranty for 2 years.

 

I know but unless I look to develop the evidence it is shot it will be like banging my head against a brick wall. Last night and into this morning it’s sitting at 12.74v. I am not going to attach the smart charger and just run the car normally and see what happens. Thanks for your input though.

 

The 20 minute top-up will make no headway against a 12v ordinary non AGM non EFB damaged battery. It's putting a sticking plaster over a very infected sore.

 

But the smart repair by the CTEK may have fixed it. It seems to be holding its charge.

 

Needs to be load tested. Very unlikely to recover reliable capacity from that kind of discharge. It's a probably a failure waiting to happen (late on a cold winters night, far from home).

 

I plan to give my 12V a CTEK reconditioning cycle. To be on the safe side I will disconnect the battery first, can anyone tell me what, if anything, will need resetting when I reconnect the battery?

 

...what, if anything, will need resetting when I reconnect the battery?

After flattening the battery at the weekend by working on the car and leaving the doors and boot open for too long, I had to pull the 12v out in order to charge it. The battery was flat enough to make everything go disco lights-wise and cycle the brake pump, but it wouldn't do anything much for more than about 20 seconds without blinking out. Not an experience I want to repeat but now at least I know what it means if it happens again.

Long story short, so long as you disconnect the 12v battery and don't pull any wires off of internal systems within the first 30 seconds to 1 minute, you won't need to do anything (the delay is to allow any residual current to drain out of capacitors). The car will remember pretty much everything with the possible exception of the last journey data and - according to the manual - mileage/number of days related to the service intervals (if you've got them set).

I found I needed to entirely disconnect the 12v before charging it because I couldn't work out how to turn off the bonnet open warning that kept appearing on the dash. Not helpful for the car to be leeching power for that sort of thing while you're trying to charge the battery.

 

I connected mine with the battery still in the car and it has created no issues. So far the battery has since held its charge. The CTEK cable is slim enough to shut the bonnet

 

Was that a ”standard” charge or a “reconditioning” charge with the de-sulphurisation routine?

 

The first charge after it had dropped to 5v included the full desulphation programme. It took 8 hours for that phase alone but it seems to have fixed it.

 

Okay thanks, I’ll give it a go.