u/BinaryJay

I've seen it said on here a few times, one case in particular where someone specifically asked if the 12V battery would charge if they remote started their car, that yes it would. Well, it doesn't appear to. I have an Ancel BM300 Pro battery monitor on mine to keep an eye on things after I replaced the battery it came with with a bigger better one. Twice now I've remote started the car and either looked at the live data before "starting" it after getting into it, or reviewing the logs afterwards. Both of these times, while the car was "started" but waiting for me to actually get in and ready it to start driving the voltage at the 12V only went up to a fixed 12.6V during the remote started state which is not really charging voltage. Once I actually put the car in ready state, it jumps up to 14.3-14.4V as you expect to see when charging.

Unless someone else can offer a different observation with remote start, mine seem to suggest that relying on remote start to keep the 12V system charged is a no go.

I'm curious what others 12V voltage sits at during normal use of the car, or even voltage over time looks like. After I got the low battery warning from 12V draining on our new car around a month after getting it, I just said forget it and put a bigger sized AGM in there and at the same time I installed an Ancel BM300 Pro battery monitor to keep an eye on what it's doing.

On May 3rd I hooked up a NOCO to the new battery and pretty much fully charged it manually ending settling at around 12.9V. Since then, even though the car has been driven a decent amount though shorter trips of 10-20 minutes each every other day or so, the voltage of the battery has steadily declined to 12.51V today. The car does charge it at around 14.3V but only for a very short time and quickly seems to reduce the charging voltage to around 13.2V or so which is more of a float charge so even with 15-20 minute drives it hasn't really been adding anything to the battery over time.

I need to monitor it longer to get the whole picture, but maybe there are two things going on:

1. For whatever reason the car just does not see the need to actually charge the battery at all until it reaches a pretty low voltage, but as it dips even lower will start to charge it more thoroughly keeping it stable at a relatively low SoC instead of trying to keep it more fully charged.

2. Around 0.1V of discharge per day doesn't seem normal, especially considering it's the bigger than OEM Group 47 size.

I have not tried to unpair the car from the Toyota app because I actually find it useful and I loathe to just throw away the service particularly during the time I'm not having to pay for it. But what else can I do? Is it really the app communication? It doesn't seem like force closing the app on the phone and making sure it's not running changes anything. Keys are kept a good 20 feet away from the car and I deleted the digital key.

So, anybody with a battery monitor or that can go and put a multimeter on their battery - what does the car actually maintain the battery voltage at for you?

I've received way more than 750 points between Bing and Game Pass this month, but no matter what I do the points total towards renewing Gold for me is just stuck at 500 of 750 and never increases no matter how many points I earn. Anybody else see this before?