Battery drain

Although Yarbo is doing a great job during this storm and is clearing my driveway really well I noticed that the battery is draining very fast.

With light snow before Yarbo was able to do my driveway in 1.5 hours without recharging. Now Yarbo has to recharge 3 times to do the same job.

Yes, snow is much higher (6 inches and more) or more and the temperature is much lower so that will certainly influence the performance.

But is this fast drain normal?

Or could it be something to do that my app is updated but I am still on the old firmware?

Just wondering.

I think that sounds about right. 30-45 mins for that amount of snow especially if you are going on Turbo. I did notice that it dropped a lot faster after the recharges. At least it seemed that way. I definitely had more run time on the second pass (clean twice).

What’s your total SQFT in that timeframe?

Yes, I agree. after a recharge it dropped significantly, at least I had the impression.

My total driveway is 3450 sqft. 70% was done but with 2 charges, one to start from 100% to 15%, recharge to 80% and charging now with 70% done, so 2400 sqft. With light snow Yarbo manages 100% with 1 charge

This sounds about right to me. I have a 4000 sq.ft driveway. It used to take 1 hr and 17 min to clear the snow (< 3”) in one full charge (i.e using 80% battery capacity). Now, Fern is pounding my area. I sent out Yarbo when there was nearly 6” of snow on the ground and it could do only 50% of the area. I assume that it is because it needed to spend nearly double the amount of energy to clear 6” of snow. My battery is only 1 year old and I hope it’s still in excellent condition.

These figures sound about right to me. My Yarbo is clearing around 2500 sq ft of driveway, and tends to consume roughly half the battery with around 3-4 inches of snow.

Ok, that reassures me. And I just measured. Yarbo clears around 8 inch each time. And the snow keeps on falling. I am in Fishkill, close to Beacon.

I charged to 85% and in 10min it was like 55% it’s not right.

You may need to unplug your battery for 4 hours to rebalance the cells

It’s unplugged right now, I will install it back once 4 hour is up then fully charge it with plug in cable, then see what happens.

Thanks for sharing your experience. As others have mentioned, this is a normal phenomenon under these conditions. This behavior isn’t related to having the app updated while running an older firmware.

My snow conditions have not changed, it’s the battery that is having a problem. I have unplugged the battery for more than 4 hours from the Rover and plugged it back. At the time when I unplugged the battery, it was 10%, then when I plugged it back, it was 35% reporting. And I have plugged it into the wall charger, it’s been more than 12 hours charging, however, battery hasn’t gone beyond 65%,. I’m just finding it to be unusual since I have been using the Yarbo awhile now under the same exact conditions.

That sounds unusual, it should be fully charged after 12 hours. I’d get a ticket open so they can remote check the battery voltages.

Ok thanks Bryan, got the ticket open!

Yarbo support tech emailed and said voltage looks good and everything is normal, what a joke. I’ve bench tested my battery at work and it’s only 65%, I believe it’s from charging it to 100% on the dock and not dissipating it and battery condition got worse, what now?

Do the 4 hour unplug of the battery and then put it in the core and connect the wired charger for 3 hours. If that doesn’t fix it, there’s something else going on. Possibly with something on the core. One thing you could watch for would be a green light on the wired charger after the 3 hours. If it’s solid green, that means it’s fully charged. If it’s still solid red, that means it’s still charging.

I did unplug it for more than four hours from the core when it was 10%, then when I plugged it into the wired charger, it reported 35% and it was at 65-70% mark after 12 hours, then I proceeded putting the core on the docking station to further charge it and when I ran it, it only did about 25 minutes of work and fully drained 10%.

You could be right that there’s something wrong with the core but fully charged battery should not be depleting this fast with only auger running unless there’s short somewhere, in which case it should throw some errors. I believe it is a combination of battery and snowblower attachment.

I’m hoping it’s just the cell imbalance. But if the core thinks the battery is lower than it actually is, it is going act based on those parameters. There have been instances in the past where people would see it be fully charged but reporting 90% and that from my understanding was software glitch unique to the core. Some weird state that they were able to fix remotely. Wasn’t the battery imbalance issue like this appears to be.

I felt like mine was draining allot faster than before, but we got allot of snow and it’s very cold out. so perhaps once i get the snow mostly removed, I’ll run a test with minimal snow and see how long it lasts.