Apps and battery usage

[Pagemakers]

I had an issue recently and was unable to login to my car for days on end.

Tesla told me to log out of all my apps and change my password and they would do a reset at their end.

I didn’t this and the problem was fixed.

However, after signing out of all apps I noticed my phantom drain had almost stopped. My car sat on a cold U.K. drive for 4 days and didn’t lose a single mile of range.

Now I’ve reconnected 2 of my 3 apps and I’ve noticed my drain is in excess of 10-15 miles a day.

Do apps really zap that much range?

 

[Tenatious]

Yes depending on what apps you're using as they are constantly pinging the car for status.

 

[Pagemakers]

I didn’t realise they’d have such a detrimental effect on the car.

 

[melduk]

Wow I didn't realise this either, does anyone know of any apps which are worse for draining battery than others?

 

[Leejmoff]

That is mad, what apps are you using?

 

[MrBadger]

One third party app should be fine. Its when multiple apps are constantly polling the car that their unsynchronised access prevents the car from sleeping.

If you stick to one well behaved third party app, it can temporarily pause its polling (or use another mechanism) to allow the car to sleep and after a period of time, it will then know whether the car has gone to sleep or not. What happens is when other unsynchronised apps keep the car awake, after the period of time the app will see that the car is still awake and resume normal logging. You then end up in a vicious cycle with the car suffering severe insomnia.

 

[Alan J]

One third party app should be fine. Its when multiple apps are constantly polling the car that their unsynchronised access prevents the car from sleeping.

If you stick to one well behaved third party app, it can temporarily pause its polling (or use another mechanism) to allow the car to sleep and after a period of time, it will then know whether the car has gone to sleep or not. What happens is when other unsynchronised apps keep the car awake, after the period of time the app will see that the car is still awake and resume normal logging. You then end up in a vicious cycle with the car suffering severe insomnia.

The Tessie App has an option to not wake the Car instead presumably getting the Car status from Tesla, the App inself is very good, Intuitive User Interface etc. I"not affiliated but I am a Fan, you might want to check it out.

 

[MrBadger]

The Tessie App has an option to not wake the Car instead presumably getting the Car status from Tesla, the App inself is very good, Intuitive User Interface etc. I"not affiliated but I am a Fan, you might want to check it out.

None of the apps talk to the car direct, just the Tesla servers. But some of the calls to the Tesla servers will then poll the car. You can only get limited info from the calls that do not poll the car, but you can deduce whether the car is asleep or not from them.

If the car is awake, the app can then call for info from the car, but if the car is asleep, not call for it. That allows the car to sleep of its own accord. Where things get a little more tricky is when the car is found to be awake - do you then make a call to get info from the car, or do you not bother and give the car a chance to sleep. There are various hints to all that decision to be made, including stopping making calls if the car is not driving etc either immediately or after a period of time - TeslaFi for instance gives good control over that. But if another app is keeping the car awake, that confuses the situation because all the apps are unaware of what the others are up to. If you poll too frequently, you keep the car awake, if you poll too infrequently, you can miss data especially during transition periods.

Some apps also use the streaming API, which is where an app subscribes to data being sent by the car without the need to poll in the same way. But very few apps (TeslaMate is an example) use the streaming API and I don't know the reason for the limited take up - although my guess is that because TeslaMate is self hosted, you have a 1:1 subscription, where as something like TeslaFi is a centralised service for all users, so you will have 1:many subscriptions which may well be a limitation when something like TeslaFi has tens thousand+ vehicles. Unfortunately documentation for the streaming API is scarce.

It would be so much better if Tesla conceded that there is a need and come up with a documented public API that can concurrently used by several third party apps.

 

[Pagemakers]

I had 3 apps installed.

Stats. EV Watch and EV Energy.

When I uninstalled all 3 my car sat at about 104 miles range for 3 days on my drive last week.

I have now re-installed EV Watch and EV Energy and after my car finished charging last night it had lost 12 miles before the morning.

I only use EV Watch for the Apple Watch complication to show my car range. If this draining my car so much I can live without it.

I guess there is no easy way to find out the battery drain of each app.

I used the same apps on my cars for the past 5-6 years and I’ve just accepted the phantom drain as a part of life.

What I have never witnessed before was my car not losing an ounce of energy over a 3 cold weather day period.

 

[Leejmoff]

If that was me I would definitely be deleting those apps. Seems mad they can drain the battery so much.

 

[Pagemakers]

Just woke this morning to battery at 164 miles. When then the charge finished at 2am overnight the change was 176 miles.

I’m logging out of the 2 apps and will see how the day progresses.

 

[LukeUK]

If the car is awake, it's equivalent to an ICE car sat there with the engine idling. The entire car is powered up and ready to go. It's the same with Sentry.

I use TeslaFi and the car regularly sleeps for 8 hours a day whilst I'm at work and 8 hours overnight, if I don't need to charge. Having an app connected doesn't automatically mean drain is an issue, it just needs to be set up right.

The car does also wake itself up for 10-60 minutes every now and again, for its own reasons.

At this time of year, temperature can also have a significant effect. The stated SOC will be reduced if the battery is cold. In the middle of summer, the battery % has occasionally gone up between sleeps.

 

[GRiLLA]

Just to add, I've also found that sometimes it's the apps in combination that are the issue, each having their own strategy to allow the car to remain idle enough to sleep. Not waking the car isn't the same as leaving it idle enough to go to sleep, TeslaFi specifically turns off all monitoring for defined periods (30 mins for me) to allow the car to reach sleep state, which can mean it misses the start of some drives. If another app is doing the same but on a different schedule thy can keep the car awake by only allowing 15 mins between requests.

 

[init6]

I guess there is no easy way to find out the battery drain of each app.

The apps don't drain the battery per se. They keep the car awake which drains the battery. So it's not like App A is using 50w and app B is using 100w. If any one if those apps keep the car awake then the car will drain at whatever rate it needs to keep it online.

Also if you want to avoid madness, use % as a way of measuring battery drain. Mileage has more variables than %.

 

[Campi]

I'm not yet a Tesla owner (hopefully early 2022 I will be). But why do you need all these app's? I thought the Tesla app was all you needed?

 

[Pagemakers]

I'm not yet a Tesla owner (hopefully early 2022 I will be). But why do you need all these app's? I thought the Tesla app was all you needed?

I use a watch app so I can see the cars range on my wrist. Stats app because it’s interesting and a charging app because it is great and simple to scheduling off peak charging.

The Tesla app does none of these things at all or easily.

 

[Campi]

Hmm, well I guess I should do some research and figure out which app's to download.

 

[Jason71]

I use a watch app so I can see the cars range on my wrist. Stats app because it’s interesting and a charging app because it is great and simple to scheduling off peak charging.

The Tesla app does none of these things at all or easily.

if you are in the car you can see the range on the screen.
If you are not then the range should not be changing so why do you need often enough to have it on your wrist?
The irony seems to be you want to keep checking it because it is falling but its the act of having it on your wrist to check it that is causing it to fall.
Sounds like a case of Schrodinger's Tesla

 

[Limey]

I use a watch app so I can see the cars range on my wrist. Stats app because it’s interesting and a charging app because it is great and simple to scheduling off peak charging.

The Tesla app does none of these things at all or easily.

If your watch didn't tell you the range away from the car, then the car won't lose much range when away from the car.

 

[Pagemakers]

It’s an app I’ve been using for the last 6 years. It just puts a number on my Apple Watch of the car’s range.

It may not be that app causing the issue. It may be one of the other 2 apps.

My point is, when I logged out of ALL apps the battery drain was DRASTICALLY better not just a bit better.