Wampa
Member
I keep my M3 in Scottsdale, so it's by far my favorite feature. Once I'm about to check-out at the store I'll activate the fans and arrive to a nice 72-degree cabin.
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*Coolness* Anybody else pre-conditioning the cabin to stay cool?
- Thread starter StealthP3D
- Start date
I pre-cool during the summer more often now. Family and friends always comment how amazing it feels to come into an ice cold car and are blown away.
AdamMacDon
Member
I've done some (very unscientific) testing. With my car nearly full charged and 15 minutes remaining charging with a 6.6KW connection, it increased my charge time to almost 5 hours when trying to cool the cabin down from completely heat-soaked on a 30 degree day (Celsius). I didn't test the cabin temp, but I'd guess it was nearly 50C, Pretty hot, well over 120 degrees F. To bring it down to my setting of 19 degrees C took just over 12 minutes (before returning to 15 minutes charge time remaining). Some very rough math tells me roughly 1.2KWh was consumed by this process, since I didn't really get much farther in my charge during this period. This seems quite high and this wasn't a super accurate test, but my takeaway has been the consumption to maintain AC on very hot days is fairly low, so any trip under half an hour I leave it idling. Exception is cooler days where I just roll down the windows to vent hot air before engaging the AC. One day I want to do some tests on this properly.
Charging shuts off when you cool the car (or it did in my car when I was actually checking the other day). And the car actually tells you how hot the inside is in the app (on the remote AC controls).
The AC uses very little power. I had it on and keeping the kids cool in the car for well over an hour once, and it used about 10km worth of the battery... about 2-3%. But they also had the stereo blasting.
Conditioning your car for a 5-10min hit should barely make a perceivable dent in the battery from what I've experienced.
Also, accurate battery drain while preconditioning your car (or maintaining the temp) is going to be nearly impossible. Factors like initial start temp, outside temp, shade vs sun, will all impact how hard the system works, how long it's on for, and how often it kicks on and off.
I think we should be happy with the knowledge that, unless you have the compressor running all day, or at least for a good chunk of it, you arent going to take a huge hit in mileage. And as stated many times, we are doing zero damage to the air quality under the specific use of the compressor as compared to ICE vehicles.
Green thumbs we be all.
The AC uses very little power. I had it on and keeping the kids cool in the car for well over an hour once, and it used about 10km worth of the battery... about 2-3%. But they also had the stereo blasting.
Conditioning your car for a 5-10min hit should barely make a perceivable dent in the battery from what I've experienced.
Also, accurate battery drain while preconditioning your car (or maintaining the temp) is going to be nearly impossible. Factors like initial start temp, outside temp, shade vs sun, will all impact how hard the system works, how long it's on for, and how often it kicks on and off.
I think we should be happy with the knowledge that, unless you have the compressor running all day, or at least for a good chunk of it, you arent going to take a huge hit in mileage. And as stated many times, we are doing zero damage to the air quality under the specific use of the compressor as compared to ICE vehicles.
Green thumbs we be all.
TT97
Active Member
Charging does not shut off. Here is screenshot from TeslaFi showing charge with conditioning turned on. Took 11 minutes to go from 144° to 70°.
The time to charge shoots up when you first start conditioning and then settles back down once car gets to set temperature. I will need to take a closer look next time on how much energy the conditioning uses from the charge.
It is one of my favorite features.
I am amazed every time how quickly it works. I start it when I get into the elevator and by the time I get to the car it is already down to the set point.
I am amazed every time how quickly it works. I start it when I get into the elevator and by the time I get to the car it is already down to the set point.
My wife loves it. I am fine with 105 (with just cabin overheat protection). Really by the time I put on seat belt, put my phone in the holder, start WAZE, put in destination, select an audio option, the car is already cool down to 70's.
TT97
Active Member
I was able to dig in a little more info from the API. First, I looked up the historic temperature and 8/17/18 had a high temperature of 88° so obviously the "Outside Temp" is affected by being parked under the sun.
Right before conditioning started, the API showed 1.33 hours for "time to full charge." Once conditioning started, the time left jumped to 16 hours, settled down to about 5-7 hours remaining while cooling and went down to 2-2½ hours once car reached set temperature of 70°.
With the AC off, the car was charging around 5.2 kW. While cooling, it looks like the A/C was consuming 4-5 kW and reduced to about 2 kW once reached set temperature.
The numbers look a little high but the car was parked under the sun in 88° weather so car would be working harder to keep the inside temp at 70°.
I charge via a 15A/120v outlet and the charging rate drops to 0 mph when the AC is on. I'm sure it is not technically shut off, but it the range goes down instead of up because the AC uses more power than the car can draw from a 15A/120V outlet.
I guess it depends on what you're plugged into then, as per this.
I should have stated that I was conditioning at home, where I haven't had my nema 14-50 installed yet. And while I didn't notice a drop in range, the charging speed dropped to 0km/hrs and the remaining time went from 20min? To 24hrs+. For arguements sake, that's shutting off charging for any measurable amount. Sounds like with a faster charging rate, it'll still keep going. Good to know.
I should have stated that I was conditioning at home, where I haven't had my nema 14-50 installed yet. And while I didn't notice a drop in range, the charging speed dropped to 0km/hrs and the remaining time went from 20min? To 24hrs+. For arguements sake, that's shutting off charging for any measurable amount. Sounds like with a faster charging rate, it'll still keep going. Good to know.
Lacrosse tournament last weekend in Stowe VT. Hotter than a blazes for those folks. It was idling heaven. Walked through maybe a hundred cars running the gas to keep cool inside. When all packed together it's a wonder the cars don't just melt or at least overheat.
Parked in the back 40 of a clover field. Suspension up and nice and quiet. Was a dream spot to have the cabin set at 75 degrees.
It was 94. I used 3% for the day. Charge at the VRBO on just normal home current. Covers my intown usage and enough to get back to the SC network to get home.
Parked in the back 40 of a clover field. Suspension up and nice and quiet. Was a dream spot to have the cabin set at 75 degrees.
It was 94. I used 3% for the day. Charge at the VRBO on just normal home current. Covers my intown usage and enough to get back to the SC network to get home.
The car is still pulling exactly the same amount of power from the wall. I wouldn't describe it as shutting off charging, because if the car was doing that, I'd expect it not to pull power from the wall.
However, the draw from the HVAC means that the battery isn't gaining any charge because the HVAC is eating more power than that wall connection can deliver and the battery is actually going down as a result.
Unless you're in a very hot place it'll eventually turn around - I think the HVAC in steady state is less than even a 120V plug in. And yes, a faster charge connection will deliver more power than the HVAC can use, but you'll still see a difference in how fast the car charges.
It was a neat feature to play with and I did it all the time the first few week I had the car, but it takes so long to connect through the app sometimes and the AC cools things down so quickly, that I pretty much never bother with it anymore. I have overheat protection on, so it never gets unbearable in there.
I will refer you to this thread: How To: Automate Preheating/Cooling, Google Play Music (or others) starting automatically, etc!
I have a widget on my homescreen, so it takes just 1 button push to precondition the car.
Keep in mind that the power consumption of the A/C is highly variable due to the fact that the primary consumption of energy is the A/C compressor and this is run by a variable speed electric motor that is designed to be very efficient when running at low speeds but still have plenty of power available to cool a heat-soaked cabin quickly. The second largest consumption of the A/C system are the fans (which also run at a high rate of speed during initial operation). This means that tests that measure the instantaneous consumption when first starting the system up do not reflect the average consumption at all.
Also, casual tests that rely upon watching how the charge rate of the traction battery is affected are highly unreliable for another reason. Namely, because there are other electrical items that consume electricity from the traction battery in a sporadic manner, the most significant being the 12V charging system. The 12V accessories run off the 12V battery which is then periodically charged every so often. If turning on the A/C causes the 12V battery charger to begin another charge cycle, the consumption will increase more dramatically because current is flowing into the 12V battery to charge it from a low state of charge to 100%. This does not represent the actual consumption of the A/C at that point in time.
I've found the A/C to actually use very little electricity on average. I also think the A/C is more effective when using the lower two air vents (and not the defroster vent). A comfortably cool cabin is maintained with less energy when the bottom vents are open (and the defrost vents are off) because this keeps the seats cool and fills the cabin with cool air from the floor upwards. Cold air is heavier than warm air so this has the effect of filling the cabin with cool air from the bottom which pushes warm air near the ceiling upwards and rearwards where it can exit the cabin in the center/rear deck cutout. This is how it works with our two Model 3's which both have the center/rear deck cutout (I understand some Model 3's do not have this?).
To elaborate, if the air exiting the car via the rear deck is warm air instead of cool air, the system will work more efficiently.
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NoPetrolDream
Fandango
You're hitting on all cylinders here...pardon the ICE reference.
My last car, a Sonata hybrid, had the ability to remote start the car. If you remembered to leave the climate on, and to turn it up to max before leaving the car, it would pull down the cabin mostly on the battery, as it also had an electric compressor, before spinning up the engine. Even so, the app to do it was slow and clunky, and I'm with you in that I didn't like running an ICE any more than necessary. The Tesla app is seamless, and often when I precool on hot afternoons just prior to leaving the office, the car is nice and cool, and the a/c compressor well settled down, by the time I get to the car.
Some of us in this forum (me included) may be old enough to remember when ICE car a/c used R12 as a refrigerant, and that the compressor ran continually vs. cycling on and off via the electromagnetic clutch on the compressor pulley. Those cars would pull down fast and could freeze you out of the cabin if you didn't add a little reheat from the heater core for comfort. It's like those engineers knew what kind of heat load they were working against. Once cars had to switch to R134A refrigerant, and economy standards forced compressor cycling to become commonplace, the ice-cold interiors faded. The Tesla a/c almost gets back to that, thanks to the variable speed electric compressor and lacking a big chunk of heat producing iron under the hood.
Yes, when it's summer, turning on the cooling in the car is part of my check-out routine at stores and restaurants.
Also, on very cold days in winter, I'm turning on the heat - but it's not as critical. No matter how cold it is, the seat heaters make the car comfortable very, very quickly.
Since I'm used to it, my favorite part about this feature now is that it makes others happy when they get into my car.
My car sits in the shade from around 2pm on (by no accident) I still crack the windows and put a sun shield up for the morning and noon time sun.
Car is cool just like all my previous cars.
My ICE Jeep could remote start and it would run the ventilated cooling seats if above a certain temperature and run heated seats if below a certain temperature. But I rarely used it.
(by no accident) I still crack the windows and put a sun shield up for the morning and noon time sun.Car is cool just like all my previous cars.
My ICE Jeep could remote start and it would run the ventilated cooling seats if above a certain temperature and run heated seats if below a certain temperature. But I rarely used it.
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