Home charging continuously while plugged in?

[Pcm888usa]

I have my M3 scheduled to charge at home at night when electric rate is the lowest. My question is since the car will use some juice while parked. If I go on a vacation and leave the car plugged in, will the car keep compensating the lost charge? That can be at a time during the day while electric rate is at highest.

 

[MLXXXp]

If I go on a vacation and leave the car plugged in, will the car keep compensating the lost charge?

Yes but as long as you don't have sentry mode enabled or anything else that prevents the car from sleeping, the amount that it costs you to maintain the charge won't be much. It likely won't cost too much more if the car decides to do a little maintenance charging during high rate times compared to low rate times.

Edit: Actually it could be that if you set for off-peak charging it only does maintenance charging during the scheduled time, in addition to regular charging. Perhaps someone else knows for sure?

 

[jjrandorin]

If you are going on vacation, charge it to 80% or so before you go, slide the charge level down to as low as it will go (50%) and make sure all draining items are off (sentry, etc). Your car will only lose 1-3 miles a day if you dont wake it up yourself a lot, and dont have anything running that keeps it awake.

The amount the car uses to maintain itself is fairly small, and unless you are gone for a very long time, it likely wont drain down to 50% from 80%.

 

[Frank99]

Yes, I can confirm that if you have scheduled charging set up, it will use that time for maintenance charging. My car starts charging at 1:00 AM, and if I go on vacation I can see that it starts charging at 1:00 every day for a short period, then shuts down until 1:00 the next day.

There are a lot of things that Tesla does right, and this is one of them. Now if only they’d fix the damned USB music player…