How low discharge for calibration?

[Veritas1980]

So I'm one of the fabled apartment dwellers without a charger at home. Or at least I was until last week where we finally had four chargers installed in the parking garage, which makes me incredibly happy! After almost 8 months, this is a great relief.

Because of this lack of home charging, I've almost never had the car to very low SOC or at 100%. I don't like having a near empty car parked at home with no charging, and filling to 100% while on the road is a lot of wasted time if you don't need it.
So therefore the car has been sitting between 40 and 80% most of the time, with the exception of road trips where I've been to around 13% as the lowest SOC.
This also means the my car actually displays the same range after almost 10.000 miles, which is nice, but also not very believable.

It is my understanding, that the car will calibrate the range displayed/battery level when it does a full charge from very low SOC to full SOC.
I would very much like to do this in order to get a more precise reading on battery level and possible degradation. But I am not completely sure on how low I need to run the car in order to do this calibration.
Anybody with solid information on this?

Thanks!

 

[Naonak]

If you've got some extra time, just run the car until it shuts down on its own and then charge it to full. Youcana do this by turning on all the power consuming stuff in the car while it's parked in the charging stall. It takes a bit of time, depending on how low you drove it, but I've done it once before. Didn't seem to make much of a difference, but perhaps I'm due again.

 

[Veritas1980]

Well that is a possibility, that should give the car a clear indication on 0% (or close) and 100%.

I have vacation at the moment, so that should clear up some time for driving in circles and sitting in a car with the heater on.

 

[TexasEV]

It's not good for the battery to discharge it to 0 (even if it's not really fully discharged as Tesla batteries have some protection on the low end). Is it worth possible loss of range in order to display a 1 or 2 mile difference in your range more accurately?

 

[Veritas1980]

If you can give me a better number than 0 that will give me a calibration, then I’m all for it.

Are there any evidence for running the car close to 0 will damage the battery? I see a lot of people, especially people with the older 85 packs, trying to hit zero when Super Changing in order to get higest charge rate possible.
So I would assume that they would take quite a hit when doing this multiple times during a trip?

 

[Veritas1980]

Actually, I just went through the manual, and it did warn against 0% discharge.

Apparently some sort of discharge protection sets in at 5%, so I’ll go for that and see if that does something. If not, I’ll live with any inaccuracies.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[tnt1971]

My car was manufactured in February, 2016. I have read all these posts regarding calibration but I have yet to see the battery go out of calibration. I notice a difference when it gets really cold in the predicted range. Also, range mode adds a few miles. Since the day my car was new I get the exact range based on the percentage charged to. I think this was resolved prior to my car being manufactured, and only affects cars made before a certain date.