Is Phantom drain a hoax?

[house9]

Sorry for the click bait title

I have been "sheltering-in-place" for the past few days and car has been sleeping:

Conditions are perfect, guessing if I was in colder climate would see some actual loss?

- 2020 Model 3 (Dec 2019 build)
- In Garage
- No sentry on at home
- Teslfi puts my car to sleep after 15 minutes of being idle
- Unplugged
- Temperatures are mild: this week was 39 - 64 F

Charged to 90% on Monday, then I unplugged (cord is in a walk way in the garage).

Car has been in Sleep mode for 113+ hours (or 4 1/2 days).

Woke the car up to go for a drive, battery had dropped from 90% to 89%

 

[jerry33]

It depends on a few things such as how much you have turned on, how often you check with the App, etc. Because you're using Teslfi, it overrides the defaults and custom settings. I'm not that crazy about giving my Tesla password to a third party, so I don't use that type of App.

 

[justsomeguy]

I've gone away for over a week and my car has lost 3%.

I've also let it sit overnight and it's lost 5%.

It is completely inconsistent and the fact of the matter is you just can not park it for extended (2+ months) periods of time unplugged without worrying about it.

 

[user212_nr]

It is not possible to say with 100% certainty that it is always a hoax, but a large number of the complaints about "phantom drain" are indeed just that. They always refuse to take accurate recordings of their activities and date/times of their battery percentages.

You see statements like "I lost 10% overnight" but not, "I left and the battery was at 52%, came back and it was 41". They even drive the car and neglect to mention it.

There is also another type of case where users are uninformed about the energy usage of certain settings that they had enabled, like sentry mode or cabin overheat protection.

You also never know, there may be some defects in certain cars that cause their experiences to be different.

 

[S4WRXTTCS]

The biggest "gotcha" when it comes to Phantom drain is the "Summon Standby Mode".

The reason is that people will experience next to no Phantom Drain at their house (like the OP), but the second they leave it at the airport the Phantom drain goes up quite a bit. So they start to freak out, and they don't know what it is.

The setting is on by default (on cars with Smart Summons), but it excludes a persons house. So odds are they don't find about about it til they leave their car somewhere that isn't their house.

 

[KenC]

Sorry for the click bait title

I have been "sheltering-in-place" for the past few days and car has been sleeping:

Conditions are perfect, guessing if I was in colder climate would see some actual loss?

- 2020 Model 3 (Dec 2019 build)
- In Garage
- No sentry on at home
- Teslfi puts my car to sleep after 15 minutes of being idle
- Unplugged
- Temperatures are mild: this week was 39 - 64 F

Charged to 90% on Monday, then I unplugged (cord is in a walk way in the garage).

Car has been in Sleep mode for 113+ hours (or 4 1/2 days).

Woke the car up to go for a drive, battery had dropped from 90% to 89%

Yep, it's a joke we pull on the newbies.

 

[Msjulie]

Even though garaged, if it gets cold enough in the garage the car can finish charging in the wee hours and lose a percent by dawn. I've also seen it lose some when it's sitting in the sun which I suspect is the cabin protection ac/fans going on. I try to put the sunshade up to control that from happening

 

[camalaio]

I have a similar long term test going. Government required us to self-isolate on arrival, but I accidentally had it set to 100%. Stopped it and unplugged at 87% or so. I found a way to wake the car for only 1 minute (via OBD) and have checked only twice, but it seems like it's losing 200Wh/day in a ~11°C (52°F) garage.

I've definitely lost a lot more before, but this made me think of a possibility. The car is dead silent right now, but when it's plugged in at home we can normally hear some pump noise or something, no matter how long ago it charged. I wonder if it uses more energy when plugged in. This usage wouldn't cause it to charge again until the percentage drops a bit.

What's weird is I could swear the implication from the Stats app was a median loss of 1.3kWh/day. That's insane. Does someone have a newer graph from Stats for standby usage?

 

[1FASTROD]

I'm experiencing somewhat of the same, very low amount of drain daily, as my car is in winter storage. Seeing about 1 mile / day (1-2 km/day).

I wonder if Tesla was able to optimize phantom drain in one of the recent software updates (I'm on 2020.8.1)?

 

[1.21GW]

This has been significantly improved in the 1.5 years I have owned the car. It used to be a problem, but lately it has been great.

also, I agree with the previous comments, ensure sentry mode is off and summon standby is off.

 

[focher]

Maybe the real problem is the use of the term "phantom drain". If energy is consumed, it's because the car is actually doing something to consume the energy. For the things that can be turned off, the car won't do those things. Not knowing what those things are doesn't make them "phantom" any more than not knowing who keeps drinking my beers in the fridge means there's a ghost in my house.

 

[MrMassTransit]

As I drive fairly infrequently (many times only every week or two) I was pretty worried about phantom drain when I bought the car - my concern was that at 2-3 miles per day, I could be seeing 20-30% of my electric usage for the car just supporting it idling in the driveway (having just had my 3 for a year, I'm a tad under 3k miles, the bulk of that from road trips). I had a Leaf before the Model 3 and I could park it for a month and not see any loss of energy, so I was bracing myself for the worst.

My experience is very similar to your's - its much lower than the initial reports and barely noticeable. I park outside and even cold weather hasn't been shown to accelerate the loss too much (I may see a short term hit, but I get it back when things warm up). It seems that in the first 24 hours, I see a higher loss, but after that the car enters a pretty deep sleep and losses are pretty minimal until I use the car again.

I agree with other posters re: things like smart summon. I don't have the FSD package, so that's not an issue for me. I only use Sentry when in public lots away from home (wouldn't do any good anyway, as I have the car covered). I also don't really open the Tesla app except when using the car or when I get pinged to install an update.

 

[tivoboy]

Phantom draing has gotten MUCH better in the past several months and builds. It's not a hoax though, it does happen but I wouldn't have really called it PHANTOM in the first place. The car WAS actually DOING something. I would have called it stationary battery usage. Maybe it was sentry mode, maybe it was phoning in to the mother ship (this happens a lot when one has third party apps installed) it could have been cooling or warming the battery, or it could have been downloading new FW/Maps data or uploading general cached data to TESLA.

I find that of course senty mode is the highest use of stationary battery usage. Then comes when the conditiions are either VERY cold or VERY hot. The car probably spends even more energy than sentry mode trying to keep the battery in a preferred temperature range. It doesn't happen out here too often.

Lately, I think the car manages it's deep sleep and sleep modes much more in line with my usage. I'm pretty sure that Tesla know the frequency of vehicle usage and aligns that with the various sleep modes. My Merc did this 25 years ago, (not an EV) so i'm be surprised if Telsa wasn't doing this to some extent today. I know when I go to the car at 05:00+, it unlocks upon walk up during a weekday. If I for some reason try that at 04:30 on a weekday, I have to manually unlock to open the car.

For this OP example though, Im' surprised that after charging it went to 90%, and he then just parked it and it only went down 1% over 4.5 days. I find that I DO get more SBU right after charging. My thinking is that charging is a high energy flow and thereby high thermal impact and the battery when quickly thereafter is parked it tries to do a bit more battery temperature conditioning. So, you must have a really good battery control unit. Or, maybe this hardware has gotten better with time.

 

[camalaio]

For this OP example though, Im' surprised that after charging it went to 90%, and he then just parked it and it only went down 1% over 4.5 days. I find that I DO get more SBU right after charging. My thinking is that charging is a high energy flow and thereby high thermal impact and the battery when quickly thereafter is parked it tries to do a bit more battery temperature conditioning. So, you must have a really good battery control unit. Or, maybe this hardware has gotten better with time.

Level 1/2 charging does not apply excessive heating or cooling that needs to be dissipated after. It only attempts to keep it above 10C (50F) or so, generally a few degrees warmer. As for cooling, it's fine up to something crazy like 50C (122F). This is true after a Supercharging session as well. It doesn't cool it down all that much and leaves much of it to passive cooling.