Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Is vampire drain still a thing?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
So I had to leave my car in the garage for 14 days. There was no phone with the Tesla app nearby. When I parked the car without plugging it in, the battery was at 81%.

After a week I was curious to see how the battery was holding up, so I checked with the Tesla app and it still showed a SoC of 81%.

When I returned after another week and got into the car, it showed 80%.

I was pleasantly surprised by the almost non-existent vampire drain. I was under the impression that the car would lose 0.5-1% per day, but without anything activated (sentry mode/cabin overheat protection) there was virtually no vampire drain.

I never had a chance to try that before. Has something changed in the software that reduces the vampire drain or is vampire drain an invention that Tesla haters came up with? What experiences do other people have?

Please note that this is the Model 3 forum. Let's try not to mix things up as other models might be different.
 
My car loses between 1-3 miles a day, while plugged in, in my garage. I drive a lot less now (for the same reasons others drive less now), but I still charge my car to 90% all the time. I just charge to 90%, then slide the slider down to somewhere around 75% so the car wont charge again till it drops to that level.

I dont check on the car much in the app cause its sitting in my garage, and my tesla app defaults to being on my powerwalls, which I look at several times a day (lol).

I still see the same 1-3 miles a day lost.
 
My understanding is “deep sleep” in teslafi just tells teslafi to not attempt to contact the car at all during that time window.

so basically like a car that is not being hit by teslafi at all.

no clue how it all works. I just know that after changing those settings that I don't experience even 1% loss when the car sits for a day or two.
 
I've watched this relatively closely, but not using stuff like TeslaFi. I currently only lose maybe 0.5 miles a day, which on my SR is maybe 0.2%. I have not kept great notes, but IIRC on earlier software builds, my drain was higher than that. I'm fairly sure something changed over the year I've had the car to make this a lot better.

It might also be generation dependent. Mine is a 2020, but I have a friend with a 2018, that has the older MCU, and even with everything disabled, he loses 1 to 1.5 miles per day.
 
I never had a chance to try that before. Has something changed in the software that reduces the vampire drain or is vampire drain an invention that Tesla haters came up with? What experiences do other people have?
It has improved considerably.

Whenever measuring it you should skip the first day. You can gain back miles after parking, etc., so those results for the first day will be quite unrepresentative of the actual average drain.

Last time I checked I lost a mile per day excluding the first night (when I gained four).

This is definitely an improvement.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: flyingowl
In June we were away for 15 days. We left the car in our barn. No charger there. When I parked it, it had 260 miles of range. When we got home it had 259 miles of range. The temperatures never got colder than 55 degrees, and never warmer than 88 degrees. I wonder what the differential in range will be during the winter when temperatures often go into the teens at night and rarely above 40 in the daytime. I'll be testing that in January, assuming it's safer to travel by air then than it is right now
 
So I had to leave my car in the garage for 14 days. There was no phone with the Tesla app nearby. When I parked the car without plugging it in, the battery was at 81%.

After a week I was curious to see how the battery was holding up, so I checked with the Tesla app and it still showed a SoC of 81%.

When I returned after another week and got into the car, it showed 80%.

I was pleasantly surprised by the almost non-existent vampire drain. I was under the impression that the car would lose 0.5-1% per day, but without anything activated (sentry mode/cabin overheat protection) there was virtually no vampire drain.

I never had a chance to try that before. Has something changed in the software that reduces the vampire drain or is vampire drain an invention that Tesla haters came up with? What experiences do other people have?

Please note that this is the Model 3 forum. Let's try not to mix things up as other models might be different.
I would say that if the car is able to go to sleep (no sentry, cabin climate protection, etc) vampire drain is VERY low now.
 
My 2020 AWD (sentry not enabled at home, no Tesla or other app e.g. Teslafi use to potentially wake it, no opening of doors) looses very little - it takes 2-3 days to loose 1% which aligns with the lower estimates above of 1 mile per day in this thread.

Today, despite some door openings to fetch things (15 minutes awake/powered for the MCU each time AFAIK) I am still at 89% after charging to 90% 2 days ago.
 
My car loses between 1-3 miles a day, while plugged in, in my garage. I drive a lot less now (for the same reasons others drive less now), but I still charge my car to 90% all the time. I just charge to 90%, then slide the slider down to somewhere around 75% so the car wont charge again till it drops to that level.

I dont check on the car much in the app cause its sitting in my garage, and my tesla app defaults to being on my powerwalls, which I look at several times a day (lol).

I still see the same 1-3 miles a day lost.
Wait - the car is plugged in to an outlet and still loses 1-3 miles a day? That doesn't sound like it should happen, even on a 120v outlet?
 
Wait - the car is plugged in to an outlet and still loses 1-3 miles a day? That doesn't sound like it should happen, even on a 120v outlet?

Why not? I charge it to 90% but then move the slider down to somewhere around 70% so the car wont ping pong between 87% and 90% since I now dont drive for days at a time. Not that it matters for this particular part of the discussion, but its plugged into a tesla wall connector, on a 60 amp breaker, and charges at 48amps when It charges.

Being plugged in but set at a lower percentage than the car is currently at will let the car slowly "decrease" in mileage, till it hits whatever charging line you have it set at.
 
Why not? I charge it to 90% but then move the slider down to somewhere around 70% so the car wont ping pong between 87% and 90% since I now dont drive for days at a time. Not that it matters for this particular part of the discussion, but its plugged into a tesla wall connector, on a 60 amp breaker, and charges at 48amps when It charges.

Being plugged in but set at a lower percentage than the car is currently at will let the car slowly "decrease" in mileage, till it hits whatever charging line you have it set at.
Ok missed the part where you move the slider down.
 
As long as you have everything turned off, Dashcam, Sentry mode, Smart Sunmon, climate over protection mode and any other 3rd party apps that will poll your car like Teslafi or A better route planner etc… you should be fine, I use TezLab to push it into Deep Sleep mode and leave it alone. Zero miles or % loss.

Fred
 
As long as you have everything turned off, Dashcam, Sentry mode, Smart Sunmon, climate over protection mode and any other 3rd party apps that will poll your car like Teslafi or A better route planner etc… you should be fine, I use TezLab to push it into Deep Sleep mode and leave it alone. Zero miles or % loss.

Fred
Deep sleep mode on tezlab simply turns off the polling from tezlab. This does help the car sleep, but it’s no different from a Tesla user that is not running any of these apps.

I don’t want people thinking if the buy teslafi or tezlab it will make their car sleep more. They have other nice features, more car sleep is not one of them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Adam3 and orion2001
Why not? I charge it to 90% but then move the slider down to somewhere around 70% so the car wont ping pong between 87% and 90% since I now dont drive for days at a time. Not that it matters for this particular part of the discussion, but its plugged into a tesla wall connector, on a 60 amp breaker, and charges at 48amps when It charges.

Being plugged in but set at a lower percentage than the car is currently at will let the car slowly "decrease" in mileage, till it hits whatever charging line you have it set at.

I thought it was fine to just leave the car plugged in after charging was completed, which I often do. Though intuitive if I stopped to think about it, I never realized that the battery charge ping pongs back and forth to the set limit.
 
Thanks for all the responses, that was very informative.
I seem to remember that I read somewhere that the car consumes more energy if it stays plugged in after charging, even if it doesn't actually charge. I'm not sure if that's true but what @jjrandorin wrote seems to support that idea. Whether or not it's enough to really matter is a different story though.
 
I thought it was fine to just leave the car plugged in after charging was completed, which I often do. Though intuitive if I stopped to think about it, I never realized that the battery charge ping pongs back and forth to the set limit.
It is completely fine to leave it plugged in AFAIK but the key difference here is about the lack of use (see musings below).

As jjrandorin implies the car won’t constantly micro charge (e.g. from 89.5% to 90%) but will wait until it has dropped a few percent then charge back up to your set limit (”87 to 90”). These kind of very shallow partial cycles aren‘t very harmful to lithium ion batteries compared to deeper discharges (other than the fact that using/cycling the battery at all puts wear on it, as does age).

The “charge to 90% and then set 70% and allow to fall, then repeat” strategy is likely aiming at getting to 90% fairly often (possibly for something like cell balancing, keeping the BMS estimate accurate) but not staying sat permanently at “high” SoC all the time due to lack of use mentioned. Hence allowing charge to fall gently down to 70% allows the battery to spend more time at a lower SOC which is nicer for battery life but still means you have a useful amount of charge at all times in case you do need it. This manually optimised pattern may be slightly better for the battery of a car that doesn’t see much use at the cost of a little effort but I suspect the difference is still likely to be small over the car’s lifetime so I wouldn’t sweat it very much either way.

[note: If the car is used most days then leaving it plugged in with a scheduled charge and the limit fixed makes most sense - the car won‘t spend long at a high SoC anyhow before it gets used and will sit at a lower SoC the remainder of the day until it’s time to charge again for the next day’s use. This is what I do - mostly because I have very cheap overnight electricity rather than worrying about the battery per se.]
 
  • Like
Reactions: jjrandorin