Location based charging limit? Home vs. work.

[icmurf]

I have LR AWD and a 100 mile round trip commute. Free charging at my office with 40 amp level 2 ... about 35 mi/hr charging. I have 240V outlet in my home garage and have been using the mobile charger and plugging it in regularly at home to make sure I have enough range at all times.

Now ... given free charging at work and plenty of battery capacity I would like to NOT charge at home unless I'm preparing for a trip or other non-standard use.

But ... I want to cover the phantom drain, sentry mode, and scheduled climate control using the wall power vs. battery. Automatically setting the charging limit to 40% in my home garage and 80% at my office location seems to be a good solution. Is the built-in scheduler capable of doing this based on location? Does one of the 3rd party apps (Stats?) have such a feature?

Or ... is there another approach to this that I am overlooking?

 

[ewoodrick]

The car and battery were designed to be worry free.
You are trying your hardest to make it hard. Just plug it in.

 

[XLR82XS]

As per the owners manual: plug it when whenever you can and utilize 80-90% SOC for daily use.

 

[coconutboy84]

Making it way too complicated man. Just plug it in when you can.

 

[SD_Engnr]

Or ... is there another approach to this that I am overlooking?

Yeah, just plug it in when you can. Charging to 40% or 80% regularly is not recommended by Tesla.

 

[jdcollins5]

Your location is GPS based. I was with the understanding that charging settings reverted to the last time you charged. I know it sets the amp limit but am not sure about the Set Limit.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

I have LR AWD and a 100 mile round trip commute. Free charging at my office with 40 amp level 2 ... about 35 mi/hr charging. I have 240V outlet in my home garage and have been using the mobile charger and plugging it in regularly at home to make sure I have enough range at all times.

Now ... given free charging at work and plenty of battery capacity I would like to NOT charge at home unless I'm preparing for a trip or other non-standard use.

But ... I want to cover the phantom drain, sentry mode, and scheduled climate control using the wall power vs. battery. Automatically setting the charging limit to 40% in my home garage and 80% at my office location seems to be a good solution. Is the built-in scheduler capable of doing this based on location? Does one of the 3rd party apps (Stats?) have such a feature?

Or ... is there another approach to this that I am overlooking?

I don't think most people are understanding that you are trying to charge for free at work and limit your home charging. To answer your question, no, the current scheduling available in the car or app can't handle that. You could try TeslaFi to see if it has the ability to set the charge limit automatically by location. Otherwise, you can just manually set the charge limit yourself. The car will remember the amps based on location but not the charge limit. I used to have free workplace charging and used to do the same thing. Fortunately, my commute was short so I only needed to charge once a week at work. Now I don't have free workplace charging but I do have solar so I just charge at home. I typically set it to 80% but charge to a higher percentage if I have a road trip or set it to 50% if I'm going out of town for a while.

 

[RoBoRaT]

@icmurf, I commute 160 miles roundtrip with same LR AWD but no free charging at work. I just plug at home scheduled to start charging at 10 PM (off peak rate) to 90% SoC (now 266 miles at 42k mile on odometer)....rinse/repeat the next day. I burn about 200 miles over the 24 hr period.

For 100 mile trip and over night drain, you likely burn 140 mile range until you get to the free charger the next day.

If the charger at work is just for you - then charging by scheduled start time/departure should do the trick.

 

[icmurf]

Thanks to @RoBoRaT and @MorrisonHiker for sifting through my post and identifying the real question: How to take advantage of free (and green) charging at my office as much as possible. I will do some experimenting. I do have the STATS app that allows some additional scheduling. Note that I also have a large solar array at my office so that is definitely my preferred charging location.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

Thanks to @RoBoRaT and @MorrisonHiker for sifting through my post and identifying the real question: How to take advantage of free (and green) charging at my office as much as possible. I will do some experimenting. I do have the STATS app that allows some additional scheduling. Note that I also have a large solar array at my office so that is definitely my preferred charging location.View attachment 498657

Nice office! My previous job had 36 Level 2 charging stations and several MW of solar panels, hence my desire to charge at work via solar.

 

[coconutboy84]

i understood your question, its just still not worth it. just charge it up normally.

 

[Victoria3]

Someone mentioned it sort of already, but by setting your charge limit to 80 or 90 (whatever you like) and your scheduled departure time as your leave work time, this MAY work, but depends on off peak algorithms that might force the car to charge overnight at home. Give it a try.

 

[icmurf]

i understood your question, its just still not worth it. just charge it up normally.

30000 miles per year x 300 wh/mi = 9000 kWh * $0.15 (residential rate) = $1350 vs. ZERO. Seems almost like real money to me.

 

[coconutboy84]

30000 miles per year x 300 wh/mi = 9000 kWh * $0.15 (residential rate) = $1350 vs. ZERO. Seems almost like real money to me.

What I’m saying is go ahead and charge up at work. It’s fine. If so worried about plugging in at home, then don’t. This is pretty simple...

 

[jtamboli1]

For a time I used the Shortcuts app to set up automations for run when I arrived at home and at work, triggering a Siri Shortcut for the Stats app to set the charge limit. The reason it didn’t work too well is that the Shortcuts automations prompt you when to run the command instead of just running it, so you’ll have to confirm it every day.

 

[DrMrEd]

I have a vaguely similar situation to OP, though just a 110v/12a at home, free charging at work, 60 mile round trip. I'm not too concerned about range, so want to minimize my cost by charging up at work.

My solution so far in working around the limited scheduler is to set the max to 80% always, but set my departure time at 6:45am and schedule charging to start at 5:00am. This allows it to precondition the cabin when I leave for work, using mostly house power. This seems to work during the week - weekends I often just turn the schedule off and plug it in if I'm driving around much.

 

[PostalM3]

I want to cover the phantom drain, sentry mode, and scheduled climate control using the wall power vs. battery. Automatically setting the charging limit to 40% in my home garage

You are aware that you can specify in the settings to have sentry mode off while at home correct? That would save appx. 1mph phantom drain.

 

[Big Earl]

It sounds like you’re probably using about 50% of your battery on a daily basis. If I found myself in this situation (solar or free workplace charging), I would charge to 85% daily at work, arrive home with ~60% and get back to work the next day at ~35%, repeat. I might bump it up to 90% on Friday to minimize non-work charging over the weekend.

As for scheduled climate control at home, I’d probably just let that pull from the battery. If you absolutely want it done on grid power without charging the car, you’ll need to plug in and set your charge limit below your current state of charge, then change it back when you’re ready to charge at work. To me, this seems a bit cumbersome and has the potential for user error / not getting a charge when you need it - all for what will amount to 1-2 kWh of power per day.

 

[rrolsbe]

With a resent firmware change, the traction battery will now condition when you pre-condition the cabin. This will happen when the traction battery cell temp is below 50F not sure at what temp it would not require heating. With the cabin heat pulling its maximum power and the traction motors pulling their maximum power, it could required more than 13kwh for part of the pre-heating session. This is more than wall power can supply, 240V*48A or 11.5KW, so you could still be drawing power from the traction battery even though you are plugged in shore power. BTW, it appears CAMP mode does not heat the traction battery just the cabin which makes sense but this mode can not be selected from the phone app.

 

[afty]

I would also just charge at work and not at home. I wouldn’t expect much if any phantom drain in a garage, and there’s no need for Sentry mode there either. Preconditioning the cabin might be nice but again in a garage I wouldn’t expect the car to get too cold.