Two week trip - leave the Model S plugged in or not?

[Mike_Schlechter]

I'm leaving for a 15 day business trip on Sunday morning, and trying to decide if I leave my Model S plugged in or not while I'm gone.

I know it should be plugged in ideally, but my concern is we get some decent spring thunderstorms, and god forbid there is a power surge it could hurt the car. I have a PV system with a net meter, and I regularly have fuses that get blown when there are surges. So far nothing has ever been damaged (but I have lots of surge protectors).

Thoughts? Am I being paranoid?

Of course, my wife will probably plug it in the moment I leave and then move the car seats from her car, making this all moot.

 

[Rodolfo Paiz]

Yes, I would plug it in.

If there are surges or whatever, that's what your fuses are for. And you're not plugging the wall directly into the car's electronics, but into the charging mechanism. I wouldn't expect that you'll hurt anything even if the house does take a good hit.

 

[Zextraterrestrial]

I'm pretty sure the UMC would get fried before your car if there was some crazy lightening strike

 

[bonnie]

Leave it plugged in.

 

[Babylonfive]

Not to confuse things, but I wish there was a 'SOC End Charge' setting in a 'vacation mode'. Then the owner would place the car in Vacation Mode, and set a safe but lower SOC value. If you left a 85 at the airport, and were perhaps 40 miles from home, but wanted to not leave a car for multiple weeks at max SOC, you would: PLUG IN, set the vacation mode, and set the 'SOC End Charge' to say.. 80 miles (instead of the forced 265 or whatever it will stay charged to)... then the charger would only charge if the SOC dropped below 80 miles, and might or might not reach that level via vampire, but it certainly wouldn't go lower.

Just my thoughts on why a thoughtful owner might want to not necessarily plug-in over a long vacation... thoughts?

 

[pete8314]

I'm overseas at the moment, but my wife is at home, which is a good thing, since I left it plugged in, and it's since melted. There's scorch marks on the wall, and it was still charging despite the meltdown, so I'd be wary of leaving it plugged in without anybody being there to keep an eye on it. Obviously it's unlikely, but it's happened to a few people.

Plug Adapter on my Universal Mobile Connector has melted...

 

[Cool-Model S]

I travel a lot mostly overseas for 1 to 2 weeks at a time. You should leave it plugged in. I checked with my DS and he also recommended leaving the car plugged in.

 

[mnx]

Leave it plugged in, you'll be dieing to drive it when you get home and you'll want a full charge.

If you had said 1 week, I would have said leave it unplugged (I did just that when on vacation recently).

 

[mknox]

Tesla says to leave the car plugged in whenever possible. Why would you not?

 

[Doug_G]

I'm overseas at the moment, but my wife is at home, which is a good thing, since I left it plugged in, and it's since melted. There's scorch marks on the wall, and it was still charging despite the meltdown, so I'd be wary of leaving it plugged in without anybody being there to keep an eye on it. Obviously it's unlikely, but it's happened to a few people.

Plug Adapter on my Universal Mobile Connector has melted...

In that case, leave it plugged in, but dial the current down to minimum. That way there's no possibility of overheating the connections.

(Probably a bad socket caused your incident BTW.)

 

[Mike_Schlechter]

My wife made the decision for me. I'm to move the car seats into the Tesla before I go, and she will advise me if I can have the car back when I return. I'm thinking that Model X can't come soon enough!

 

[pete8314]

In that case, leave it plugged in, but dial the current down to minimum. That way there's no possibility of overheating the connections.

(Probably a bad socket caused your incident BTW.)

What makes you think that? I'm genuinely interesting, I'm still not home for another week or so, but it was a little concerning. I mentioned on the other thread that the UMC (up to the silver widget) got very warm when charging, so I'm included to think it was a UMC problem rather than the socket/outlet. My local Tesla service manager is dropping off a new one in the morning (obviously we can't use it on the 240v outlet until fixed), so he'll probably take a closer look at it.

 

[DavidM]

Since we no longer have sleep mode, you need to keep the car plugged in while you are away. We had an electrician install a whole house surge protector at the panel box for about $250. Since the Tamps area is the lightning capital of the world.

 

[NigelM]

My wife made the decision for me. I'm to move the car seats into the Tesla before I go, and she will advise me if I can have the car back when I return.

Smart woman. The only puzzling thing is that this didn't happen sooner!