jombolo
Member
I don't think TesalFi offers a detailed vamp drain report (yet). however here are efficiencies of drives of 5 miles or more which tells a lot.
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Vampire Drain/Loss Tracking
- Thread starter HopeToGolf
- Start date
I don't think TesalFi offers a detailed vamp drain report (yet). however here are efficiencies of drives of 5 miles or more which tells a lot.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Interesting. It would be cool if they add the vampire reporting - looks like they have all the capability. When driving, I imagine climate control settings & other factors (thicker/thinner air, tire rolling resistance vs. temp) are more dominant than the energy required to maintain the battery temperature. So can't conclude anything on battery management energy needs from above plot.
jombolo
Member
This is my wife's daily. when the temp gets below 60f she turns the seat warmer on high and 80f cabin temp....no comment...
I don't think that battery temperature management is a cause of 3-4 miles per day drain. Warming battery takes a lot more energy than 30-40W. If car stays in a garage and temperature not freezing, management is not in a play. If it was, drain would be huge.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Neither do I. It’s too erratic. Plus I figure 50-70F must be about optimal (just seems about right) and that’s where the garage is at these days. Looking it up...looks like 59F is the optimal temperature, FWIW.
Anyway, I assume it is from mothership communication and other wasteful Tesla background activities. That is why it is such a shame they don’t provide more control. And frustrating when people say this is just BMS and somehow it is cool and Tesla knows best.
My car parked in a garage and I did not drive it a few days (I do not use my car for everyday commute) . Just charged it yesterday a little bit from my garage nema 14-50. Today when I came home after work I get into garage specifically to check if car makes that whirring sound. Sure enough it did. I have no idea why pump should work if car stays already few days sleeping. At least nobody explained that yet.
I’ve been away for almost 2 weeks and have been curious to know the vampire drain that my battery would get. While parked in a garage with temperatures around 60F, I’ve been getting an average loss of 1% per day. And this is without checking the app at all. I know about it because I set the charge limit to 75% and the car starts charging when it reaches 73%. So every 2 days the car would charge for 15-20m.
For what it’s worth I have a model X 90
18 months ago I calculated my vampire loss whilst parked in Syracuse in the winter for a week, without pinging it and with most system shutdown, I lost about 1 to 2 miles per day
I recently moved to Florida and have been away from the car for 10 days, I’ve already lost 55 miles with the same set up
I have to assume it’s a software issue and the vehicle never goes into a deep sleep
18 months ago I calculated my vampire loss whilst parked in Syracuse in the winter for a week, without pinging it and with most system shutdown, I lost about 1 to 2 miles per day
I recently moved to Florida and have been away from the car for 10 days, I’ve already lost 55 miles with the same set up
I have to assume it’s a software issue and the vehicle never goes into a deep sleep
Hello!
I just bought a P3D and thought it would be interesting to track the vampire drain. The car has 250 miles and is parked in a well insulated garage in San Francisco (average temperature about 65°).
I was on a business trip for 12 days and the car was parked in my garage during that period. I did not check the app and only reported the charging status using the app notifications and later on using the data from my utility provider.
The car was set to maintain a charge of 76% and start charging every day at 11pm. Usually the car was waiting to loose about 2% to start topping it up. On one occasion it did not and waited 71% to start topping it up again.
On average, I lost about 1% per day (3 miles?) and required a total of 111 minutes of charge to maintain battery level over 12 days. All together, the Model 3 pulled 11.76KW from the grid (reported by my utility provider), which represents an average of 0.98KW per day.
In California, with my SuperGreen plan, I pay about $0.14 per KW so that would be a cost of about $4.11 per month.
What do you think of those numbers?
Data: Model 3 Vampire Drain
I just bought a P3D and thought it would be interesting to track the vampire drain. The car has 250 miles and is parked in a well insulated garage in San Francisco (average temperature about 65°).
I was on a business trip for 12 days and the car was parked in my garage during that period. I did not check the app and only reported the charging status using the app notifications and later on using the data from my utility provider.
The car was set to maintain a charge of 76% and start charging every day at 11pm. Usually the car was waiting to loose about 2% to start topping it up. On one occasion it did not and waited 71% to start topping it up again.
On average, I lost about 1% per day (3 miles?) and required a total of 111 minutes of charge to maintain battery level over 12 days. All together, the Model 3 pulled 11.76KW from the grid (reported by my utility provider), which represents an average of 0.98KW per day.
In California, with my SuperGreen plan, I pay about $0.14 per KW so that would be a cost of about $4.11 per month.
What do you think of those numbers?
Data: Model 3 Vampire Drain
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jombolo
Member
Unfortunately, that does seem to be within the range of what others (and myself) are reporting.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
0.98kWh per day seems about right.
40W average.
There are still people on these forums saying “it’s no problem! It’s only 1% per day” and “they’ll add 120V Outlets at the airport so it’s cool”. But actually it’s terrible.
For reference I last drove my Spark EV about a week ago and it has been sitting sadly neglected in the cul-de-sac since then. I left it at 84%. It’s still at 84%. (Even though, heaven forbid, I CHECKED THE STATUS, on the OnStar app). It has about an 18kWh usable battery. So you would easily see vampire drain. Zero vampire drain.
Turns out that there is no good engineering reason for electric cars to have vampire drain at benign (let’s say 45-75F with 59F optimal) temperatures!
We need half of one of those massive 10MW wind turbines just to keep all the Model 3s happy at this point!
Innovations | Offshore Wind Turbines | MHI Vestas™
Rotor diameter is 164 meters!!!
Maybe we should start a GoFundMe where all Tesla owners pool resources to offset their vampire drain, and install one of these offshore somewhere.
It's like $150 a person or something. $20 million installed or so.
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AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Ha. I would prefer they just fix the vampire drain because that would also save me about $50 a year.
jombolo
Member
I think we can all agree with that. To bring it home, i lost over 15 miles today while M3 was asleep (not to mention 4.5 while parked). This makes me wonder a few things
1. Is my M3 really sleeping when Teslafi says it is?
2. Does TeslaFi have a wire crossed somewhere and data is being reported incorrectly?
3. TeslaFi is not to blame at all and Tesla's pinging data while asleep, OR
4. An issue with the battery backs basic design?
These are total WAG's...
Try deleting TeslaFi and changing your password. As I've said before, I don't understand people who complain about vampire drain and let third party crap communicate with their car.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Third party apps can be bad for sure. But let’s not let that fact distract us from the vampire drain issue! It seems well-established it’s about 1kWh per day usually, though for unknown reasons, it can be less sometimes. 40W average consumption per vehicle.
Going to drive my Spark EV to work today. It’s been sitting for a week. Left it at 84%, it’s still at 84%, 7 days later! Now that’s good engineering. Attaching some pictures here.
Over the same time period, my Tesla has wasted at least 7kWh, enough to drive 30 miles in my Spark! If that had happened in my Spark, my battery percentage would now be roughly 35%!
Attachments
Like others have already suggested, third party apps like the ones you are using are a no no if vamp drain bothers you. I had TezLabs on my car for a few weeks and the drain went from less then 2km/24hr to more then 30km/24hr period. Deleted the app and seems like it is pretty much back to normal considering the climate is a lot colder now. Easy solution, just delete them and see if the situation changes. Just make sure you change the password to your Tesla account though as that is probably how you were granting access to the app.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
If you read the entire thread (it is long...), @C141medic did exactly this and identified Tesla 4 U as the offender and deleted it and left a bad review.
Baseline without any apps appears to be 1kWh per day. I assume it would be a bit worse if you get a software update as the car would be drawing something like 500W during the half-hour update (or whatever it takes). But we don't have to count that.
We're just looking for information on why sometimes it is substantially less than 1kWh per day, and we'd like Tesla to provide the ability to get to ~0kWh per day (let's say less than 5W average draw) (possibly with some loss of functionality). It's pretty obvious that this can be done without compromising the battery or interfering with BMS; we'd expect that if BMS has to operate, we'd want that to occur and we're ok with those losses. But those aren't the losses that we're talking about here.
Yeah sorry, I guess I missed the last page somehow. My point was that like others have already alluded to, third party apps that constantly request data from your car will likely affect the vamp drain. I can't remember commenting on losses due to the BMS though! Was that something someone else said? In terms of you question, I stopped looking at the drain since I deleted Tezlabs and the weather has gotten cold, but you are reminding me that maybe I should take note out of interest to see what a colder day does to the Model 3 in terms of vamp drain when it is not plugged in.
Has anyone considered asking any of the vendors of third party apps that are known to cause an increased drain if they have a solution to the problem? In the case of Tezlabs, I think the app was constantly pinging the car to see its status, as in parked or driving. I think it does that to know when to log your trips. I would be interested in using an app like that if it didn't have to assume so much control. It seems to me that Tezlabs would be a great app if it had a feature that let the user decide when he/she wanted to log a trip. That way the app wouldn't have to constantly be waking the car up.
Second question. If your interest is to have Tesla improve on the drain issue, has anyone contacted them regarding this. I know for me I was seeing slightly less then 3 miles/day in the summer time, but it would be great to see that come down a little if possible.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
No, it wasn’t something you said. It is a response to what generally seems to be the boilerplate response about why there is vampire drain...something along the lines of “Tesla has very sophisticated and world class battery management. Tesla knows best, and it’s a small price to pay to use 1% of your range each day, if it means the battery will last a long time! Therefore, we should be ok with this very modest drain! Why are you complaining about such a small and inconsequential thing?”
I’m just trying to neuter this argument before it is made. Because 1) this has nothing to do with BMS, 2) it’s a heinous level of vampire drain, and 3) I think it exists for the simple reason that Tesla has no spec for this and it is not a priority - and it costs them nothing, and 4) it’s a huge problem (as an example, cable boxes in the US require something like 4 (!!!) natural gas power plants just to power them while they do nothing - Google it for the actual numbers). If Teslas become that ubiquitous, this is going to matter!
Meanwhile, it costs their customers up to $150/yr, for California customers consuming in the higher energy tiers without Time of Use electricity plans. For most, it would be more like $50/yr.
I tweeted at Elon when he asked “what could be improved about your Tesla” a month or so back, saying vampire drain should be reduced, but I have no following, so I had no results (nor did I expect any). Guess I’ll submit a report to customer service and see what they say.
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