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To: Tell It Right

Especially considering you are not using waste heat to warm the cabin, you are drawing from the energy you are using to drive.


11 posted on 08/13/2023 5:29:54 AM PDT by Claud
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To: Claud
For what it's worth, the EV forums are full of people complaining about running their heater reducing range. I think it's more from batteries losing charge in the cold. But they claim they have the problem even if their EV has preconditioning (heating the battery before heading out), thus their reduced range, they surmise, is from warming the cabin. You'd think the EV designers would transfer some of the warmth from the battery into the cabin when running the heater (much like an ICE car uses heat from the engine to warm the cabin). But what do I know? I'm just a dumb software engineer. LOL

I do see reduced range in the summer from running the A/C. Not enough to be a problem (on trips my wife wants to stop every 200 miles anyway to walk around for 10-15 minutes, which is conducive to how often and how quickly our EV charges). But as a data hog I like to watch the numbers and can see a difference. That one aspect alone would add a significant amount to my power bill if I didn't have lots of solar (which gives me plenty of free power in the summer anyway). And even in the winter when it's really cold (really cold to us in Alabama LOL) those tend to be sunny days too (free solar to help warm the home and do the extra charging the EV needs to compensate having to keep the cabin warm). Plus solar panels have a weird feature in that they operate more efficiently in cold weather (assuming everything else being equal).

For what it's worth, this past December we had a horrible cold snap in which for one day the high never got out of the teens. That's bitter cold to us. LOL I had the EV sit outside in the cold all day (it was Christmas holidays) so I could experiment with the charge loss from cold. It lost about 10% doing nothing but sitting in the cold. That's not enough to be a show stopper (maybe my newish EV can handle the cold better than others). But it'd be enough so that if I lived up north I might rethink the math on how much having an EV adds to the power bill for it to be worth the gas savings. I didn't drive the EV during those cold days and I didn't try to charge it at a fast charger (to see if the cold reduced my charging speed as much as the EV forums were complaining about). So I can't say from experience if trying to road-side charge an EV in bitter cold is as bad as the EV forums make it out to be.

15 posted on 08/13/2023 5:55:39 AM PDT by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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