DCFC preconditioning is it coming????

[dbsb3233]

- At 20 miles from the charger, turn the heat off, or set it on 68 and fan speed 1 if we can't tolerate off.

Does the fan speed really have any effect on the amount of power being delivered to the resistive heater? I would kinda think it would be the opposite -- that the fan alone won't change the resistive heater power, but the cabin will warn up faster from high fan speed, allowing it to be turned off sooner.

But I really don't know. It's probably more complicated than that.

 

[Maquis]

I live in Phoenix, car temps reach 160 when parked in the sun, and it is normal to hit above 110 ambient.

Yep….that’s why I said “different!”

 

[Johnny572]

Yeah, kinda reinforces my inclination that it's just not worth it, for us anyway. Comfort > 10 minutes saved charging for us.

That's been a requirement for us all along. I'm not one that uses seat heat and steering wheel heat in place of cabin heat. I use all 3 when it's cold out (steering wheel, low seat heat, 71F-72F cabin heat).

I look at it this way….anything will helps for

So I did a rough little test for pre-conditioning yesterday. I have a 2021 GTPE that’s kept fully up to date via FDRS so all modules are at their latest versions as of Jan 23, 2022 (i.e 4.1.3).

Test conditions:

Charger is 100km from origin
Vehicle was cold on start
Between -1 and -4 degrees Celsius outside
Clear roads, no traffic cruising at ~120km/h for most of the trip

Initial temp readings:

Had cabin heat running until I was approx. 40km away from the station, that’s when I noticed a slight spike in coolant inlet temp. I turned cabin heat off and when I reached 30km from the station I got a huge spike in coolant inlet temp up to 36 Celsius. It seems having the cabin heat on renders battery heating nearly useless as it shares the heat.

Final temp on arrival to charger:

So good news is it looks like preconditioning is working as designed. Unfortunately, the 150kW stations I went to were refusing to communicate with my car so I had to settle for a 50kW charger which didn’t allow me to test the charge speed.

This all begs the question:

How effective will this be when the temperature is much colder, say -10 or -20 Celsius? Being 30km away from the charger as the sole trigger for preconditioning seems irrational given the multitude of other parameters effecting vehicle range and charge speed.

I also had to disable cabin heat for any meaningful jump in battery temps, how viable will this be in extreme cold without causing much discomfort?

Living in Michigan my heat is on and off during a long trip in the winter with the heated seat on. I can turn my heat off for 15 no problem at all and that’s if it’s needed. But if you have people in the back seat with no heated seat that might be the an issue.

Any heat to the battery in the winter is better than nothing. It’s better for battery health and charging. Same goes for summer and cooling it down.

My game plan going forward in winter trips is to do the following:

- At 20 miles from the charger, turn the heat off, or set it on 68 and fan speed 1 if we can't tolerate off.

- For the first 10 - 15 minutes of DC charging, turn off the heat as Ford recommends.

- As we near the end of DC charging, turn the heat in the car up a few degrees past where we keep it during the driving, to be able to leave with the charge % we want and an overly warm cabin to hold us for a while.

We should be traveling in the next 60 days or less so we'll see.

I crank the heat up before turning it off.. shouldn’t be an issue.

 

[Mach-Lee]

Does the fan speed really have any effect on the amount of power being delivered to the resistive heater? I would kinda think it would be the opposite -- that the fan alone won't change the resistive heater power, but the cabin will warn up faster from high fan speed, allowing it to be turned off sooner.

But I really don't know. It's probably more complicated than that.

It won't affect the power a great deal, but lowering fan speed will increase the amount of heat available to the battery pack. Fan speed and temperature controls the % heat split between the cabin and the battery. You want to turn the heat down as low as possible so the battery gets a larger % of the heat.

 

[azerik]

So again, you're jumping to conclusions based on a guess.

Not a guess, logic. Yeah the heat has to come from somewhere. Logically I looked at what others said and saw the only place for it to easily come from is the same heating loop as the cabin. In the screen shots above he's showing exactly what I was saying about having to cut the cabin heat to precondition the battery effectively while driving. At the station, yeah, turn off the heat like Ford says, no disputing that.

Which goes right back to what I was saying about there's no way Ford will force cut cabin heat in order to precondition. Even if you pick a DCFC charger and when doing so there is a huge pop up that says you won't have heat in order for this to work. People won't accept that. I think it's much easier for Ford to be on the "charing in cold sucks" wagon rather than, "my heater just stops working when I'm driving". The latter would affect sales, the first is industry standard that Ford surely isn't going to change.

 

[Addos]

Would be helpful for Ford to comment on the mechanics and technicalities of how all of this works in specificity than a bunch of us just speculating and throwing random darts at a dartboard and hoping one of them hits a bullseye. All of this feels haphazard and disorganized. Having to have forum members with connections "tease" out details from engineers is not the most effective way to keep customers informed on how all of this is supposed to work.

 

[Hammered]

Would be helpful for Ford to comment on the mechanics and technicalities of how all of this works in specificity than a bunch of us just speculating and throwing random darts at a dartboard and hoping one of them hits a bullseye. All of this feels haphazard and disorganized. Having to have forum members with connections "tease" out details from engineers is not the most effective way to keep customers informed on how all of this is supposed to work.

They should allow 3rd party skins so that people can make their own info displays / layouts and let other's who want to use them, do so. If you had a batt temp gauge, you could simply see its temp increasing on nav to DCFC.

In the navigation when selecting a charger it could pop up a note telling people what's occurring. They don't need press releases, just have the car tell the owner. That way everyone knows.

 

[Addos]

They should allow 3rd party skins so that people can make their own info displays / layouts and let other's who want to use them, do so. If you had a batt temp gauge, you could simply see its temp increasing on nav to DCFC.

In the navigation when selecting a charger it could pop up a note telling people what's occurring. They don't need press releases, just have the car tell the owner. That way everyone knows.

Well, that too. I mean, the car is programmable and computerized. There really is no reason a lot of this information can't be exposed directly through the center display. But I just mean, how much information is passed off on this forum as fact, when it is conjecture and guessing, or it is passed along second hand from some anonymous Ford engineer who for whatever reason won't just directly post information as a Ford employee with direct first hand knowledge of how all this stuff works. Not sure why getting answers to questions like these have to go through back channels, and can't just get direct responses from whoever at Ford is approved to provide these answers. Otherwise forums like this are kind of limited in what value then can provide, when the blind are out there leading the blind.

 

[Hammered]

Well, that too. I mean, the car is programmable and computerized. There really is no reason a lot of this information can't be exposed directly through the center display. But I just mean, how much information is passed off on this forum as fact, when it is conjecture and guessing, or it is passed along second hand from some anonymous Ford engineer who for whatever reason won't just directly post information as a Ford employee with direct first hand knowledge of how all this stuff works. Not sure why getting answers to questions like these have to go through back channels, and can't just get direct responses from whoever at Ford is approved to provide these answers. Otherwise forums like this are kind of limited in what value then can provide, when the blind are out there leading the blind.

Large companies like ford are highly inefficient bureaucracies. Engineers do stuff, marketing wants to be the voice, and legal is, well, it's lawyers. One big giant entity where they can't even provide simple communication. Imagine a simple blog from the engineering and development side that said in plain language the exact changes made for each release, and what they're hoping to have in future releases / being worked on. That just makes too much sense.

Like the update that did nothing but "allow" for future updates. ChatGPT can do away with ford's marketing department......

 

[Addos]

Large companies like ford are highly inefficient bureaucracies. Engineers do stuff, marketing wants to be the voice, and legal is, well, it's lawyers. One big giant entity where they can't even provide simple communication. Imagine a simple blog from the engineering and development side that said in plain language the exact changes made for each release, and what they're hoping to have in future releases / being worked on. That just makes too much sense.

Like the update that did nothing but "allow" for future updates. ChatGPT can do away with ford's marketing department......

Even more so when point releases say meaningless things like, updates to make the car software work better? Oh really? Like what specifically? Someone can't be arsed with putting in a little more detail about what these updates are actually fixing? Does anyone know? Or are updates being pushed out without any idea what is even in the update? And how are these things leaving QA with the update reverting settings in the car? How are we already several years into this process with people who were hired to fix things on the Ford side, and these updates are still this much of a mess?

Meanwhile, we end up coming to forums like this, where some "insider" leaks some hearsay details that none of us can actually validate or verify are legitimate because the engineer refuses to come forward and identify who they are or whether the information is actually authoritative in the first place. All we hear is some second hand info that god only knows if it is even really coming from a real engineer or not. The whole thing is a giant mess.

 

[Howard]

I saw battery pre-conditioning occurring on a trip from Memphis TN to Abilene TX this week. I saw a huge increase in max charging rate requested via Car Scanner app. Prior to pre-conditioning starting, max charging rate would have been limited to 101 kw; when we arrived at EA charger, max charging rate was 149 kw. Initial charging rate on car peaked at 148 kw for about 1-2 minutes then settled in at 115 kw until we got close to 80% SOC. I have more detailed numbers at our hotel. I will try to get them posted tonight or tomorrow. Pre-conditioning started 20 miles from charger.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

I ran CarScanner on a spur-of-the-moment trip of ~250 miles during which we charged at about mile 160. After the first 100 miles, we stopped for lunch and from there I asked Ford to navigate to the DCFC charging station, which was about 60 miles away.


Here's a plot of the coolant inlet temperature and the battery power (where negative values mean charging). There were a lot of elevation changes during the trip, so we got some good regenerative braking, but did not see inlet temperature fluctuations during the first part of the trip. There was no massive increase in inlet temperature until we were about 30 miles from the charger. Our peak charging power was 151 kW and some change. You can see the peak dropped quickly, but I don't think I've ever seen it hit 150 kW during DCFC and I do a trip that requires multiple DCFC stops about once a month.

I don't run cabin heat until it's actually cold: below freezing outside and below about 50 degrees inside. There was no cabin heating during this trip until we were back up at 6500 feet elevation and the temperatures dropped down below 32 F.

The trip starting temperature was below freezing (but I started the car about 12 minutes before we left and the battery had time to warm up and the cabin was warm);
the middle of the trip was nice and warm (50s), and the end of the trip got cold again.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

Also, it looks like the car will condition the battery if you're within the proper range of the DCFC and simply ask it to navigate there, even if you're plugged in to your home charger.

This morning, after a cold soak of the battery (HVB and exterior temperature both around freezing), I left the car plugged in to the 120 V Basic AC charger, turned it on, set the DCFC as the built-in navigation destination and told it to take me there. I left the car plugged in and then turned on CarScanner to watch the HVB Inlet Coolant Temperature. This is the result. Note that the temperature reached much higher peak than it did when I had remote started the car the day before (61 F maximum, even after driving a while).

So, it looks like you can use the in-car navigation to precondition the battery before you leave for a long trip or when it's very cold out by setting the immediate destination as the nearest DCFC (if there's one within 30-ish miles), even while the car is plugged in. Basic 120 V AC is not enough to keep the battery from discharging while performing this warming up.

Next test is to see what the departure settings do to the temperature...

 

[ckt]

Also, it looks like the car will condition the battery if you're within the proper range of the DCFC and simply ask it to navigate there, even if you're plugged in to your home charger.

This morning, after a cold soak of the battery (HVB and exterior temperature both around freezing), I left the car plugged in to the 120 V Basic AC charger, turned it on, set the DCFC as the built-in navigation destination and told it to take me there. I left the car plugged in and then turned on CarScanner to watch the HVB Inlet Coolant Temperature. This is the result. Note that the temperature reached much higher peak than it did when I had remote started the car the day before (61 F maximum, even after driving a while).

So, it looks like you can use the in-car navigation to precondition the battery before you leave for a long trip or when it's very cold out by setting the immediate destination as the nearest DCFC (if there's one within 30-ish miles), even while the car is plugged in. Basic 120 V AC is not enough to keep the battery from discharging while performing this warming up.

Next test is to see what the departure settings do to the temperature...

Great tip! I'd do this before cold road trip.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

Great tip! I'd do this before cold road trip.

I think it would work best if you have a Level 2 (240 Volt) charger. I lost about 1-1.5% of displayed battery state of charge while testing this on a 120 Volt charger. However, other interesting things did happen at the same time, so I think my actual range (not GOM range) increased.