The benefit of preconditioning is to extend range during the first leg of your trip in winter, IF YOU NEED RANGE. It will heat the battery to 59 degrees. Your battery is 45 degrees. Therefore, unless you need a bit more range, there is no reason for you to set a departure time, you can simply do a remote start.
Also curious about this, as I'm still on the Ford mobile charger, so I only see actual charging events in the FordPass Charge Log, which I use to loosely calculate energy cost. But if preconditioning takes 30 minutes (as an example), I don't get a record of it and don't see any energy consumption figures, so I have no idea what it "sort of" costs me.
I have a home energy monitor, and one of the probes is on the 240v circuit that my Juicebox 40 amp is on. When I precondition on a cold day, my energy monitor shows that the Juicebox/MME is using the full 40 amps to precondition, although I think it goes down as the battery gets up to temp and it starts to heat the cabin.
Yes, it consumes more power than charging. The only reason to set a departure time and precondition is to improve your range. The reason you're not noticing a big difference is the 45 degree storage. It's not like the efficiency (miles per kilowatt) is exact, to multiple decimal places either.
Preconditioning time depends on temperature. Can take 80 minutes and use 4 or so kilowatt hours. Again - unless you need the range, just do a remote start 10 minutes before leaving.
I had my EVSE set at 28A this morning, and had a scheduled departure time. While charging, the app reported 6.8kw, which is slightly higher than its usual 6.7kw when not doing the conditioning--but then again, it was an unusually cool morning here in South Florida, so not sure what it would have reported without the preconditioning.
Not really when it's that warm, unless you need to squeeze every little bit of range out for a long drive. Preconditioning is meant more for temps below freezing or above 90F.
That is pretty funny. I mentioned the "unusually cool" part to put the 6.7 vs 6.8 kw into context--unusually cool for South Florida, even in January. Meaning, the 6.8 reading may not be apples-to-apples with the my day-to-day observation; therefore, preconditioning may not have actually increased the rate of power draw, though it no doubt increased the total power drawn.
