I'm an original owner of a 2014 Nissan Leaf S. After about 4 years of ownership, I feel I've come intimately intune with how the range of my car and achieving maximum range when needed. I've never once become stranded. It has been a fantastic car for me.
However, because I only own the base model, I do not have the onscreen dashboard readouts for how much energy (kW) the climate control is using. So I was hoping some people here would be able to lay out some general guides as to how much kW drain is put on the battery under varying use cases with the climate control system (@ varying outside temps and temperature settings).
A few questions I have:
1) Does the fan speed have any measurable extra drain?
2) A sub-freezing temperatures, how much extra drain is there?
3) What's the difference between a temperature setting of say 60 versus 70?
4) If reset, does the miles per kWh estimate on the dashboard account for the current drain of the climate control system?
According to the Nissan Leaf range chart I've long had, it says to subtract 1 fuel bar for every hour of usage @ 1.5kW of heat/cool climate control. The problem is that I don't know whether or not my climate control usage is running at 1.5kW. If it is a lot more than that, then I could be underestimating my climate control drain by a lot.
Often, what happens during my actual real life scenarios is during drives where I feel I might be really close to making it to my destination with a charge left, I end up running without heat for a little while only to find out that when I reach my destination I could've run with heat the entire time and still been safe. I'm often overly conservative in my estimate just to make sure I reach my destination. I feel if I had a better understanding of how much drain the climate control system is putting on my battery, then I'd be much more comfortable using it because I can already estimate very well how far I'll be able to go based on my miles per kWh efficiency.
However, because I only own the base model, I do not have the onscreen dashboard readouts for how much energy (kW) the climate control is using. So I was hoping some people here would be able to lay out some general guides as to how much kW drain is put on the battery under varying use cases with the climate control system (@ varying outside temps and temperature settings).
A few questions I have:
1) Does the fan speed have any measurable extra drain?
2) A sub-freezing temperatures, how much extra drain is there?
3) What's the difference between a temperature setting of say 60 versus 70?
4) If reset, does the miles per kWh estimate on the dashboard account for the current drain of the climate control system?
According to the Nissan Leaf range chart I've long had, it says to subtract 1 fuel bar for every hour of usage @ 1.5kW of heat/cool climate control. The problem is that I don't know whether or not my climate control usage is running at 1.5kW. If it is a lot more than that, then I could be underestimating my climate control drain by a lot.
Often, what happens during my actual real life scenarios is during drives where I feel I might be really close to making it to my destination with a charge left, I end up running without heat for a little while only to find out that when I reach my destination I could've run with heat the entire time and still been safe. I'm often overly conservative in my estimate just to make sure I reach my destination. I feel if I had a better understanding of how much drain the climate control system is putting on my battery, then I'd be much more comfortable using it because I can already estimate very well how far I'll be able to go based on my miles per kWh efficiency.