Enabling sleep settings to limit vampire loss.

The following article does not apply to Telemetry users.  Tesla Telemetry only sends data to TeslaFi when the vehicle is awake and all sleeping is handled by the vehicle.

In order to obtain data from your vehicle TeslaFi polls the vehicle every minute while idling to look for state changes to determine when a drive or charge has started.  When polled for data the vehicle remains active and prevents it from sleeping causing "Vampire Battery Loss" where the battery percentage will drop and range will drop while idling.

In order to work around this TeslaFi has sleep modes to try to allow the vehicle to sleep by pausing the data polling for a specified amount of time to allow the vehicle to sleep.  

There are two different data calls that TeslaFi uses from the Tesla API to determine the vehicles state. 

1.  Vehicle 

 Only a few data points are returned from this call.  The most useful point is the online state of the vehicle such as online/offline/asleep/waking/unknown.  The important part of this call is that it can be called without affecting the vehicle’s state.  This means it can be called and it won't prevent the vehicle from sleeping and it won't wake the vehicle if it's asleep.

2.  Data

    This call returns all the useful data that TeslaFi uses to display your information.  Things like odometer, battery charge, range, speed, shift state and many many more are provided from this call. The important part to remember from this call is that it will keep your vehicle from sleeping and will wake your vehicle if it's sleeping when called.

So if we know the vehicle won't sleep by calling the data call we can pause using the data call for a certain amount of time and try to put the vehicle to sleep.  The only issue is that we don't have any way of knowing when the vehicle is ready to go sleep.  The onboard computers may be doing some work, a software update may be downloading, etc.....only Tesla knows.  

• Prior to software version 8.1 Tesla provided a battery_current return which displayed the current draw on the battery with an accuracy of 0.1 amps.  It was very useful in determining when the vehicle was ready to go to sleep by monitoring this field for 0.0 and then stopping the polling of the data call and allowing the vehicle to sleep.
• After software version 8.1 Tesla removed this battery_current field which prevented TeslaFi from determining when the vehicle was ready to sleep and stop polling.  Currently the next best data point to monitor for inactivity is the temperature readings inside and outside the vehicle as well as the shift state.  When the outside temperature is no longer reported by the API it usually means that the vehicle is inactive and ready for sleep, mostly for the the Model S/X with a MCU 1 unit (Pre April 2018).  The temperature reading do not seem to stop reporting on the Model 3 and  Model S/X MCU 2 (Post April 2018).  For these vehicle the shift state reading may be a good indicator that the car is ready to sleep when it is no longer reported.  Unfortunately all of the indicators can change with different software releases on the vehicles and may need to be revisited if they no longer work.
• Do not be surprised if there are sleep attempts that do not actually put the vehicle to sleep.  Since there is no direct data provided from the Tesla API as to when it is ready to sleep some of the sleep attempts may not work.  This could be from very cold or very hot days where the system is monitoring the battery temperature, a software update is downloading or something else is going on behind the scenes preventing it from sleeping.
• If your vehicle goes a few days with many sleep attempts but not actually sleeping be sure to ready this article - http://support.teslafi.com/topics/161-my-car-is-not-sleeping/

There are three sleep modes available in TeslaFi.  They can be found in settings->sleep modes.

TeslaFi Sleep Mode:

TeslaFi sleep mode works by attempting to pause the polling of the Data call for 15 minutes or user configured amount of time.  During this 15 minutes only the vehicle call is made to see if the vehicle returns that it is asleep.  You can set up email and/or text alerts to be notified when the vehicle is attempting to sleep and if it went to sleep or not.  This can be useful since you can re-enable polling if needed since TeslaFi will not notice a starting drive or charge during these 15 minutes.  Once the vehicle is asleep TeslaFi will continue to poll the vehicle for it's online state every minute to watch when it wakes up.

Model S&X Pre April 2018 (Old MCU):

In order for TeslaFi Sleep Mode to work it needs to know when the vehicle is asleep.  Currently the only way for the vehicle to know if the vehicle is asleep is by making sure the following feature are set in the vehicle-

1. 'Energy Savings' is enabled on your vehicle 2. 'Always Connected' is OFF on your vehicle 3. Cabin overheat disabled.

Also be sure that you are not using any other apps or websites that may be polling the vehicle for data and keeping it awake.  You can reset your Tesla.com password to remove any other apps access to your vehicle.

Model S&X Post April 2018 (New MCU) And Model 3:

In order for TeslaFi Sleep Mode to work it needs to know when the vehicle is asleep.  Currently the only way for the vehicle to know if the vehicle is asleep is by making sure the following feature are set in the vehicle-

1.  Cabin overheat disabled (This may not need to be disabled in colder weather).

Also be sure that you are not using any other apps or websites that may be polling the vehicle for data and keeping it awake.  You can reset your Tesla.com password to remove any other apps that access to your vehicle.

If you can make sure all of the criteria above is met then most likely TeslaFi Sleep Mode is all you need to limit vampire loss in your vehicle.

Schedule Sleep Mode:

TeslaFi Sleep Mode by default waits for 30 minutes after a drive to try to put the vehicle to sleep.  This is user configurable but is a good idea to prevent the vehicle from trying to sleep a few minutes after parking at the grocery store.

Scheduled Sleep Mode works by bypassing this idle time to wait before trying to sleep.  During the time window you set TeslaFi will constantly try to allow the vehicle the sleep.  If the vehicle doesn't go to sleep on an attempt it will immediately try again.

Deep Sleep Mode:

Some users do not want to turn Energy Savings on or Always Connected Off in their vehicle but want to limit vampire loss at night.  During the hours set for Deep Sleep Mode TeslaFi will not poll any data during the hours set.  This sleep mode should only be set when you are not going to be using the vehicle since TeslaFi will miss large points of data during these hours.