danjayh

Please don't spread incorrect information. The heater tops out at around 6KW which is about 19 amps ... MAXIMUM. Even in the coldest weather the heater doesn't draw that much after the cabin is up to temp, which it will be assuming you remote start or use go times. In that case, the heater uses maybe 2.5-3KW, which is ~9 amps. More importantly, charging the battery when it's very cold is that absolute worst thing you can do to it (discharging, on the other hand, is OK), which is why regen is so limited when the battery is cold. It's important to make sure that the battery's thermal management system has the opportunity to get it to a reasonable temperature before you plug in, which means a warm cabin, since it doesn't have a heater. Always make sure your battery is up to a reasonable (40-50 degrees) minimum temperature before charging it. if the battery is down below freezing, DON'T plug it in, just drive on gas until you get a chance to plug it in after it's been warmed up (which the thermal management system will do once the cabin is warm). Some of the recommendations that rbort posts on this board are right on (don't charge your battery when it's over ~100f), and others are totally unnecessary. The biggest thing is to keep the battery in a temperature range that it likes, which is generally anything under 100 degrees, although it's OK to let it creap a bit higher than that during discharge (but not during charge). If you don't feel like looking at in in Forscan, I've found that in general: 1) In hot weather (> 75f or so), you get on charge per day, at night. Any more than that and your battery is going to end up at angry temperature. 2) In cool to cold weather, charge to your heart's content. Once the outside temperature gets below 55 or so, the thermal management system can actually manage to cool the battery adequately during a charge. 3) Don't accelerate to highway speeds in EV mode. It adds a lot of heat to the battery. Don't cruise at highway speeds in EV mode in hot or even warm weather, the thermal management system can't keep up. If the battery started off really cold, you can get away with it, but your range will stink anyway because a cold battery doesn't have a lot of capacity. That's it. I watch my temp in forscan, and I accelerate at more than 2 bars all the time, cruise on the highway in EV mode, etc. The only real 'rule' I follow is to keep the battery below about 104 when discharging, and below 100 when charging (if it's hot out, you have to let it get below 85 or so before charging). In the 3 years and ~30k miles I've owned my car, I've lost 0.2kwh of capacity from what it had when I got it (used). Not too bad if you ask me (it was, however, pretty degraded when I got it ... it's gone from about 3.7kwh before switching to hybrid mode to about 3.5kwh). As far as range loss in the winter, cold li-ion batteries are much less efficient than warm ones. You're just going to get less kwh out of it in the winter unless you store it in a heated garage. Considering that Ford had decent thermal management on the Escape hybrid, which came out before our cars, I think the design of the thermal management system on the Energi cars is grossly negligent. All they had to do to make the car usable as it was intended would have been to run a couple of AC refrigerant lines to the back and put a chiller in the battery's cooling ducts, along with a resistance heater for the battery. Probably less than $500 worth of parts. Absolutely disgusting. The only company to do a worse cooling system is Nissan, but at least they got sued into honoring their battery warranties. I guess Ford learned their lesson, because they're going to a liquid cooled system on the mach E.

:( I bought a 2015 Fusion Energi with 40k on it last week, and it's been pretty disappointing. Until I started driving it I had no idea about the thermal management & related capacity loss issues that Ford's PHEVs suffer ... but needless to say, after seeing that I was only getting between 3.6 and 4.0 kwh out of a full battery (depending on the temperature), I knew something wasn't right. My first charge from empty was only about 3 hours 30 minutes, although it's been running closer to 3:50-4:00 now that the car's been used for a week. After reading through these forums, I realized that Ford doesn't stand behind its products, and that I'm basically up a creek without a paddle on this one. This knocks me down from an all-electric commute to work with partial electric going home to a 3/4 electric 1/4 gas commute to work with all gas going home. Also already the cabin coolant heater has been sporadically faulting out, and neither Ford (since it's slightly out of warranty) nor the dealer who sold it want to step up. So disappointed. Wish I hadn't bought a Ford, and I will never make that mistake again. Now that I've been educated, I will never buy another electric vehicle that doesn't have a liquid cooled battery (and critically, a liquid cooled battery with a heat exchanger to the A/C system). I so wish I'd paid the extra money to get a Volt :(. To add insult to injury, I asked my employer about using the plugs in the parking lot to charge (which would have alleviated the capacity loss problem*), and I got the response "Those are for fleet vehicles only. Until [name of megacorp that I work for] subsidizes fossil fuel vehicles, electric vehicle drivers can buy their own electric." Nobody actually ever bothers to plug in the fleet cars, though, so those plugs just go unused. The real irony here is that at the corporate level, they have had an eco-friendly brand push going for over a decade, they have shifted the entire corporate fleet to Volts, and until recently they were a major manufacturer of EVSEs. * Yes, I realize that twice-daily charging is 'bad', but according to Forscan my battery never gets over 75-80 basically no matter what I do, because it's 32 degrees outside right now ... so for the winter at least, it'd probably be OK.