R1T phantom drain and possible work around

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Do you mean Shipping Mode?

I think Service Mode was just referenced in the .46 release notes and is for service technicians. Some used to able to access it with the old RIDE code.

Under Vehicle --> Service. Try one. Or the other. Heck, try both. ?

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[WSea]

exper no drain with prox off at home. Your truck isn’t sleeping

 

[HaveBlue]

The system likely still had power when you disconnected the battery ground because the secondary capacitor was still powering things. The surest bet to stopping the HV contactors and DC to DC box, not to mention vampire drain is cutting the 12v battery. As long as the pack doesn't get too hot or cold, this should be perfectly fine. As small as the battery is, I don't think it can deliver much current through those wires.

At some point I will attack it from the individual vehicle fused circuits. It's going to be time consuming mapping them all while the car is "locked". Some circuits will be cold, some hot, some may only be hot in accessory mode and maybe some more while driving. The hot ones will need to be measured for draw. That might be intermittent and vary.

There are significant dangers as many of them will be canbus modules. They may be sensitive to power spikes if not well buffered. There could be a hazard in disabling a rogue module permanently that is drawing power while parked. If the car goes to do a firmware update while parked, that module won't update with the rest since only powering the module while moving isn't when updates happen.

There are a lot of considerations but the first goal would be to see if the drain is primarily in one particular set of circuits or distributed across the fuse panels. We have no way to diagnostically access this data in any logs. Only Rivian has info and they aren't doing to well organizing their software stack to capture and analyze it. It's immensely complex from a software point of view where modules are interdependent. Something as simple as a frunk switch can keep the whole car awake and decimate the HV battery. As we saw there was a laundry list of items: seat belts, door sensors, sensor heaters, apps like Spotify, firmware updates, battery maintenance, gear guard, cabin cooling/heating, cell/wifi requests or weak service, misbehaving key fobs and BT signals not to mention any misbehaving body control computers that just want to do their own thing.

 

[LL75]

exper no drain with prox off at home. Your truck isn’t sleeping

^^^ this. My R1s used to drain about 2% a day until 3 or4 updates ago. I can't figure out why nor the service center. However, after the software updated, I see the vehicle go to sleep mode whenever I look at the app. There are times it went to "deep" sleep mode where it doesn't wake up even when I'm standing next to it.

 

[BCondrey]

Since you tried pretty much everything, I'm sure you had looked into this. The biggest drain I have experienced was connected the passenger side seatbelt without a person in the seat overnight. This kept the car awake and drained pretty fast overnight. Maybe there is some kind of sensor problem that keeping the car awake.

This has caught me several times.

A suggestion... When you talk to the service techs, have them review the logs or whatever from the vehicle. Thats how they discovered the seat belt issue with my truck. They can tell where the loss is coming from.

 

[Jiji]

How is everyone able to track their phanton drain? The Rivian app doesn't share much info that would show that. If I leave the car plugged in, where would I see how much energy was "lost," outside of the stuff used to charge to the set limit?

Here is what I am doing, there is no great solution since the precise data is not available so you compute some 'ballpark' estimates and live with them.

These results are taken from a personal iPhone app I use to log trips and charges and are records selected with there being a minimum of 6 hours idle time between events. As I am reworking the graphing I made a simple list, the first item in a pair is the end of an event and the second is the start of the next event.

Drilling down into the last pair of events, my Rivian sat from 3:48PM yesterday until 1:47PM today when I was ordered to replenish the Christmas cookie larder, let's call this 22 hours idle. The SoC declined from 66.2% to 63.7% for a loss of 2.5% SoC. I did turn on the climate and seat/steering wheel heaters since there were a couple inches of snow to clear off so not all the loss is solely due to phantom drain. On my Large pack battery use `1.3kWh/degree of SoC so this represents about 3.25 kWh of consumption.

This data does clearly demonstrate the limits of using the SoC as a proxy for energy as overnight on Sunday the reported SoC had increased when I plugged in Sunday AM to charge. While the vast majority of idle periods record a loss of SoC this is not uncommon and is probably because the battery management software did some cell balancing or other work and the SoC was recalculated.

I would be very upset if the daily loss were in the 5-10kWh range as the OP observed. I have a Mustang Mach-E and the SoC never moves after a long sit and I get more accurate energy data since I can pull energy data from the OBDII connector with a scan tool. I just hope it is a lack of maturity in the Rivian software so it can be improved rather than being stuck with an inefficient hardware design.

 

[KY Serenity]

Other EVs also have reported high phantom drain. In most cases, it is due to the car waking up through the night. In some cases, this is resolved by placing your fobs in a Faraday bag and insuring the phone key is not actively pinging the car.

 

[TeslaCoil]

Hey, O.P. here. Just wanted to make a quick update:
I tracked the battery consumption over the the last 72 hours where the truck has not moved by using the trip odometer and also watching the last session stats from the charge menu.
It has been 10kWH per 24 hour period that the truck consumes according to the odometer and the charge menu. I checked the stats 4 different times and it is very consistent about 500wH per hour. This is confirming what my charging stats were recording and also is in line with what I estimated based on reading the battery pack percentages earlier. Charge menu claims 95 % of that is going into the battery pack. I have read the suggestions from around the site about trying to get the truck to sleep, check original post, and it just doesn't make a difference in my case.
I have decided to hold off on installing the master switch until after I bring it in next week. I'm hoping this time they don't tell me that this is "normal". Will recommend they check the logs, perhaps a faulty sensor or module somewhere, however I would think camp mode would override this truck not being able to sleep.
Should know in a few weeks.

 

[Tim-in-CA]

Hey, O.P. here. Just wanted to make a quick update:
I tracked the battery consumption over the the last 72 hours where the truck has not moved by using the trip odometer and also watching the last session stats from the charge menu.
It has been 10kWH per 24 hour period that the truck consumes according to the odometer and the charge menu. I checked the stats 4 different times and it is very consistent about 500wH per hour. This is confirming what my charging stats were recording and also is in line with what I estimated based on reading the battery pack percentages earlier. Charge menu claims 95 % of that is going into the battery pack. I have read the suggestions from around the site about trying to get the truck to sleep, check original post, and it just doesn't make a difference in my case.
I have decided to hold off on installing the master switch until after I bring it in next week. I'm hoping this time they don't tell me that this is "normal". Will recommend they check the logs, perhaps a faulty sensor or module somewhere, however I would think camp mode would override this truck not being able to sleep.
Should know in a few weeks.

Really push back on that 10kWH / 24 hr loss is normal. You can calculate the number of gallons that would be lost on an ICE car - go in prepared with that number. For my 2.5kWH/day and using my electricity and gas price (So Cal), that was equivalent to an ICE vehicle leaking 6.5 gallons of fuel a month! No consumer would stand for that, we shouldn't either. My Lucid (after multiple updates) now loses practically nothing while sitting idle in the garage.

 

[TeslaCoil]

Took some pictures with a thermal camera, I made sure all Bluetooth was disconnected and key fob disabled 24 hrs. before these photos. Ambient temp in garage is about 50 degrees F.
Removed plastic cover in frunk for some of the photos. It seems that the things making heat are the cameras, u.s. sensors, and what look like coolant lines running into the fire wall. Also the entire dash is warmer than my work car by about 7 degrees. Most other areas I could see were ambient temperature.
Driver side Cowling

Driver side camera

other car in garage interior

pass side cowling

interior

windshield

pass side cowling

 

[HaveBlue]

Basically what you are saying is that all the cameras are running even with gear guard off? Try cycling all the settings for that feature. Maybe a software bug or maybe big brother just watching all the time.

My car definitely just decides to wake itself up for no reason. Super annoying.

 

[TeslaCoil]

Don't have the truck back yet, but they are reporting they fixed the issue. Also got an R1T as a loaner and have 0 phantom drain, so glad this is not a issue I'll have to live with.

 

[TeslaCoil]

Though I'd give an update. I've had my truck back for several weeks now, the phantom drain is much better than before the service.
They did replace a faulty rear module. I've calculated that the car uses about 100 watts continuous, or about 2.4 kWH per day.
This is with gear guard off, temperatures have been mild this winter mostly in the 30's.
I have played with turning camp mode on, unfortunately it still draws 100 watts continuous with camp mode on.
For the most part the truck seems to sleep, and doesn't regularly connect to my phone as key while I'm at home, although it probably does a little, for this reason, I try to stay in the habit of turning the climate control off before leaving the vehicle.
I would not recommend disconnecting the batteries in an attempt to save phantom drain, This may have caused several calibration issues with windows and drive motors, that they reset while it was in for service.

 

[NY_Rob]

Though I'd give an update. I've had my truck back for several weeks now, the phantom drain is much better than before the service.
They did replace a faulty rear module. I've calculated that the car uses about 100 watts continuous, or about 2.4 kWH per day.

2.4kWh/day still is a bit high compared to quite a few of us seeing 1.2kWh/day loss.

I was considering using a magnetic latching relay to break the two (Jan 2023 VIN) negative battery leads, but I'm concerned about losing calibration data on the window and seat encoders.

If all the fuses were the same physical form factor it wouldn't be difficult to fabricate an adapter and run each fused circuit through a VOM in Ammeter mode to see what's drawing current and how much when the vehicle is supposedly sleeping.

 

[TeslaCoil]

Finally posting an update to the thermal pictures I had before, but there is basically no heat coming from under thew cowling or anywhere else on the vehicle.

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