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What is your miles/kWh (total average electricity consumption) on the "Drive Monitor 2"

Discussion in 'Prime Fuel Economy & EV Range' started by Salamander_King, Jun 4, 2019.

  1. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Absolutely!! I don't know why that MPG indicator bugs me so much. I guess it's the engineer in me that can't fathom the purpose of that limit since it's completely arbitrary and accomplishes nothing. But it's such a great car in so many other ways and maybe that's part of the increased aggravation from that display.

    BTW, I got gas last week since it's on sale. I think I could have gone several hundred miles farther. This morning, with almost 200 miles on this tank, I switched to metric and it was showing 0.1 L/100 km. I'm sure it's well under that, but it doesn't have anything between 0.0 and 0.1. (edit to add conversion: 2,352.15 mpg) My HV DTE has only gone from 550 miles to 544 so far. Yesterday I drove over 60 miles without running the ICE. Today is likely to be closer to 70 miles w/o gas. :D
     
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  2. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    If I am to just leave the climate control on AUTO all the time as I did with my earlier 2017 PRIME Premium on that dysfunctional touch screen, then those buttons and toggle switches are not needed. But we are getting into the thawing season now, the temperature in the morning is still 10s and 20s F requiring heating. But by the afternoon commute time, temp can clime up to 40s F, and now with time change and longer day light hitting on the dark colored car, cabin temp can get uncomfortably warm requiring changing the temp, fan speed, and direction of air flow setting frequently without using AUTO A/C. With those fine manual tuning of the climate control, I have managed to keep the A/C load ratio in a single digit most of this winter.
     
  3. Bill Norton

    Bill Norton Senior Member

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    Exactly, and you don't have to spend a lot of time looking for these REAL Controls!

    Tell that to the Tesla Model 3 crowd with their ~$59 touch screen that controls almost everything.
    Even if it is "Revolutionary, Disruptive, etc. etc."
    I think of it as a 'Cheap UI'...o_O
     
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  4. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    Yeah, I think realistic value is somewhere around 4~5miles/kWh. My final average on 2017 PRIME was 5.2miles/kWh, but that's after 10 months of very intensive "manipulation". The real average if I just drove EV mode every day without any EV/HV switching is more like 4.5miles/kWh.
     
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  5. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    Didn't realise you changed cars! Good deal on the 2020s?

    @Raytheeagle Same! Picked up my 2010 in Aug 2009 and took it on a road trip in Sept 2009 haha. Loved all the new tech on the car at the time.
     
  6. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    Yap, with discount, rebates, incentives and trade-in. I was able to switch the car for ~$1000 out of my pocket. But saving on new set of all season tires and 5 free maintenance, I am probably ahead of the game.

    The real motivation was not to save money but just to get rid of the 11.6 screen and SofTex seats. That changes are priceless.;)
     
  7. Paul.Ivancie

    Paul.Ivancie Member

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    My two-cents worth:

    I have recently installed a ChargePoint® (CP) level 2 charger in my garage, which I activated on Sunday, March 1st, replacing my no-name 230V unit. For the past almost 3 years now, I have been frustrated because I could only guess-timate my charging costs. There are very few publicly available chargers that I have been able to easily access in and around my local area (and only one CP), so I have casually approximated a guess at about a dollar-a-day for charging my [Blue-Magnetism] beauty.

    Now, I will get a very accurate report from the [CP] company on a monthly basis, including kWh used, and cost, based on my local electricity supplier's day and night rates. There is one free (non-CP) charger that I occasionally make use of when I have errands or appointments in our nearby “big city” (Binghamton, NY), which generally lie just beyond my round-trip EV range. I will have to manually jot down the kWh used from now on when I use this device.

    I have yet to figure out how to mesh this data into my master transportation economy spreadsheet, but it will be enlightening, I believe, when I do. I have attempted to include all transportation costs into said spreadsheet, but have been frustrated as to how I can incorporate electric costs. Now, that will be easily accomplished, with a fair degree of accuracy. When I accumulate sufficient data, I will backfill the spreadsheet with averages that I can derive from the newer data points.

    A report will eventually be forthcoming.

    BTW, I am creeping up on 60K miles, as well as my third anniversary owning this car. My son took possession of my 2006 Prius when I bought the Prime. It currently has clocked over 370K miles.

    For the first year and a third, I was driving the Prime on an equal mixture of local and long distance (>1K) trips. My MPG graphs needed only to be re-scaled (from the 2006 machine) to accommodate the newer (higher) numbers. But when I completed a 350-mile household move, those long trips disappeared, and I found that I had to re-scale the amplitude axis on the MPG chart to make it logarithmic, since some of my calculations moved into the stratospheric realm of thousands of miles per gallon. I have recently adopted a monthly re-fueling schedule (last day of a given month), and the typical fillup is usually less than a gallon of [ethanol-free] gasoline for 1200 miles.

    My current bottom line ignores electricity costs and is:

    Miles driven: 56,736
    Gallons purchased: 419 Fuel Cost (Gasoline) = $1,397.00
    Miles-per-gallon: 136 Fuel Cost per mile driven = $ 0.0247

    Lacking more specific data (until now), I have assumed added electricity costs at $1 per day. This adds another 1.77 cents to the fuel cost per mile driven, yielding a total of 4.24 cents/mile.
    The spreadsheet reveals my average cost of fuel to be $3.33 per gallon. Dividing this by the above (gas+electric) fuel cost per mile yields about 78.5 MPGe.
     
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  8. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    Hummm, for almost 3 years now, I have kept meticulous record of precise kWh, down to 0.01kWh, used from the grid and the charging cost associated with my PRIMEs (2017 and now 2020). And all it cost me was a $15 Kill-a-watt meter.

    upload_2020-3-11_13-57-11.png
     
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  9. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    @Paul.Ivancie, I have a cheap Duosaida L2 charger and I installed a meter on the circuit powering the 240V outlet I plug into. Then it's a simple matter of multiplying my electric rate by the number of kWh in each tank. I add that to the gas cost for that tank and then calculate my total cost per mile. See post #7 on this thread if you want to use it to make your own. PHEV calculator | PriusChat
     
  10. Raytheeagle

    Raytheeagle Senior Member

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    Interesting irony on gen3 purchase timing:).

    It was an exciting timing in 2009 when the gen3 was rolling out;).

    Now getting 140 mpg is exciting(y).
     
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  11. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    336mpg here but who's counting :whistle:
     
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  12. Bill Norton

    Bill Norton Senior Member

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    Guys,
    Imaginary numbers.

    You're on only counting one energy source, while running on another.
    You're not counting the electron use.

    NO FAIR :unsure:
     
    #212 Bill Norton, Mar 12, 2020
    Last edited: Mar 12, 2020
  13. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    That's a valid point.

    So, to be fair ---
    Counting electron use:
    3.26 cents per mile overall for almost 20k miles in one year.
    Without the 6k mile road trip: estimated 2.4 cents/mile.

    My PiP was 3.47 cents/mile with a smaller proportion of road trip miles.

    My wife's 2006 Prius (49 mpg) over the same distance and gas prices would have been 5.6 cent/mile.

    A typical 28 mpg car would have been 9.8 cents/mile.

    Compared to that typical 28 mpg car, I've saved $1,124 in fuel costs in one year.
     
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  14. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    That's true. Too bad Toyota hasn't given us a way to easily separate the two. I can't even see my trip consumption on electricity because it only gives it in L/100km so it's always at 0.0L/100km.
     
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  15. Paul.Ivancie

    Paul.Ivancie Member

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    Read my post above (#207).
    "
    Miles driven: 56,736
    Gallons purchased: 419 Fuel Cost (Gasoline) = $1,397.00
    Miles-per-gallon: 136 Fuel Cost per mile driven = $ 0.0247

    Lacking more specific data (until now), I have assumed added electricity costs at $1 per day. This adds another 1.77 cents to the fuel cost per mile driven, yielding a total of 4.24 cents/mile.
    So far, this month, CP reports that I have used 96 kWh this month (12 days in). My cost is $9 so far, which averages $0.75 per day, or about 2.05 cents per mile. (I drove about 438 miles so far.) So, using this small verified sample of electric usage data, my total fuel consumption is about 4.52 cents per mile.
     
  16. benagi

    benagi Active Member

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    I wish I had the 999 on mine. In the 2 1/2 years I’ve owned it, I’ve only burned 13.5 gallons. I’m averaging just over 1000 miles a gallon. Plus I have solar, so I’m not paying anything for EV usage at this point.
     
    #216 benagi, Mar 13, 2020
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2020
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  17. Bill Norton

    Bill Norton Senior Member

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    MATH !
    Accurate Data Presentation!
    Good Job!!:D
     
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  18. Paul.Ivancie

    Paul.Ivancie Member

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    I have to add this incident to the accumulation of Driver experience:

    Last summer, we visited friends in CT for a few days, during a pretty hot spell. My car, which had never been parked outside for any long stretch of time (always garaged) suffered a failure of the right-hand dashboard display, I suspect from the heat. The afternoon sun beamed right into the car interior. One morning, the display was washed out, not unusable, but very annoying. Toyota would not replace just that display, but the whole instrument cluster. I had to estimate what my mileage would be when they actually got around to doing the switcheroo, and I came within 30 miles of being correct, because the new odometer had to be preset to this value at the factory.

    Unfortunately, I did not realize that this meant all of the accumulated MPG for 48,000 miles was reset, along with my trip odometers and ECO mi/kWh history. Not anticipating this, I did not write down what was on them at the replacement event. And, since I was counting on them to keep on accumulating, I didn't even mentally track them as assiduously as I do now. My foggy memory of those two stats is: The Drive Monitor 2 MPG agreed pretty closely with my spreadsheet (130) and I believe my mi/kWh was between 4.5 and 5.

    So, as if starting from scratch, I started observing those statistics more closely.

    This all happened while the weather was extremely conducive to high-efficiency driving, and my new statistics were accumulating: (ignoring the gasoline MPG, since almost all of my driving was EV) my average Miles per Kilowatt-Hour were creeping up from 5 to almost 6, and certain to pass that milestone shortly. And this wasn't over-optimism on the part of the vehicle's internal calculator; I was actually achieving almost 40 miles per charge.

    After two-thousand miles, however, I was due for a scheduled (50,000 mile) checkup, and I had a slow leak in my passenger side front tire which needed attention.

    Well, the slow leak was from a road hazard which rendered the tire unusable, so I bit the bullet and sprung the wallet open for a full set of new tires. I should have suspected something was not quite kosher, when the service person did not know what was meant by “low rolling resistance.”

    The tires are “Yokohama AVID ascend”, and my per-drive EV mileage has dropped from pushing 6 to bouncing up from 4 mi/kWh. My current average is just 4.6 after driving about an additional 7,000 miles. The numbers seemed to have dropped precipitously after the tire change. I had expected a drop due to the added new tire “tread squirm” and slightly larger tire diameter, but not this magnitude. And the onset of winter did not help either. But I had been through two winters already, and this (2019) winter was somewhat milder, in my subjective opinion. MPG and MPKWH did not suffer as precipitously during those previous winters.

    Any thoughts?
     
    #218 Paul.Ivancie, Mar 29, 2020
    Last edited: Mar 29, 2020
  19. Paul.Ivancie

    Paul.Ivancie Member

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    Perhaps I should have posted to this thread instead of
    "We like sheep... on the ECO Dashboard" post #858.
    I experienced loss of my "Drive Monitor 2" data.
     
  20. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    I read your comment below.
    As you mentioned, different tires always affect fuel efficiency. New tires usually negatively affect it. That being said, Yokohama Avid Ascend is LLR tire. Blue Earth is their trademark special compound used for I think all of AVID lines of tires. There are several models of AVID Ascend tires, GT and LX are two new lines, but older original AVID Ascend is still available in some stores. I had them on my old Civic Hybrid, and they were good tires in terms of gas mileage. I have not read any negative comments here on AVID Ascend tires affecting milage negatively.

    As far as drop in the miles/kWh value is concerned, it is hard to pinpoint a single factor. New tires definitely have some effect but I believe winter months driving only on much shorter distance on the reset DM2 is the reason for the precipitous drop. My winter month miles/kWh has been average 3-4miles/kWh vs summertime average 5-6miles/kWh. I am sure your average will go up from the current value as the weather gets warmer.
     
    #220 Salamander_King, Mar 29, 2020
    Last edited: Mar 29, 2020
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