Fan Higher After Startup

Admittedly, I haven't searched the manual on this topic yet, but I was wondering whether we all see this, or if I'm just somehow imagining it:

When I drive home from work, with the climate controls not on "Auto," the fan typically ends up at a 30% or so fan speed. It seems to me that, when I later hop into the car for evening errands, upon firing it up again, the fan spins up a lot higher than the 30%ish I left it on. That, while it still reports to be in manual mode.

Has anybody else seen this, or am I just imagining it?


iPhone ? Pro

 

Not that I know of, nor the reverse, which is kinda-sorta what I seem to be seeing. It comes back up in manual mode where I left it, but at a higher fan speed.


iPhone ? Pro

 

OK, I think I'm starting to understand what exactly I'm seeing here:

Even when the air conditioner is not in "Auto" mode, I find that it's not a completely 100% "anything goes" manual mode. In particular, what I seem to be seeing is that if the temperature difference, inside versus outside, is fairly small, the fan speed seems to have a limit. It won't blow at full power unless there is a substantial inside-to-outside temperature difference.

It occurred to me that this might be part of what makes ECO-mode more ECO, but turning off ECO mode doesn't seem to affect it. Come to think of it, I haven't tried turning off the S-Flow (or whatever it's called) mode to see if that affects it.

 

Oh, actually I didn't say that quite correctly. It's the difference between the thermostat SET temperature and ... I'm not sure whether it's the inside or outside temperature. I would guess more likely the inside temperature.

Just now, for example, we hopped into the car charging in a parking garage. I had the AC on and set for 80F, and the outside temperature read 85, initially. I don't know what the actual inside temperature was (no readout for that), but it was likely around 82 or so. I turned the fan up to ~70% on the "dial," and it spun up a bit, but not a whole lot. As I drove out of the parking garage, the outdoor temperature readout dropped fairly quickly to 79. At that point, I realized that the AC was just a semi-pointless power drain, so I turned the AC off, and dropped the set-point temperature to "LO." As I lowered the set-point temperature, the fan spun up to a fairly high speed.


iPad ? Pro