Right 100% charging complete here at the supercharger. So drum roll, let's go here and see how many miles we got. Hey what's going on everybody? Today we're talking about battery calibration. So in the Tesla community there's a lot of these different kind of rumors that spread about how to do all kinds of different things and one of them is calibrating your battery. So you'll notice sometimes that when you charge to a full charge 100% your battery instead of saying what it's supposed to say so mine is supposed to say 310 miles it'll say maybe 305 or 300. A reason I'm calling this a rumor is there's nothing in the manual at all talking about battery calibration. Usually Tesla tells you how to treat your battery they tell you to plug it in all the time what level to charge to all those kind of things but they don't mention anything about calibrating it. So you know if it was something that needed to be done occasionally I think it would be in the manual. Also when you just charge to say 80% you know it's supposed to say I think it's 247 for me for 80% it'll say 240 and so it's kind of like is my battery degrading or what's going on and then you'll always get this response oh your battery's just not calibrated you need to run it down to below 20% and then back up to whatever. So there's all kinds of things that people say and so what I want to do is I want to test and see if that actually works. Here's a chart of what my battery's been doing lately you can see in the last few days my range has been going down pretty quickly it's always hovered around 306 miles as my 100% all the way up to 309. I've even had it go up to 311 before as 100% so there's two options here either my battery isn't calibrated or my battery is starting to degrade. To see such a quick downslope like that I would not expect degradation. There is one other possibility here as you get software updates Tesla can change the BMS the battery management system and either not tell us or there's some kind of bug. One thing people don't always realize is your battery percentage that is shown on the car it's just an estimate. There's no physical way to know exactly how much the battery is actually charged. There's just a lot of math going on and the computer is doing its best with the voltages and different measurements it can take at the battery to guess what the percentage is. Now it's super accurate it's very accurate but it is true that if the battery only stays between let's say 50% and 80% for a really long time it can kind of get off a little bit and the calibration is wrong. So we're going to test and see if this works. So I've heard all kinds of ways that you can calibrate your battery. The most common you'll hear is you need to run your battery below 20% and then charge at least up to 90% and then it should be calibrated if it doesn't work just do it again. In my case I only use maybe 30% a day so if I want to calibrate it without doing a bunch of extra driving it's going to take me days to calibrate. And then there's more extreme suggestions. Some people say you have to get below 10% and then you have to charge all the way to 100%. I've even heard some people say the best way to calibrate is to go below 10% and then go to a supercharger to go all the way to 100%. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to just test the most extreme versions of this. So I'm going to go below 10% charge and then I'm going to charge all the way to 100% at home and if I don't gain some miles that way if it doesn't seem to get calibrated then I'm going to repeat it as people will suggest I'll go below 10% again and then I will go to a supercharger to get back up to the 100% that way where repeating the calibration process we're doing it at a supercharger all these different things. Or if it stays the same and maybe it's just software updates that are causing you know my fluctuation and range. Okay so you can see here I've routed home by the time I get home I'll have 15% left which is a little too much I want to be below 10% I can make that lower by driving fast driving inefficiently accelerating quickly using century mode stuff like that but I'm going to drive around a bit just to be sure that I'm below 10% by the time I get home I actually could make it all the way back to work with 3%. So I'm going to work on getting that lower so that by the time I get home I'm below 10% and then I will charge to 90% overnight and then when I wake up I'll increase the limit to 100% and let it charge all the way. I need to do some creative driving to get my percentage down it was saying I was going to arrive home with 11% couldn't allow that I think we made it home with 7% so let's see where at 21 miles right now at 7% let's change to percentage see what it says so we have 7% so 7% of 310 is actually right around 21 so according to that the calibration is is looking really good so we have a lot of charging to do I'm going to charge up overnight to 90 or 95% so we can up this let's throw it up here somewhere looks pretty good and in the morning I'll finish the charging all the way to 100% and we'll see if we can hit 310 miles right here on this number all right so here we are charging at home charging complete 100% is 298 miles 298 charging complete it actually when it was done it said 300 miles and it's lost a couple sitting here so that's the home attempt at calibration did not work so we're going to head to a supercharger and try this again all right so it's a couple days a few hundred miles later I mean come on who else is wasting hundreds of miles worth of fuel for you just to test the stuff out so I'm going to the supercharger here about to get on the highway you can say only have 44 miles left we are predicted to arrive at the supercharger with 8% I think 9% so that's perfect I'm going to drive a little fast anything lower is is better as long as we don't get there with 10% we're all good and then we'll plug in I'm going to be there for a while charging up to 100% is going to take a bit and then oh what's going on here geez that truck was a jerk it's always fun waving at the other test the drivers I am really hoping this calibrates my battery if we switch between energy and distance you can see 13% 39 miles that would be 40 so 40% of 310 is sorry 13% of 310 is 40 miles so that's really close so I've seen twice now that on the low end of the battery this is very accurate on the high end is where you're not getting you know the range that you're supposed to be getting so I'm wondering at this time we let it finish getting to 100% and then we'll get an actual real 100% one more example here 10% is 31 obviously 10% of 310 is 31 so again at the lower end of the battery these percentages are exactly correct so this is giving me some optimism here and just a message running your battery really low or charging it really high isn't great for it doing it a few times isn't going to kill it but you want to avoid it if you can I mean if you need the range to just use it don't worry about it but what's more important is not leaving it stored at these ranges check this out I went to plug in and it like felt loose I don't know if you can see but it's looking pretty goofy in there have to report that to Tesla all right we're charging we're immediately at 139 kilowatts hopefully that'll go up a little more it should hit 150 and we're going to also raise our limit here and it says 55 minutes remaining so not too bad let's hope at the end this says 310 or something very close to that all right so we're currently at 46% it's going a really quick but let's do a check-in we'll switch to miles and see what it says okay so now we're at 47% so let's switch to miles so 140 at 47% 141 so we'll say 141 at 47% and that's actually supposed to be 146 so now we're falling behind now that we're higher up in the battery range so we're about to hit 50% it should be there it is 155 miles and we're only at 148 so we are lagging behind and this is where you may need that additional time at the 100% at the top end for the car to figure out oh you know I thought I only have this many miles but really I'm adding some more I have some more room and we have more miles than I thought so 51 is 151 so yeah we're just a little bit behind here all right switching back to the phone GoPro is a little wide for me so you can see we're at 100% we are still charging very slowly if we switch it over to distance we're now at 300 miles so we've been at 100% but we've gained a few miles so it's getting close but I don't know I hope that it would hurry up so I can leave while we're waiting for these last few kilowatt hours to squeeze into the battery let me tell you about my sponsor the Model 3 part shop they have some really cool stuff on their website the link is below in the description and you can use the code dirty tesla to get 15% off anything sight wide okay charging is finally complete that took forever you can see my screen turned black because like the sunset but anyway right 100% charging complete here at the supercharger just to prove to you I am here so drum roll let's go here and see how many miles we got 300 so that's it so in my case calibration didn't do anything it didn't change my maximum range or anything like that I went below 10% up to 100% at the supercharger at home and it did nothing so is this actually real battery degradation have I lost 10 miles of range I'm not convinced of that you can also see while I was sitting here I got a software update so I have to go home connect to Wi-Fi and download that and I'm gonna try this again and I will update you in the comments and see if I can get my range back through that software update