We consider an Early Dark Energy (EDE) cosmological model, and perform an analysis which takes into account both background and perturbation effects via the parameters c2eff and c2vis, representing effective sound speed and viscosity, respectively. By using the latest available data we derive constraints on the amount of dark energy at early times and the present value of the equation of state. Our focus is on the effect that early dark energy has on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data, including polarization and lensing, in a generalized parameter space including a varying total neutrino mass, and tensor to scalar ratio, besides the 6 standard parameters of the minimal cosmological model. We find that the inclusion of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) data and CMB lensing significantly improves the constraints on the EDE parameters, while other high redshift data like the Quasar Hubble diagram and the Lyman-α forest BAO have instead a negligible impact. We find ΩeDE < 0.0039 and w0 < −0.95 at the 95 % C.L. for EDE accounting for its clustering through the inclusion of perturbation dynamics. This limit becomes weaker ΩeDE < 0.0034 if perturbations are neglected. The constraints on the EDE parameters are remarkably stable even when Σ mν, and r parameters are varied, with weak degeneracies between ΩeDE and r or Σ mν. In general we expect smaller values for the upper limits on the total amount of EDE with an increasing neutrino mass, while with a decreasing value of the tensor to scalar ratio we expect the 2σ upper limits on EDE to increase. We compare this EDE model with a simple wCDM with zero dark energy at early times and we find ~1–2% different upper limits on total neutrino mass and ~0.1–0.2% difference on the equation of state at the present time. Perturbation parameters are not constrained with current data sets, and tensions between the CMB derived H0 and σ8 values and those measured with local probes are not eased. This work demonstrates the capability of CMB probes to constrain the total amount of EDE well below the percent level.
