What do you think about DC charging stations?

PV1 said:

Don said:

Me? I'd be tickled just to see an L2 public charger installed somewhere . . . . just ONE! . . . . anywhere! :lol:

Don

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Ever go by Estabrook Motor Company or Pat Peck Nissan? They each have one listed on Plugshare.

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I have a very strong suspicion that in order to make it look like there are charging opportunities in every community in every state, Plugshare just lists every Nissan dealership there is as a place where everyone/anyone can charge. What makes me think this? When I signed on with them more than a year ago, I called both Estabrook and Pat Peck to see if I could charge there. This began an interesting tete a tete which took several days to resolve, as on the original calls, not a single person at either dealership knew what Plugshare was, how they got listed there or what it meant. Eventually, the general managers were consulted, which led to the dealership owners being queried for a ruling and the answer was . . . . if you drive a Leaf, you can recharge there, but I could not

My opinion of Plugshare went down several points as a result - I don't know how useful their service actually is . . . . I'd surely hate to count on it in an emergency. I think you'd be better off carrying your own EVSE and a long extension cord around with you

To my knowledge, the only 'public' charge point between Mobile Alabama and New Orleans (a distance of some 150 miles) is . . . . my house

Don

That's the thing with Plugshare, anybody can list a site without the owner's permission. User comments then determine a reputation for the site. Even local Nissan dealers up here in EVtopia aren't managing their EVSE listings, but I've plugged in at six Nissan dealerships and only had one unpleasant experience, which was followed up with a personal apology from the owner!

I did my first quick charge today. There is a quick charger about 40 km from my home. I drove down and found it and then burned the battery down to 30 % driving around the area before charging.

What an experience.... Charged 30 to 80.5 % in 15 minutes.

The A/C turned on for about 5 minutes.

Battery temp ave climbed 6 deg C during the charge. All the cells were below 30 deg c at the end of the charge. Outside temp was 10 deg c

I did a video of the charge not the best video but you can see the information on canion. It's in two parts.

Can't wait till these things are everywhere....

http://youtu.be/HdUQCIt0ILU

Don.....

Sheetz gas stations are installing quick chargers across Pennsylvania. I can now make it to Dubois, PA with the quick charger and two level 2 units in Greensburg and Indiana. My circle just expanded quite a bit. Won't be too much longer before I can cross the state.

I took MR BEAN on a round trip down to Portland OR this past week, 371 miles total on the West Coast Electric Highway, including 85 local miles over three days in the middle.
The car was coming off of a return commute to begin with, so we did our first of four southbound quick charges only 6 miles from home.
CHAdeMO station spacing on WCEH varies from 15 to 36 miles if the Blink and Nissan units are included, so it's possible to skip one or two, but to insure against unanticipated downtime and check the health of all, I hit almost every station between Tacoma and Portland at least once on the round trip, nine sessions in all. A full L1 recharge was done at the hotel immediately after arrival and before final departure.

The longest leg on an 80% charge was the last 46 miles, with a momentary glimpse of the turtle before arriving home (though still at 10% SOC according to CANION). The hottest battery temperature recorded on the trip was 46 C (115 F), on cells 41 and 53 (those two are usually the hottest during quick charge), and the greatest interpack temperature differential recorded was 18 C, during that same session.

Max session duration en route was 19 minutes, max charging power per session ranged from 41.3 kW (121.6 amps) to only 28.2 kW (79 amps), and yes- that 28 kW session coincided with the hottest battery temperatures. Temps were high probably due to 70 mph speed and short time between the most closely-spaced stations that I used (19 miles), and it was the third session within two hours.

I did one 'cold' CHAdeMO session, at midnight after a couple of days bumming around town. That was my first use of the Kanematsu "EV Collective" unit, which has a battery buffer to enable CHAdeMO at lower-power sites. It was the strongest session I've ever seen, at 43.8 kw (123 A at 356 V), started at around 40% SOC.

From a UK i-Miev owners perspective, fast chargers (rapid chargers as they are refeerred to over here) are very definately what makes it feasible to own an EV as an only car - assuming you are a typical car owner and only do a very rare long drive - maybe 3 or 4 times a year over 200 miles.

Beyond that, as someone else pointed out, the *vast* majority of charging - and I mean 98% or so - is going to happen at home, at night, during off peak (cheap) electricity rates.

For those who simply cannot charge at home - about 30% of current car owners apparently - a rapid charger is going to be the only viable charging option unless you can do it at work or at your commuter car park (station?). The latter is not likely currently, so rapid chargers are it... or no EV.

I can understnd that due to the longer distances travelled in the US, this model probably would not work as things stand but here in the UK, and for most , if not all, of Europe, it is an acceptable one, ie to take 50% longer to get where you are going, particulalry as the existing rapid charger infrastructure is free to use.

Estonia is leading the pack with a network of rapid chargers which equates to one per 8k head of population. Apply the smae maths to the UK and we would have 7,500 of them (about 250 currently). The US, nearly 37,500! MW

Blink seems to be upgrading, simplifying, and slimming its CHAdeMO connector.
http://insideevs.com/blink-dc-fast-charger-with-upgraded-chademo-connector/

I have no idea what's going on at insideevs.com this evening, but they are badly broken. For those curious to see the new connector in service at a U.S. Blink station, here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qbRG8n9_IY

Please note the commenter's confusion during the video - he keeps mistakenly calling the new handle Yazaki and the old one CHAdeMO, when in fact BOTH connectors are CHAdeMO, and BOTH were designed by Yazaki. This is the second generation plug, fully compatible with existing CHAdeMO sockets (as in our i-MiEVs).

We knew about this improvement a while ago, but it was unclear when it would start showing up on chargers in the real world. Good to see that they're finally here.

And now SAE/CCS Combo really IS "The Frankenplug" by comparison.

Hey jray3,

Regarding the high temps of highway driving:


Have you done any routing of cool air into the battery with the AC on and set to the floor position and the little flap manually overridden to direct air in to the battery? This can be done while underway to keep temps down or it can be done while waiting for a quick charge for say 10 minutes to drop battery temps.

You can also blend and route part to the cabin and part to the battery as you go.

Don......

Here are the new connectors on Eaton units. This one is in Blairsville, PA at the Sheetz.

Picture from Plugshare of a LEAF owner.

PV1 said:

Here are the new connectors on Eaton units. This one is in Blairsville, PA at the Sheetz.

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Interesting - I hadn't seen that one before. It looks like a connector from Dyden, who it seems has always used this design (i.e., it's not new for CHAdeMO 1.0, they also used it for CHAdeMO 0.9).

The CHAdeMO Association has an interesting little gallery of connector types, both 0.9 and 1.0.

http://www.chademo.com/wp/chademo-connectors/

There are a lot more than I realized.

btw, looking around the CHAdeMO site, I saw that they listed two CHAdeMO locations in New Mexico, which is good news if true. One was a Nissan dealer in Santa Fe, which doesn't surprise me, though I'm disappointed there isn't one in Albuquerque. But here's the weird one - the site claims there's one in Los Lunas, a bit south of Albuquerque - and it's at a Ford dealership. I might call them just out of curiosity - why would a dealer for Ford, supposedly a SAE/CCS/Combo (whatever the hell they're calling Frankenplug this month) supporter (who as far as I know has shipped no cars with any DCQC of either standard) have a CHAdeMO station?

DonDakin said:

Hey jray3,
Regarding the high temps of highway driving:
Have you done any routing of cool air into the battery with the AC on and set to the floor position and the little flap manually overridden to direct air in to the battery? This can be done while underway to keep temps down or it can be done while waiting for a quick charge for say 10 minutes to drop battery temps.
You can also blend and route part to the cabin and part to the battery as you go.
Don......

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Thanks Don, no I haven't tried that HVAC mod- will take a closer look now. This was my first long highway trip with CANion- it gave great insights.

Ditto on the Yakazi 2nd gen handles (ver 1.0) they are much easier to use than the metal monsters were.

I just figured the value of CHAdeMO for my household. We're i-driving over 3000 miles per year more having dcfc than we did without it in our first i-MiEV. That's because we never have to leave MR BEAN at home or switch cars midday to allow for a charge, and we take a few more trips beyond the range radius each month. (The 49 mile one-way trip up into Seattle used to involve real logistics when planning around a 3 hr+ charging session.)
That's gross savings of $750 per year in fuel savings alone vs the mommyvan. Of course, DCFC ain't free no more. Approaching the one-year anniversary of $5/session Blink fast charges, I've laid down a Lincoln 25 times ($125). Assuming 45 miles of added range per quick charge session, that $125 only bought 1125 of my 3000 extra miles. Chalk up the rest to experience and reduced 'range anxiety'. Even at $125 for 1125 miles, that's only 9 cents per mile, or at least a 65% discount compared to the family van. I consider it to be more valuable than that, because lots of 100+ mile days only involve a single fast charge. HowEVer, I'm still not happy with the AeroVironment $20/mo subscription. That'll nearly triple my annual DCFC charge for very few additional miles, because the AVI stations only come into play when outside the Seattle-Tacoma region.