Hatched a Tesla

[JoeS]

Along the line of needing to extend one's driving range unexpectedly: drove up to Medford, Oregon, today and 50 miles up from the Corning Supercharger station I realized that I had left my iPad at the Starbucks there, necessitating a backtrack (and a short recharge), thus turning a 400-mile drive into 500 miles (still effortlessly).

This past week the Supercharger stations along this route were swamped with eclipse-watchers trekking to Oregon, necessitating multi-hour waits. My long distance travel to date in the Tesla has still been totally unencumbered by queues at the Superchargers.

We'll see if that still holds true, as right after Labor Day we're taking the northern route across the States and up to Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and down through the New England states to view the Fall colors. Whether it's sailing across oceans or driving across the country, for me it's the journey and for my wife it's the destination.

 

[JoeS]

Happiness is having the right adapter.

The Tesla UMC (portable EVSE) has a lovely high-current low-insertion force connector adapter that presently has replaceable sockets for a conventional 120v 5-15 plug and a 14-50 plug. They used to have adapters for other 240v plug variants, but no longer offer them. Separately, they also provide a J1772 adapter for their inlet connector (which, unfortunately, does not work with the Mitsu EVSE).

I consciously bought my used Tesla MS with the optional second 40A charger, allowing me to input 240vac at 80A if it was available. The Tesla's ac charging input current is on-screen programmable, from 80A all the way down to 5A. The beauty of this is I that I can scale down the current to match both the circuit and my departure time, as I still prefer to draw a lower-than-maximum current to go easy on both the wiring and the battery pack.

As an i-MiEV-related aside, the current programmability and its very elegant implementation is one of the features I really like about the EVSEUpgrade.com of Mitsubishi's i-MiEV EVSE. Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in this company, but both of my i-MiEV's have these modified EVSEs.

Well, the first two days of our trip allowed me to exercise not just my Tesla's 80A input capabilities, but my adapter collection as well.

In the Turbocord thread I had written:

"For years I had standardized all my EV extensions using locking NEMA L6-30 connectors with a zillion adapters for that 30A connector, but now I have the Tesla UMC which can comfortably draw 40A out of a 50A circuit (and even 80A if I hardwire the HPWC), thus obsoleting my collection... "

Hit the road on Tuesday in the Tesla, heading for Nova Scotia…

On Tuesday night stayed with friends in Reno, Nevada. He's a very skilled woodworker and his garage was wired with a 240vac NEMA 6-20 straight-in outlet for his wood lathe. My adapters consisted of:
6-20P —> L6-30R
L6-30P —> 14-50R
14-50P —> Tesla UMC

Comfortably charged overnight dialing down the current to 12A and having a little over 70% by the time we departed - plenty to get to the Lovelock supercharger 100 miles away - could have charged more and gone directly to Winnemucca Supercharger (170 miles), but we like to stop and walk around and see the local sights and stretch our legs as we are, after all, tourists. Then, on to Winnemucca on the way to Boise, Idaho.

After charging in Winnemucca, Nevada, we headed for McDermitt on the Nevada-Oregon border where the casino has an 80A J1772 Clipper Creek EVSE, on the way to Boise - I discovered that I had made a "minor" math error as somehow I thought that McDermitt —> Boise was 140 miles but instead it was 183 miles :shock: , and I had consciously stopped charging early at the Supercharger in Winnemucca. Not to worry, the coffee shop in the casino was nice for our now-extended lunch and we needed to catch up on emails as well as walk around a bit, and I really appreciated having bought my used Tesla with an 80A charger which sucked in a steady 73A at 206v from that Clipper Creek J1772 EVSE. My wife convinced me to let Tesia charge a bit more, as I was all set to take off when the car predicted 10%SoC at the destination, and we waited until that number was 18%. Good thing we did, as during this drive the predicted end charge dropped to as low as 7%, I think because the car's battery cooling system was working overtime in the heat while driving through all that horrible smoke from all the forest fires. Would have really liked to have had a new Tesla's Bio-Weapon Defense Mode air filtration system! Anyway, arrived at my friend's house with 17%SoC, simply by slowing down a bit and following this nice big truck for a while.

At my friend's house here in Boise last night I plugged into his modern 240vac NEMA 14-30 dryer outlet using -
14-30P —> L6-30R
L6-30P —> 14-50R
14-50P —> Tesla UMC

Dialed down the current again to 12A for the overnight charge to 60%, which will be plenty for today, but I'll take her up a bit before leaving tomorrow for the Twin Falls Supercharger 134 miles away.

Sorry for the long-winded writeup, as I had only intended to talk about charging adapters…

9/8/17 Edit: clarified adapters provided with Tesla's UMC.

 

[sandange]

Can't beat the fun of a road trip
Armed with a portable evse's and a box full of adapters
The open road is yours!!
Where there's a plug there's a charge!!

No looking over your shoulder like in Mad Max..LOL
The price of gas here in Montreal just took a large leap last weekend-
as much as 1.45 liter = x 3.79 for 1 US gallon =
$ 5.50 gal Canadian dollars .

Have a great trip

 

[Don]

I read today that a Tesla taxi service now has 300,000 miles on their first 2015 Model S. They anticipate putting another 900,000 miles on it before the Tesla 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty expires! They're averaging around 17,000 miles per month

A million mile Tesla won't hurt their reputation any

Don

 

[Don]

Tesla enabled those with 60 Kw Model S's fleeing Hurricane Irma to dig deeper into the battery pack to give them an extra 30 to 40 miles of range to ensure they could make it to the next Supercharger

Gotta love what they can do online with those cars!

Don

 

[jray3]

Gotta love what they can do online with those cars!

True, though I'd prefer to have full owner control over all features. I think Don is referring to 60 kWh Model S that are really 70 or 75 kWh cars that were software-limited to 60 kWh for a lower selling price? In that case, TESLA split the baby quite admirably by proactively releasing some emergency capacity. (And likely prompting a few upgrade purchases.)

I get a sort of sick thrill from meeting the turtle a few blocks from home, taking it as a sign of perfect trip planning. However, the one time I've encountered the Flatbed Of Shame, it would've been nice to have a message that said "You may press the emergency override button for an additional 2 Ah, providing approximately 3 miles of additional range. This may result in cell failure or a permanent capacity loss of 1%." or some such thing. However, I just don't see that happening with 99% of companies in today's litigious environment.

 

[JoeS]

A quick update on our cross-country Tesla jaunt - uneventfully meandered from Boise up to Jackson Hole WY then across and up a few states and then we met up with Fiddler John who, with his wife, gave a fun and very talented performance near Minneapolis. He's heading west to California from the East Coast in his Tesla X, so it was fun connecting and swapping i-MiEV and electric vehicle praises.

Met with Ben Nelson yesterday at the National Drive Electric Week Event in Madison Wi and then drove over to his house - he's very enterprising, and his new heated-floor garage is terrific!

Amazing how many common interests I share with both John and Ben… guess it's the i-MiEV connection.

Heading for Milwaukee today to see my godson whom I haven't seen in ages, and then continue onward in our meandering sightseeing touristing travels, still headed for Nova Scotia. Have over 3000 trip miles so far, and thoroughly enjoying experiencing Americana. Everywhere, the Tesla attracts positive attention and conversations, and only had one negative electric car reaction so far.

 

[JoeS]

Brief update on our cross-country Tesla tour. Today heading for Prince Edward Island, after being shown a fantastic time in Montreal by Sandy ("sandange") and his wife, and had a nice meetup with DonDakin. There is such a commonality of viewpoints and interests amongst us i-MiEV owners!

 

[JoeS]

Another brief update - have covered over 9000 miles since we started in early September, touristing and visiting extended family and friends. Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia (and part of Cape Breton Island), down through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, etc., down to New Orleans and presently in Dallas-FortWorth waiting for my wife's return from her family emergency. Will give a synopsis with a few photos after our return home.

Have to share what I consider one of the most unique PlugShare home charging station locations, in what has to be the largest number of charging stations per capita of any locale in the world(?):
https://api.plugshare.com/view/location/122822

 

[JoeS]

Arrived home yesterday after 12,158 miles and 50 days. Fantastic trip with the Tesla being a wonderful long-distance car. I'll post a few photos shortly.

 

[JoeS]

Trying to put a slideshow of our trip for the family and selecting a few appropriate photos for this site from the thousand+ photos we took during our Nova Scotia trip, has been time-consuming. I soon realized that there were a number of recurring themes, so in this post I'll focus on ROAD TRIP CHARGING (knowing this is near and dear to Rick's (rkarl89203) heart during his i-MiEV Route 66 epic trip earlier this year).

With the Tesla I can adjust -

* the State of Charge at which charging ends (I have yet to ever charge my Tesla to 100%)
* the ac charging current at either 120vac or 240vac, from 5A all the way up to 80A at 240vac
* the time that I want charging to start

This flexibility has proven useful, especially the ability to dial-down the the current to match the sometimes questionable power source wiring.

First off, to show there is nothing new under the sun, here is a photograph of a 1917 home charging station (from the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation in Dearborn, MI) - that's 100 years ago!

Crossing the US using Superchargers is effortless, and we had a couple of stations in Wyoming open up just a few days before we arrived (I had adjusted our route accordingly). Outside Quebec City the new Supercharger station opened a week after this photo was taken -

Not to worry, Quebec Province is peppered with CHAdeMOs and that night we stayed at the nearby hotel and used this one - thank you sandange for pointing out that the FLO charging card is popular in Canada - I obtained one just before leaving home.

This last summer New Brunswick had installed quite a few charging stations across the province, which was fortuitous as there are no Tesla Superchargers up there. Here's a typical one (note the CHAdeMO-to-Tesla adapter in both the above photo and this one) -

Once we got to Nova Scotia a number of people suggested we do the Cabot Trail circumnavigating Cape Breton. After a long day's drive we arrived at Baddeck (start of the Trail and home to the fantastic Alexander Graham Bell museum) only to find their charging station DOA. No worries, a friendly local boatyard nicely obliged and I managed to pick up 240vac from their vacuum system connector. Helps to have a huge collection of adapters. Did a nice museum tour while the car charged as everything in town is within walking distance.

By the Bay of Fundy (I wanted to see the experimental tidal power generating stations) we stopped at the lovely village of Parrsboro where this lonely EVSE was located right in front of their town hall. Stayed the night at a very nice Inn just a short walk away.

I prefer to let the car slowly charge overnight (even often using L1) instead of hitting it with the Supercharger. Here's an example of one of many motels with available L2 EVSEs - I parked on the (unused) sidewalk, fearful of cars backing out -

On Route 66, we stayed at one of the cute preserved 1930's motels (Blue Swallow) in Tucumcari NM which had modern conveniences such as a Tesla HPWC and J1772 and Wi-Fi -

At the Grand Canyon one can plug in the car at their RV park and then go for a nice long touristy sightseeing walk along the rim -

Finally, arriving back in California and what happens at the Supercharger station outside of Truckee? ICEd - the only time on this entire trip! Luckily there was a spot available, and the fallback was the Supercharger in Truckee itself nearby.

Here's why the i-MiEV charging port (right rear side) is superior to the left side of the vehicle (Tesla, Volt, Bolt, etc.). If you want to park right next to the building you can't do it with the left side of the car because you need to open the door. If you park the other way around you have to drag the cable around the car and have the connector precariously protrude, in this case into the narrow alleyway. I would have preferred to squeeze the car closer to the wall. Similar argument when charging stations are located next to the curb.

What a well-prepared EV road warrior carries in his pocket; hmm, only seven charging cards, I thought I had more -

Here's what resides in a plastic box in the frunk of the Tesla. Every connector is labeled (blue tape). Not shown are the various heavy-duty extension cables. Of particular note are the J1772 extension and CHAdeMO adapter.

Here's the list of all the adapters (I think) -

http://www.katiekat.net/Vehicles/Mitsi/EVSEAdaptersJoeS.pdf

Hope to post a few photos from the trip shortly...

 

[Don]

Great collage of charging experiences Joe and it goes to show that a well prepared EV driver can go virtually anywhere these days and with minimal inconvenience

Your night at the Blue Swallow in Tucumcari really brought back some memories! We stayed there on our Route 66 trip which we did in our Miata (90% top down too!) in 2003

Don

 

[BarryP]

Beautiful. Thank you for posting.
-Barry

 

[Phximiev]

Cool! Hope you enjoyed the Grand Canyon hike. Its one of our favorites.

 

[sandange]

Thanks for sharing the experience & photos .
We really enjoyed meeting up with you and Kathy here in Montreal.
It must of been an interesting trip through the Maritime Provinces.
We're hoping to head out that way sometime soon.

 

[JoeS]

Thank you all for your kind comments. At the southern rim of the Grand Canyon we had a nice long walk over mostly-paved walkways (but not down the canyon which my wife had done with her father years ago) - incredibly popular tourist destination, even in the 'off' season. Hikes like this had become a necessity to counteract the inactivity of sitting in the car for so many hours. Sandy, I'll be posting photos of our visit with you, and it's interesting to contemplate an i-MiEV trip to the Maritime Provinces. Montreal to and around New Brunswick would be fast and easy, and further east and north will take some planning. Lovely part of the world.

I'm still busy selecting and formatting photos of our trip to post, but thought I would show a snapshot of the map I quickly marked up to show our friends where our two Tesla cross-country jaunts have taken us. The red circles represent our overnight stays. Recall that last year we drove to Key West. Yellow is this year's trip and green is last year's. Some of the meanderings reflect visiting friends, and I'm so happy we did last year's trip as two old friends we saw have since passed away. In a year and half we've covered over 40,000 miles in the Tesla, even though we simply do not use it locally at all. It was quicker for me to mark up the physical map instead of creating one in, for example, Google Maps, but I am open to suggestions for doing this 'properly' but not spending much time on it. The link below the snapshot is a high-resolution version of this map. More photos coming...

http://www.katiekat.net/Vehicles/Tesla/IMG_3446USATripMapHiRes.jpg

 

[JoeS]

One of the really nice aspects of crossing the country is the ability to meet with members of this forum - face-to-face after years of corresponding!

Who we didn't get a chance to visit -

Last year on our Tesla trip to Key West we met with forum moderator Don and his wife in Biloxi, Mississippi. For some strange reason I didn't have to the presence of mind to snap a photo of us, not even with both the Tesla and his i-MiEV side-by-side, with me of course back-in parking. On our trip this year while in New Orleans I had intended to backtrack the hundred miles to Biloxi to meet with Don again, but my wife (who had flown to Medford from Nashville for a family emergency) had moved up the timeframe for rejoining me and was already booked to fly into Dallas and I was just a bit short on time - Don, catch you next time.

This last July forum moderator Tim (PV1) paid me a visit in California and was successful in seeing a Tesla Model 3 at the nearby Tesla HQ before the car's official delivery! On our cross-country trip we came close to Tim in Pittsburg, but had a schedule conflict which kept us from popping up to see him.

When crossing New Mexico we almost connected with Tony (Aerowhatt) - he left Albuquerque for a family visit the day before we arrived on our way home. Pity, as I had looked forward to meeting him and continuing our debate regarding maximizing EV range on downhills.

Who we did connect with -

A few days before we left on our Nova Scotia trip, I received an email from John Annen (FiddlerJohn on this forum) in Maryland wondering if we were going to be around as he was going to be visiting California. Surprise! - I allowed as we were heading East and thus we agreed to possibly meet somewhere in the middle of the country. John and his wife are accomplished musicians and entertainers (in his past life John was a serious hands-on NASA instrumentation engineer), and a meetup near Minneapolis looked doable. We made a left turn from Interstate 80 in Des Moines and arrived in Champlain MN just in time to enjoy their performance. We then spent a few hours having a great time chatting away about so many common interests that it was downright scary!

John and his wife Debbie performing -

Photo of our get-together -

Still discussing some esoteric technical topics in the parking lot in front of my Tesla -

John and Debbie in their Tesla in front of the Tesla factory in California.

They also have a photo (just as we do of ourselves) outside the gate at the Tesla gigafactory in Reno NV (they don't let tourists in, even if they're driving Teslas).

I had neglected to keep John informed of our itinerary and on our way back we made contact when we arrived in Nashville TN and it turns out that we had passed each other on the highway earlier that day and missed connecting at a Tesla supercharger by minutes... my bad.

We then headed east from Minneapolis to meet with Ben Nelson at the National Drive Electric Week event in Madison WI - perfect timing. We enjoyed the show and nearby market and after some sightseeing drove 50 miles further east to meet Ben at his place in Oconomowoc, WI. For those of you who might not remember, Ben was the first to show us what the (flooded) insides of an i-MiEV battery pack look like as he had bought and attempted to revive a Hurricane Sandy casualty. He eventually bought a running 2012 i-MiEV and has provided lots of videos about the car and everything related. Here are the links to Ben on this forum:
Taking Apart a Flooded i-MiEV
http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1344
New Owner - Ben got an iMiEV - Again!
http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2917
LED light mods and lots of useful tidbit on yet other threads on this forum.
Ben has a great website: http://300mpg.org

Needless to say, we spent quite a few hours discussing everything from his new solar installation to all things relating to electric power and vehicles. Wonderful technical interchange with, once again, a techie kindred spirit.

Our first meeting in Madison -

Here, Ben is explaining the finer points of electric cars to an attentive admirer -

At Ben's house in front of his new garage with solar system, with his i-MiEV in the background -

Heading on up to Canada we had been in touch with Sandy (sandange on this forum), as he and his wife Angelika had extended a gracious invitation to us. Sandy lives in the mountains up from Montreal, having built a unique round cordwood home in a most idyllic location. Incredibly (especially for that climate), their only car is the i-MiEV, and the distances they need to drive to get to just about anywhere are mind-boggling! They devoted an entire Saturday to us giving us the grand tour of Montreal and vicinity in the i-MiEV - Sandy's got all the charging stations sussed out to perfection as we were able to visit and tour a number of areas while the car charged. i-MiEV owner and forum member DonDakin joined us for lunch and it was interesting chatting about not only energy and EVs and Solar, but some of our mutual avionics experiences as well. The weather was incredible, as we brought the California heat wave with us, and the entire city was out enjoying what was probably the last gasp of summer - partying well into the night. We had a truly enjoyable experience in a great city (and I don't normally care for big cities). For anyone interested in visiting and staying out in the country outside Montreal in a most beautiful and relaxing location, I can't think of a nicer spot - here's a link to their website: http://thecordstead.blogspot.ca/

This is what Sandy and Angelika's unique cordwood house (their "cordstead") looks like - they built it themselves!

The interior is very elegant and tastefully furnished -

The view out of one of many windows -

In front of their garage, Sandy and Angelika are imagining how their future Tesla M3 might fit in...

Our lunchtime get-together with Don Dakin -

Sandy and Angelika are our role models in terms of elegant minimalism - they've managed to pare down the amount of "stuff" that they own and yet, in a beautiful setting, have a most comfortable lifestyle that is far from Spartan.

 

[Don]

It's true!! You meet the nicest people driving an EV

Don

 

[sandange]

Agree with you Don -
Special like minded people, not intimidated, pioneering into the EV world from all walks of life.

Very similar to the Cordwood builders community that we have meet.
We've been fortunate enough to experience both worlds.

Thank you Joe for your wonderful write up and comments.

 

[ed5000]

Thanks for posting all the pictures. They really help add to the website here.