Did I get free dual chargers?

you sure that's not kilometers per hour? 30amps is only 1 charger. each charger goes up to 40 amps. if you had dual chargers, you'd be able to pull 80A if the charger supported it.

umar said:

I will double check - but I was at the service station for an hour, and I'm fairly certain I added 60 miles to my range.

I'll take a photo of the screen next time I charge up!

Click to expand...

AS yobigd20 said, you have to be charging at a charger that supports more than 40 amps. When I charge my car on an HPWC at my local service center, the screen says I'm pulling 80 amps, so I know I have dual chargers.

Ecotricity in UK is likely 3 phase. Single charger in UK is 16A 3ph, dual charger is 32A 3ph. Look for the 3 inside a circle near the amperage on the center screen.

Please remember that this guy is in the UK and probably pulling 3 phase. The US vehicles do not charge the same way that the EU/UK/Asia cars do.

Interesting. So if he's charging at 30 amps, that means he has dual chargers?

We're talking about the UK, i.e. with european three-phase chargers.

On a three phase 400V 16A, you will get 11 kW, on a three phase 400V 32A, you will get 22 kW. I'm not entirely sure how many miles/hour that works out to, as I don't own a Model S, but it should be somewhere around 35 miles/hour for 11 kW and around 70 miles/hour for 22 kW.

In other words, if you're getting 30A and 60 miles/hour, you must have dual chargers.

Sounds like you do... single charger 11Kw... dual chargers 22Kw...

I have dual chargers... at Ecotricity 43Kw AC chargers you get 65 Miles per hour of charging.... (which I also get at my office... which is a 3 phase 30A charging point)..

85Kw battery / 22kw dual chargers = 3.8 .... 3.8 times 65 Miles = 250 miles... doesn't matter which way you slice it...

Happy for someone to tell me otherwise!

Oh Umar... forgot to say... it's quite commonly known that a lot of UK cars got delivered with dual chargers physically fitted and enabled...

Subsequently some of those who didn't order/pay for them have had them disabled remotely... (and not happy about it in some cases)..

If Tesla do this... they do allow you to pay the £1250 and have them enabled again... HTH..

Maybe the service centers can bypass the disabled feature to charge them using both chargers but that's not able to done in the wild?

There's also some 60 kWh Model S owners who didn't opt for supercharging who have been allowed to charge at superchargers once or twice. It's a simple SW enable/disable.

It like with drugs - first time is free...

I guess we will never know... but the story goes it's all to do with UK domestic chargers... there is a government scheme that allows us to have 7Kw chargers fitted at home for £95.. but apparently just before launch there was a panic when testing showed that a single charger Model S would not draw the full 32A from these domestic chargers...

Given how widespread they are... panic was so bad that just a couple of weeks before launch Model S soon to be owners were being contacted to have 'custom' domestic chargers that would only work with the S retrofitted at home... someone (thankfully) realised that was really dumb... too many other cars might want to use them in future...

So that was abandoned and the thinking is that the 'Tesla' fix was to install dual chargers in all UK cars... as dual chargers cars didn't have the issue with the 'standard' home point..

Final version goes that either by wiring or software they managed to fix the problem at the very last minute (without the need for dual chargers)... and so a lot of early UK cars had dual chargers even when not ordered..

We know from a variety of forums that Tesla did start disabling them... offering to re enable for the £1250... they even mistakenly disabled dual chargers on a car where the owner had paid at one point (he was not a happy camper understandably)...

That's as much 'gossip' as I know...

@umar
Take a look at the 7th character of your VIN. I'm betting it's D.
Decoding Tesla Model S VINs

brianman said:

@umar
Take a look at the 7th character of your VIN. I'm betting it's D.
Decoding Tesla Model S VINs

Click to expand...

The decoding at the top of that thread is not accurate anymore. They don't encoding single/dual charger in the VIN anymore. You want this:
ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/MfrMail/ORG9130.pdf

Edit: And even that isn't entirely right for UK delivered vehicles, digit 5 will be B for RHD vehicles.

Better option for finding out if you have dual chargers is to use VisibleTesla and click Details on the Overview Tab. There will be a charging section like this:

Charging: [
Supercharger: true
Twin Chargers: true
HPWC: true
]

VintageMark said:

I guess we will never know... but the story goes it's all to do with UK domestic chargers... there is a government scheme that allows us to have 7Kw chargers fitted at home for £95.. but apparently just before launch there was a panic when testing showed that a single charger Model S would not draw the full 32A from these domestic chargers...

Given how widespread they are... panic was so bad that just a couple of weeks before launch Model S soon to be owners were being contacted to have 'custom' domestic chargers that would only work with the S retrofitted at home... someone (thankfully) realised that was really dumb... too many other cars might want to use them in future...

So that was abandoned and the thinking is that the 'Tesla' fix was to install dual chargers in all UK cars... as dual chargers cars didn't have the issue with the 'standard' home point..

Final version goes that either by wiring or software they managed to fix the problem at the very last minute (without the need for dual chargers)... and so a lot of early UK cars had dual chargers even when not ordered..

We know from a variety of forums that Tesla did start disabling them... offering to re enable for the £1250... they even mistakenly disabled dual chargers on a car where the owner had paid at one point (he was not a happy camper understandably)...

That's as much 'gossip' as I know...

Click to expand...

That makes a lot of sense. The thing about the EU chargers is that they are actually composed of three 16A 230V chargers. They are configured in a star, so that each charger is wired between between each phase and ground. 3 x 16A x 230V = 11.040 kW.

Now, the way Tesla is able to charge at 32A 230V without dual chargers is by distributing the load between two of the 16A 230V chargers. This is easy in a home setup, you merely need a wire connecting two of the phase pins, so that you actually have the single phase going to two of the three phase pins. This solution, however, isn't a part of the Type 2 standard, so any public Type 2 will be wired so that the 32A is only connected to a single pin. This means that only one of the 16A 230V chargers can be used, and your charging rate is halved.

It isn't in any way dangerous for another EV with a 3.3 or 6.6 kW charger to to charge at a modified Type 2, it will simply draw the current it can from the single pin, without using the second pin. On cars designed for three phase, like the Zoe, I'm a bit more unsure. It shouldn't be damaging, but you might get an error of some sort.

One thing you say interests me - can you confirm that people have been able to charge at 32A with a single charger at an unmodified Type 2 charge point and a standard Type 2 cable? There has been some noise surrounding this in Norway, and I would imagine that if they have rolled out a fix for the UK, we would see the same fix here in Norway on new cars.

There are basically two ways Tesla could have resolved the issue. The one way is to distribute modified Type 2 cables, where the single phase is connected to two pins. (I don't think you'd be able to use this cable at a three phase Type 2 charge point.) The second way is to have an internal switch in the car so that the car can connect two of the phase pins when it is signalled by the Type 2 charge point that it is capable of supplying 32A.

The latter would be quite useful here, 32A 230V Type 2 charge points are popping up everywhere.