I wanted to share our experience with our over the weekend trip to Montreal, CA from Concord, NH.
Concord-Montreal:
We left fully charged @ 255mi and we made just one stop @ home charger with HPWC near Burlington VT. One of the best decision I made was to check the plugshare map and get in touch with home owners having HPWC. This portion of the trip was fun and it took us about 5h.
Montreal-Concord:
We charged at our destination from a regular wall connector (slow) and a family in the same neighborhood and left with half full. We then stop by at another Model S owner home and charged for about an hour. After we stopped by at the duty free for 1/2h we continued our trip and stopped by in Montpelier VT to use the Chademo charger there (VSECU location). This is where we started having problems. The charger refused to work and gave us VE122 error code. We called the 800 number only to waste 1/2 h as the guy didn't help at all and also didn't pay attention to what we were saying (game on maybe?). Since this did not work we charged there at L2 (18mi/h) for 1h. These L2 chargers are sort of useless due to their speed.
We continued our trip and shortly after this we stopped at the Barre VT Chademo location only to find that its use was restricted (not working with a chargepoint card). My wife used again her master paypass card but the charger gave us the same error again.
At this point we realized that the only way to make it back home was to take a detour from 89S and go to another Tesla S owner location where we managed to arrive @ 9:00pm with 20mi left. Charged there for 1 1/2 h and got back home @ 12:00 am with 17 mi left (RED battery).
We learned our lessons.
-Chedemo is ..useless and thus will be returned this week to Tesla.
Sorry I don't care why it didn't work: car, adapter or station. We paid a bag of money for our P85D and this adapter (which should really come standard with our cars since the number of superchargers are nowhere near enough).
-Always leave fully charged and this is our mistake, although the supercharger in Montreal has only 2 stales and people are often waiting in line. BTW the service center there I hear is the biggest in NA???
-Forget about L2 chargers. Can they all disappear over night? Yes I won't miss them. I don't want to make a 5h trip a 10h trip just because I enjoy my car.
-Tesla should get their act together with these superchargers and not slowdown in building them BUT grow them faster because it's the only place where we can charge and NOT have the trip impacted.
-Home charges rock!!! God bless the people who offered to help us. Fyi when you contact them using the info in plugshare, most of them will respond, some won't. Life is not perfect.
-No more range anxiety or range assurance or whatever is called? Right....Based on that we should have taken our trip going through Albany only 7h more.
Cheers to All!
Concord-Montreal:
We left fully charged @ 255mi and we made just one stop @ home charger with HPWC near Burlington VT. One of the best decision I made was to check the plugshare map and get in touch with home owners having HPWC. This portion of the trip was fun and it took us about 5h.
Montreal-Concord:
We charged at our destination from a regular wall connector (slow) and a family in the same neighborhood and left with half full. We then stop by at another Model S owner home and charged for about an hour. After we stopped by at the duty free for 1/2h we continued our trip and stopped by in Montpelier VT to use the Chademo charger there (VSECU location). This is where we started having problems. The charger refused to work and gave us VE122 error code. We called the 800 number only to waste 1/2 h as the guy didn't help at all and also didn't pay attention to what we were saying (game on maybe?). Since this did not work we charged there at L2 (18mi/h) for 1h. These L2 chargers are sort of useless due to their speed.
We continued our trip and shortly after this we stopped at the Barre VT Chademo location only to find that its use was restricted (not working with a chargepoint card). My wife used again her master paypass card but the charger gave us the same error again.
At this point we realized that the only way to make it back home was to take a detour from 89S and go to another Tesla S owner location where we managed to arrive @ 9:00pm with 20mi left. Charged there for 1 1/2 h and got back home @ 12:00 am with 17 mi left (RED battery).
We learned our lessons.
-Chedemo is ..useless and thus will be returned this week to Tesla.
Sorry I don't care why it didn't work: car, adapter or station. We paid a bag of money for our P85D and this adapter (which should really come standard with our cars since the number of superchargers are nowhere near enough).
-Always leave fully charged and this is our mistake, although the supercharger in Montreal has only 2 stales and people are often waiting in line. BTW the service center there I hear is the biggest in NA???
-Forget about L2 chargers. Can they all disappear over night? Yes I won't miss them. I don't want to make a 5h trip a 10h trip just because I enjoy my car.
-Tesla should get their act together with these superchargers and not slowdown in building them BUT grow them faster because it's the only place where we can charge and NOT have the trip impacted.
-Home charges rock!!! God bless the people who offered to help us. Fyi when you contact them using the info in plugshare, most of them will respond, some won't. Life is not perfect.
-No more range anxiety or range assurance or whatever is called? Right....Based on that we should have taken our trip going through Albany only 7h more.
Cheers to All!