I haven’t seen anyone mention this handy tip yet, and many new owners don’t know this about how Superchargers are set up.
When you get to a Supercharger, you may see something like 8 stalls, and they will be labeled: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, etc. The ones with the same number are connected to one stack of the 120kW charging hardware, and it will split/share the power between the A and B stalls—first car gets priority. That’s what people mean if you hear “paired stalls”. So if you arrive and there is a car on 2A, and it may be pulling 90kW, you can only get the leftover 30kW from 2B. So if there is a set of 3A and 3B that are both open, get on one of those because they won’t be limited by sharing with another car. The sharing is not too terrible, though, as it will automatically shift more power to the second car as the first car gets more full and starts to reduce its power draw. A lot of people don’t know this and are confused and frustrated when they’re getting a shared one and it’s not delivering the charging rate they expect.
Some useful sites:
For trip planning, to see how much energy a route will take, this site is the most amazing thing before or since sliced bread. You can enter a lot of variables, like what your car type is, how much weight you’re carrying, driving speed, and the inside and outside temperatures to estimate heat or A/C use. It takes into account those factors plus the elevation changes of the route and will show how many rated miles of the Tesla range will be used for driving that route. It’s amazing, and most Tesla drivers use it pretty often. It’s maintained by a college kid, so if you use it, it would be really nice of you to make a donation to his college fund that he has listed on the site.
www.evtripplanner.com
Someone mentioned this. Plugshare is about the best and most complete map of charging locations. You can filter the display by what charger or outlet types you’re looking for.
www.plugshare.com
Tesla’s map of Superchargers only shows the ones that are complete. There is a wonderful user-maintained map where people add locations where building permits or construction has been found of Superchargers that are not live yet. This is pretty cool to see ones that are in progress and should be coming up in the next few months. Timelines are really variable, though.
www.supercharge.info
If you see any weird types of outlets you need to identify, this Wikipedia page is great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector
If you need adapters for any odd outlet types,
www.evseadapters.com
They have a lot of different ones for various types of plugs that convert to a 14-50 outlet, which is the type of plug that your Model S comes with on its mobile charging cable. *
Notice* If you use any of these that are for lower power circuits, you MUST manually dial down the current in the car, so you don’t draw too much current and flip a breaker or start a fire. The rule is 80% of what the circuit rating is. The standard 14-50 comes with the car. It’s a 50A rated circuit, so the car draws 40A. If you use an adapter to a 10-30 or 14-30 (old and new clothes dryer outlets) those are 30A circuits, so you need to use 24A maximum.
If you’re going off the beaten path, away from Superchargers, one of the best charging resources that may not be listed on Plugshare yet are campgrounds and RV parks that have the 14-50 outlets, which is the one that comes with your charge cable. This site lists campgrounds, and you can filter by ones that include “50 Amp”, which is what they call that type of outlet.
www.allstays.com