-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Free charging
- Thread starter Gregkeys
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Electric Vehicles
JeffK
Well-Known Member
ChargePoint
click "free"
There's also sites like PlugShare
but it's more difficult to see free ones.
click "free"
There's also sites like PlugShare
but it's more difficult to see free ones.
originalsalt
Member
rw86347
Member
But honestly isn't your time worth more than $1 per hour. Most free chargers are level 2 chargers with give you 6.6 KWH of electricity. In one hour that is ($0.12 * 6.6 = $0.76 {$0.12 is the national average for 1 KWH of electricity}). And at my home, I can charge at $0.07 per KWH. Which means I can charge for less than $0.50 per hour. On average I charge for 2 hours per day. I would much rather spend $1 charging at home than two hours sitting in my car watching my wrist watch. Heck if I was at home working I could earn $200 during that same amount of time.
thefortunes
Active Member
I do some opportunity charging if I am going to be parked for a couple hours or more.
Does it make sense financially? Probably not, but there is something satisfying about getting that $2-$3 of free electrons
rw86347
Member
One of the city's near where I live has free EV Charging. One day I really needed a charge so I headed to the Rec center for some juice. Only to find a Tesla parked there. My little Nissan Leaf was starving. Now chances are that Tesla was just getting free electrons because he could. It was at that point I decided that free was bad. Maybe even bad for the environment.
Now Walgreens also has chargers but they Charge more for electrons then gasoline. It is like ten times the price. This is equally bad!
I really want to see more chargers, and I think charging going rate for electrons can help us proliferate them. Please feel free to charge me $0.12 per KWH.
I expect that once my Tesla arrives I will use zero level 2 chargers that are not in my garage or at a hotel.
Now Walgreens also has chargers but they Charge more for electrons then gasoline. It is like ten times the price. This is equally bad!
I really want to see more chargers, and I think charging going rate for electrons can help us proliferate them. Please feel free to charge me $0.12 per KWH.
I expect that once my Tesla arrives I will use zero level 2 chargers that are not in my garage or at a hotel.
If you ever make it up the hill to Black Hawk, the Monarch Casino recently added 2 free Clipper Creek J1772 chargers (40 amps) and 10 (TEN!) Tesla connectors (40 amps). It looks like they've run the wiring to add at least two more but right now, we can't tell if they will be Tesla or J1772.
Black Hawk Destination Charging
rw86347
Member
Interesting I did not see that there, I must be blind. I also found that the ChargeHub app has a similar filter.
Yes it is, but I'm brand spanking new to the whole electric vehicle lifestyle, the closest I got before was my Prius which is half electric and only charges itself via gasoline
I tried a blink charger while I was shopping which cost $4 per hour for only about 15 miles of range, I was quite disappointed with that so it got me thinking that surely there are free chargers elsewhere so I can charge while shopping.
Currently the closest Super Charger is 60 miles away from me which with my 60D doesn't make sense for me to do my shopping down there, I was hoping to find chargers closer to me that I could top off with when I was out and about shopping (not really as an alternative to the house charging) I monitor my dollars very closely (more so now with the tesla) and every dollar matters, if I can come home and only need to charge for an hour rather than 3 then thats a win for me.
According to CharHub the WalGreens in my area are all free, does that mean the app is wrong or Walgreens changed theirs chargers to free, or is it just free im my area here (Washington State)
Canuck
Well-Known Member
Tesla recently opened Superchargers at a Best Western hotel in Kelowna, BC. Before they added them, the hotel had two 80 amp HPWC's that I would use, and they are still there. Before they announced the end of free supercharging, I wondered if anyone would ever use them again. Now I wonder if there will be more demand for those free HPWC's years down the line than the Superchargers?
rw86347
Member
Interesting I did not see that there, I must be blind. I also found that the ChargeHub app has a similar filter.
Yes it is, but I'm brand spanking new to the whole electric vehicle lifestyle, the closest I got before was my Prius which is half electric and only charges itself via gasoline
I tried a blink charger while I was shopping which cost $4 per hour for only about 15 miles of range, I was quite disappointed with that so it got me thinking that surely there are free chargers elsewhere so I can charge while shopping.
Currently the closest Super Charger is 60 miles away from me which with my 60D doesn't make sense for me to do my shopping down there, I was hoping to find chargers closer to me that I could top off with when I was out and about shopping (not really as an alternative to the house charging) I monitor my dollars very closely (more so now with the tesla) and every dollar matters, if I can come home and only need to charge for an hour rather than 3 then thats a win for me.
According to CharHub the WalGreens in my area are all free, does that mean the app is wrong or Walgreens changed theirs chargers to free, or is it just free im my area here (Washington State)
PlugShare says the Walgreens by me is $2 per hour. They should be charging $0.50 per hour. :-(
Huh, well I'll be, plugshare says Walgreens charges $2 for me as well, I wonder which is right chargehub or plugshare
diamond.g
Active Member
Is chargehub crowd sourced? I know plugshare tends to be more up to date as folks can add comments.
JeffK
Well-Known Member
Without a doubt you'll be an expert within a few months.
Generally Plugshare is my preferred general source, partly because Level 3 (high Power Stations, they call them) are colorcoded Orange. Tesla does have an up to date list of Destination Chargers on their site. That helps a lot with trip planning because no other source is that specific. Destination Chargers at hotel and restaurants are often priceless advantages. They are particularly valuable when traveling in the extremes (i.e. very densely Tesla-populated areas (AKA SFO-LAX) and largely Tesla-free areas (I-10 between Phoenix and San Antonio, say). The areas such as the I-10 desert and many others are rapidly being filled in with Superchargers as we speak, among them I-80 /I-76 from between OMA-DEN which right now has the last three gaps under construction. If you take long trips you'll quickly begin to monitor Supercharge.info and other places. For example, I have been planning a Seattle-Edmonton trip for next January, expecting several Destination chargers and alternatives. Now the Merrit, BC Supercharger is opening, so I'll have Supercharging all the way. Trip planning, even coast-to-coast, is becoming easier every day.
Most Level 3 (aKA, DC Fast) are CHAdeMO, and are associated most often with Nissan dealerships. You'll need a CHAdeMO adapter to use them that cost $450 new, but they're often for sale cheaper on this site. Some CHAdeMO are pay per use, some not. Some Nissan dealers love Tesla, other hate them. Call ahead for NIssan dealers. It always helps if you enthusiastically support Leaf, which it seems you can do.
Some Level 3 are SAE Combo, for which there is no Tesla adapter thus far, but most NA SAE Combo are co-located with non-Nissan CHAdeMO. Lots of those are pay for use, some are free.
There are lots of free options to your North in British Columbia, which has Province-wide incentives for EV charging. I won't give details here, but they're easily available in the Canada Forum and elsewhere.
More Superchargers keep coming, never quite as quickly as we want them to, but faster than we have any right to expect. Looking at Supercharge.info gives better planning perspective than does Tesla's own site, partly because Tesla tends to announce new Superchargers by simply showing them in your car Trip Planner. Supercharge.info links to specific discussions on TMC, and is mostly crowd-sourced.
Also, EVTripPlanner is frequently the trip planner of choice for many of us. It was developed by a high school student, now college student, who did a really good job of building something simply and usable. It does not do anything fancy (yet), but it does accept your own vehicle and driving habits and considers altitude and temperature changes.
The chief weakness common to all EV Planners at the moment, is that one cannot upload a predesigned trip into the vehicle navigation system. That one irritates me, because we could do that with first generation light aircraft navigation systems in the 1980's, before GPS was available for private use. Here we are more than 30 years later and we cannot do the same for cars!
I may have listed a few things you already know, but since you're new to the subject I thought you might like a few basics as well a some comments on the very dynamic field of Tesla/EV Trip Planning.
JeffK
Well-Known Member
If you want to email the developer... it's actually a very simple export which can be retrieved by your phone. The developer wouldn't have to do much to implement it.The chief weakness common to all EV Planners at the moment, is that one cannot upload a predesigned trip into the vehicle navigation system. That one irritates me, because we could do that with first generation light aircraft navigation systems in the 1980's, before GPS was available for private use. Here we are more than 30 years later and we cannot do the same for cars!
Retrieving it is easy. Exporting it into the Tesla navigation system seems not to be so easy.
JeffK
Well-Known Member
I was talking about straight Google maps to Google maps is easy... It depends on how Tesla and Ev trip planning websites utilize the API. It's a software issue, easily fixed.
That's why the 1980's vintage airplane Navigation systems were so easy. regardless of specific vendor, the API was always the same, although it was not called API back then. Once GPS and then internet came into existence the old API still worked. There have been refinements, but that initial system had precisely defined metadata, and all spatial references depended on precisely defined coordinates, both demands high accuracy too. Luckily for the transportation world none of that needed to change.
Unluckily for the automotive world vendors love proprietary formats and specific, arcane differences. Thus we can have uncommunicating versions of Google Maps, and vendors who want to make data interchange difficult. Sadly, it is not just a matter of API, or so it seems to me. I wish it were Google Maps to Google Maps. Then Waze would be easier too.
Similar threads
