EV general discussion

lordrobs said:
Unless you happen to want to use your car in Wednesday which would require charging it up on Tuesday night :confused:

I've been an Octopus customer since day one but the gimmicks are getting a bit much. "Great news, between 13:00 and 14:00 on Wednesday we're giving an hour of free energy." Great, maybe I'll book the day off work to save myself 7p on half a wash cycle :roll eyes:
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u ok hun? dm me x
 
Spleen Sauce said:
Doesn’t surprise me. I was at Membury services charging and a lady pulled in with her brand new Model 3 and had no idea what she was doing - likely because the handover at Tesla now is ‘here’s the car, off you go’ and not everyone reads up on how to do this stuff in advance. In any case, she clearly needed help and instead of offering to help or show her what needed doing, the chap in the next bay in his Model X decided to watch and laugh at her. The guy the other side avoided all eye contact.
I showed her what she needed to do (hadn’t even set up billing in the Tesla app). She was embarrassed but very thankful that not all of us are complete tools.
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I had this at Gloucester the other week, a couple of old biddies were having trouble getting one of the SWARCO units to handshake with their Zoe, all the Tesla guys just say there looking at them, I'm pretty sure one of them took a picture for the lols. I finished my rather nice sausage roll and went out to help them.

Spleen Sauce said:
Besides that, Cardiff superchargers are hilarious. You still get super angry Tesla owners (usually Model S drivers from experience) who get proper wound up when a Polestar or Mach E pulls in to charge. I’ve seen them argue still that non-Tesla owners aren’t allowed, etc. It’s all very sad.
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Doesn't surprise me at all, some of them were like that to those who bought Model 3's in the early days.

lordrobs said:
Ok so the last bit is a bit ranty but the point still stands that promoting half price charging with the caveat that you can't charge the following day is a bit pony.
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There is no such thing as a free lunch...
 
lordrobs said:
Ok so the last bit is a bit ranty but the point still stands that promoting half price charging with the caveat that you can't charge the following day is a bit pony.
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Octopus are promoting energy shifting for nerds. If you want economy 7 and not think about it, fill your boots.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
There is no such thing as a free lunch...
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Normally the data on how they can get us to change our habits by throwing a few pennies in our direction is payment enough though.
Octopus are promoting energy shifting for nerds. If you want economy 7 and not think about it, fill your boots.
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I'm not fussed myself. I'm tight as a ducks anus generally when it comes to spending money but even I can't be bothered jumping through hoops to try and reduce my whopping 7kWh average daily usage.

I know a guy who is heavily into farming solar and selling it back at the optimum time. It just always comes across as a really hard way to make a tiny return on a massive investment. They also took half a day's holiday to take advantage of that hours free electric which I guess absolutely proves your point!
 
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Penfold101 said:
Might take both mine and the Mrs EV’s (Polestar and EQC) to the Gloucester services Supercharger tomorrow and see what happens…
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Expect it to be busy. I was there on the first Sunday of the school holidays at lunchtime and it was full, no queue but each time someone left, the slot was filled within a few minutes. The chargers were also hitting the site power limit also so not blisteringly fast either. There were a few SWARCO units available and turning over cars as you'd expect.

Gloucester and Tebay are excellent services but the downside of places like Gloucester and Tebay is they are excellent services and people don't stop for a splash and dash. Everyone is there for at least 20-30 mins because they want to be not because they have to be.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
Expect it to be busy. I was there on the first Sunday of the school holidays at lunchtime and it was full, no queue but each time someone left, the slot was filled within a few minutes. The chargers were also hitting the site power limit also so not blisteringly fast either. There were a few SWARCO units available and turning over cars as you'd expect.

Gloucester and Tebay are excellent services but the downside of places like Gloucester and Tebay is they are excellent services and people don't stop for a splash and dash. Everyone is there for at least 20-30 mins because they want to be not because they have to be.
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By this same metric I assume that people desperate enough to stop at Knutsford are stood by their car ready to yank the charging cable out the second they have enough charge? :p
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
That's pretty much my approach when I need to stop at the likes of Grantham and Blyth :p
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You'd think to that with my job my motorway services knowledge would be encyclopedic but I'll remember that Knutsford is a complete hole for a few months (I stopped there a couple of weeks ago) then completely forget and make the same mistake again!

Only ones I remember long term for being decent are Norton Cranes and Rugby. Beaconsfield I remember for the novelty of it having a Wetherspoons and Derby and Burton for being a complete ghost town of closed outlets.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with the company car suggestions. I thought it best to fire off an email as there was a stack of information but in essence I've suggested one PHEV estate, one PHEV SUV and then basically asked the question about whether EVs are an option. I listed out half a dozen different models that were in budget used and highlighted an example of one that could be had new for £5k more and pointed out that being new it was eligible for 100% write down.

Wait and see now I guess.
 
pc-guy said:
Is there any downside to using Tesla superchargers for non-Tesla cars?
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Not great for higher voltage cars either. My Ipace is much faster charging at higher SoC on FastNed than the Tesla units. Plus I’m not into chogging…

Did a survey a few months back and got 3 months free ionity Passport so activated that yesterday for 43p/kWh and used at Cobham yesterday whilst eating McDonald’s breakfast.
 
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jpaul said:
which are the paired tesla chargers where you end up sharing the power if you have a neighbour - or that's prehistory


I'm a bit surprised that there seem to no low profile charging cables afaik (like the house internet ones I just put in)
but some of the pavement porotectors look like they would present less of a pedestrian obstacle being wider https://ev-extras.com/products/ev-cable-floor-cover-protector-pedestrian-anti-trip
(whilst I have a garage the power it has is only 4-5Kw so pavement would be easier)


.
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Feel free to use a question mark from time to time rather than italics…

Like this

What on earth is prehistory?

lordrobs said:
Unless you happen to want to use your car in Wednesday which would require charging it up on Tuesday night :confused:

I've been an Octopus customer since day one but the gimmicks are getting a bit much. "Great news, between 13:00 and 14:00 on Wednesday we're giving an hour of free energy." Great, maybe I'll book the day off work to save myself 7p on half a wash cycle :roll eyes:
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Does your washing machine not have a timer?

I’m not sure load balancing of the national grid is a gimmick?
 
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jpaul said:
which are the paired tesla chargers where you end up sharing the power if you have a neighbour - or that's prehistory
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They ALL share power to a lesser or greater extent.

The old V2 chargers (identified with having 2 cables) share up to 150kw between 2 stalls.

V3 and V4 chargers have a power cabinet rated to around 350kw on the AC side and this is shared between 3 or 4 stalls depending on how busy the site is expected to be and how much power they can get hold of. Each power cabinet also has a DC bus where they can share power between themselves as needed and in effect creating a single power cabinet rated for 350kw X the number of cabinets on site.

Pretty much all the big charging hubs from all suppliers these days are set up in away that they 'share power' in one way or another. Almost all of them are provisioned with significantly more chargers than their power supply is able to support at high power. This makes sense given chargers are seldom at their full output for any meaningful length of time.

If the chargers are full they will probably bouncing off the total site power limit, be that Tesla or otherwise.

jpaul said:
(whilst I have a garage the power it has is only 4-5Kw so pavement would be easier)
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The answer has always been to run another cable out to your garage or just charge at 3.6kw and accept its slower but in reality is probably more than enough for 99.9% of the charging you actually need to do.

That said upgrading the power supply isn't an investment for that one car, EV's are not going away and it will probably be there for as long as your house/garage exists for.
 
lordrobs said:
Unless you happen to want to use your car in Wednesday which would require charging it up on Tuesday night :confused:

I've been an Octopus customer since day one but the gimmicks are getting a bit much. "Great news, between 13:00 and 14:00 on Wednesday we're giving an hour of free energy." Great, maybe I'll book the day off work to save myself 7p on half a wash cycle :roll eyes:
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Shock - the world doesn't revolve around you :p
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
They ALL share power to a lesser or greater extent.

The old V2 chargers (identified with having 2 cables) share up to 150kw between 2 stalls.

V3 and V4 chargers have a power cabinet rated to around 350kw on the AC side and this is shared between 3 or 4 stalls depending on how busy the site is expected to be and how much power they can get hold of. Each power cabinet also has a DC bus where they can share power between themselves as needed and in effect creating a single power cabinet rated for 350kw X the number of cabinets on site.

Pretty much all the big charging hubs from all suppliers these days are set up in away that they 'share power' in one way or another. Almost all of them are provisioned with significantly more chargers than their power supply is able to support at high power. This makes sense given chargers are seldom at their full output for any meaningful length of time.

If the chargers are full they will probably bouncing off the total site power limit, be that Tesla or otherwise.
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Do you install superchargers for a living? :D
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
The answer has always been to run another cable out to your garage or just charge at 3.6kw and accept its slower but in reality is probably more than enough for 99.9% of the charging you actually need to do.
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Pretty sure his answer will just be continually to comment about it, but never do anything, or the move on to complaining about the cost for 6 years in this thread, and by the time everyone else is in flying cars they may have installed something. :p
 
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