Summer travels with no battery cooling

[hradek]

I made a summer trip between San Mateo and Topanga Canyon in between heat domes. I had complied a list of chargers with chademo chargers every 20-50 miles and a second list of hotels with level 2 chargers along the way. If your going to do something dumb like this make sure you start early, heck if I was not so old I would have done it at night. Of course I took the 101 as only fools drive the 5 in a Leaf. more to follow

 

[hradek]

Choosing the right charging station for long drives is a bit of an art. Plug share is the best app for giving a list of possible chargers for your Leaf but you always want to confirm while you are charging at your previous stop that the charger you will be driving to next is actually working that day by using the app specific for the charger you are driving to next. I find choosing a charging station at a shopping center is usually a poor choice. They tend to be busy and often have users and people parking in the one chademo charging station you need. This same problem exist for Electrify America who usually have only one chademo that is shared with a cc2 and someone is using that cc2. On the other hand, I find charging stations at gas stations are a good bet because EV drivers hate driving to gas stations so they tend to be less busy and they have the added bonus of windshield washing stations. Charge Point has charging stations at Chevron and BP pulse has charging station at Arco. Another lesser know charging station is Loop EV chargers at US Bank which are older and slower so many CC2 users go elsewhere which means the chademo is likely to be less busy. One single advantage to the Leaf is the obvious choice of charging at “you guessed it” a Nissan dealer. Call ahead to confirm they are open and their charger has the chademo you seek.

Before leaving on any long trip, log into and make sure you have funded the apps you plan on using to charge your Leaf. Charging your Leaf is a problem in so many ways. All of them will require a good cell phone signal or WiFi. Some of them may require you plug in before you tell the app to charge and others will require you to connect after you tell the app to charge. One of them requires that the car be shut off before you start charging. It would be easy to assume, why use an app at all, just use your credit card. That does work sometimes and then again it may not. I usually have my best luck by using an app to identify the machine and then select the start charging option. I have attached a screen shot of the apps I use. I fund the apps using a series of virtual credit cards from capital one.

 

[Chad E. Mo]

My recent experience has been that turning the Leaf off before charging is a must, otherwise the chargers fail to connect.

 

[BillAinCT]

Once connected can you double START to turn on the AC (or heat which I do look forward to)?

 

[hradek]

So I left San Mateo about 8:30 and got to my first charging station with 60% charge, a bp pulse station with one CC2 connector and one CHAdeMO connector. Under normal circumstances I would not choose this type of setup and go for the charge point in Gilroy with two stations with CHAdeMO connectors. The Gilroy station however is in a shopping center and the big difference is this bp pulse station has the newer charging option of allowing both the CC2 and the CHAdeMO to function at the same time. Seems rather obvious but you always want to avoid places where you have to wait for someone to get done charging.

 

[hradek]

From the BP pulse station in Morgan Hill I headed south toward Salinas. My Nissan came with a large charging credit for EVGO charging credit that would expire in a year. I like the EVGO stations themselves because they often come with more than one CHAdeMO station but coupled to CC2. Usually you can use only one or the other unlike the BP pulse I just came from but the locations often place the stations in shopping malls and in the case of the Salinas EVGO in the front of the mall near a Knob Hill Foods. Knob Hill has some well priced sushi if you go there but I have not been back there since the last time I tried to use it there was a ICE parked in the EV spot with a disabled parking sticker. If you choose a charger in a mall, chargers should be located towards the back of the mall away from the stores. I continued past Salinas toward a shopping Mall in Soledad.

 

[hradek]

What makes Soledad a good choice for charging a Leaf is there are several charging options in a small shopping center that is rarely busy. There is an Electrify America with the usual one CHAdeMO paired with a CC2 but the better choice is the EV Range a smaller web based not app based charging option. It is located next to Denny's and has 3 paired CHAdeMO CC2 chargers. It is harder to use which makes it less busy. If you activate it with the web option plug into after the web page tells you to plug in and if you activate it with a credit card plug into it before you start the process. It is difficult to get to work be it always works for me. There is a nice grocery store with a bathroom and good selection and prices. When I arrived at Soledad I was at 60% and the temperature was in the 90s.

 

[hradek]

I left Soledad with 87% battery and temperatures in the mid 90s headed for BP pulse in King City. There are also Charge Point and EVGO level 3 stations but I checked ahead and the BP pulse was available. A short stop at King City and I was off to a EVCS station in San Miquel. It was well over a 100 by then and San Miquel is a sleepy little town off the 101 with one charging station next to an laundromat that sometimes have customers using the EV charging station as a parking area. The one shady spot was already occupied by a Tesla with a sunshade up, unplugged and not charging. Laundromat was empty with no customers in the heat of the day. I fired up the charger and it charged to about 70% before it thanked me and told me to move on. It's too hot to charge today you idiot. As I drove from King City to San Miquel I could look to the west and see the farm workers picking our food from the fields, yah, too hot to charge.

 

[hradek]

Between San Miquel and Paso Robles are two rest stops with chargers. The south bound has better cell coverage and they both have free level 3 and level 2 chargers but it is rare for the level 3 chargers to be working. The charging stations are located under the solar panels which offers some shade. I plugged in the level 2 charger well after noon to plan the rest of the day in the heat of the day. Paso Robles was well on its way to 110, Atascadero a little cooler but things did not look good until Santa Maria. You can travel in the Leaf fine in this kind of heat but it is not so easy to charge. Even Level 2 charging is a bit of a problem at 110. I moved on to Paso Robles and it was hot at the Electrify American charger in the bank parking lot without shade. In the future I would go for the Charge Point station in Paso Robles as it offers some shade. I added about 10% in Paso Robles and moved on to Atascadero to a Loop station and added another 15% to bring the battery to 70% and headed for Santa Maria skipping past Pismo Beach which looking back was a mistake. It had a really cool Electrify America charging station.