On Arriving Early to Charge

I know that if I drive from one place to another I will use about 30 percent of the car’s battery. This means that if I want to offset the drive with charge time I need to go extra early. I know that the battery needs 1 hour for each five percent, so to recharge by thirty percent I need four hours or more. As I write this the car says that it’s at 35 percent or so and that it will take ten hours to charge. This means that when I arrived at 10:00 I will need to wait until 20:00 for the battery to be full.

I know that if I go to the shops it costs just four percent for the back and forth trip. In theory I could do the trip for the shops 25 times before I need to charge but in practice I will never take that risk, for obvious reasons.

We always have the option of using faster chargers that will do the same work in two hours or less. This might not be as good for the battery. Slow charging is better The battery may heat up less.

It’s like when you’re filling diving bottles with air. You fill them to 230 bars, and then you let them cool for a few minutes and then you top them up. As gas is compressed it heats up, so it makes sense to let that heat dissipate and fill the tank a little more. Sometimes a full tank is at 210 bars once it has cooled, rather than 230 bars.

With a petrol car you think “I have a meeting at this time in that place so I need to count this much time to get there. With an electric car you think “If I go at this time then I can charge to offset the amount of battery charge I used to get from A to B. If you question “But why?” the answer is simple. If I go back and forth, without thinking of battery power I will get to below 30 percent and then I need to charge at a public charging point and these are expensive. Normally I would go from 70-60 percent but the car was driven a longer distance so I have to offset the difference but that is taking time. The simplest solution is to leave the car overnight to charge fully. With public transport this is convenient.

And Finally

When I have my own electric car I will have a charging point or two in the garage so that I can charge conveniently. As I write this blog post the car is charging downstairs. I work remotely so I am not limited by time or location.