Today I got to experience something new, to me, and exciting. I got to charge an EV in the rain. In theory you should avoid doing this because you don’t want moisture to get into the connectors of the car, as well as the rubber plugs. You also don’t want to get moisture into the plug of the EV station adaptor. I was not electrocuted, and from what I saw everything remained dry.
Yesterday I tested the Migrol Car Charging at Portes de Nyon. It’s an underground charging station that is accessible when the shopping centre is open. It has the double advantage of being close to the shops, but also of the centre oof Nyon, if you’re ready to walk for an hour or two and explore the time.
There is another charger by the same company in La Combe but La Combe is in the town, so you’re adding to traffic.
Yesterday I tried to use a slow charger to recharge the car. After 49 minutes I had charged 8.95 watts for 5.13 CHF. I got to about 63 percent. I stopped charging. I drove somewhere and by the time I got back I was down to 30 percent. I looked to my left as I was approaching McDonald’s and saw that the GoFast chargers were free so I stopped to charge.
After some trial and error I finally managed to get an electric car to charge at public charging points. The first success was at an evpass charging station where I was able to charge 13.1kW/h in an hour and 14 minutes using the app on my phone and a credit card for 8.48 CHF. The second time was with the TCS eCharge RFID tag that I ordered from the Touring Club Suisse for free.
It’s easy to drive a petrol car. You fill up, and 500-600 kilometres later you fill up. With Electric vehicles it is the same in theory. In practice it isn’t that simple. The EV charging market is fragmented and each company has a different app and possibly RFID tag. The result is that you can either be loyal and use just one app or you can have two or more apps on your phone.
It rarely happens. I rarely forget my airpods at home, and when I do I usually turn around to get them. Yesterday I didn’t turn around. I went for my walk anyway. You might think “so what?” and you’d be right to. It doesn’t change much. I usually listen to podcasts and audiobooks, rather than music. I like my walks to be intellectually stimulating, as well as physically good for me.
Many years ago I used an old Beta SP camera with batteries that lasted just ten minutes per charge. I didn’t know if they would last long enough to get the entirety of what I was filming so I needed quite a few batteries. Since then I have used laptops, video cameras with 7hr long batteries, diving flash lights where I swapped new batteries in for each dive and more.
I know that driving to the house where I charge the electric vehicle will take about 20 percent. I also know that driving to the shops will take less than one percent per drive. This means that if I had an electric car, and I had a plug at home, rather than a climb up the Jura, I would need to charge every week or two, rather than almost every time I drive the car.
For a few weeks I have access to an electric car. This is an opportunity to experience what it’s like to have a car that you recharge, rather than refuel. I ran the car from one hundred percent down to fourty percent before charging it. It gave me a charge time of 11hrs.
A Normal Plug I’m using a normal plug, rather than a dedicated car charger so the charging time is much longer than it would be with a specialised charging option.