Tesla Chronicles #12 - Destination Charging on STD outlet.

(Posted to Facebook on 9/18/2021)

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure how charging would go while we were on vacation a few weeks ago. All we had available to us was an outside 110V outlet… this delivers about 3-4 miles of range per hour of charging. There was also a destination charger nearby (Visitors Center) that would deliver about 20-30 miles of range per hour charge. If I needed this, I would have plugged in there and left it for several hours and had someone else in the family come get me. Turns out, we never needed this. We were able to keep the car plugged in 20 hours a day or so, which was significantly more miles of charge than we were using while there. It did take two days to get it up to 90% since we arrived there below 50%…. But I had no issues keeping it above 75-90% charge all week. We only needed 20-25% to get out of town on our way home until we would have gotten to the first Supercharger on our route.

Overall….the trip was easy! The kayak on top of the car knocked down our efficiency but it didn’t really change how we traveled or stopped. On the way out, we made it all the way to Breezewood with 14% left. We stopped there for about 30 minutes to charge and eat lunch. That was really the only stop we really needed. Because of the notes above about destination charging, we ended up stopping one more time for a few minutes to add a little more charge (and we actually needed a bio break anyway). I’d estimate that charging made our trip about 20 minutes longer than it would have been in each direction. On the way home, we didn’t have quite enough to make it home, so we stopped a little west of Morgantown PA at a rest stop that now has the new 250kw superchargers. We needed a bio break as well and in the 5 minutes it took us to walk in/out, we had added way more charge than we needed to get home….so zero time impact there.

As more V3 Superchargers (250kw+) get installed, time to stop and charge up for long trips won’t be any longer than a typical bathroom stop.

Our solar panels were approved and turned on while on vacation, and we also switched over to Time of Use pricing for our electric. Charging the Tesla overnight is now $0.09 vs $0.15 per kWh. I have been using about 400 kWh of power at home for the Tesla/month…. That is about $24 of savings for night charging rates…. Peak power rates occur while we are producing peak solar power, so we aren’t using much power then.