Tesla Chronicles #15 - Bitter Cold weather and a 110V charger

(Posted to Facebook 2/1/2022)

I am not talking our typical winter weather, although I am guessing it would have been bad too, but temps in the 0-4 F range.

Susan and I took the Tesla to Watkins Glenn for a nice long, long weekend. We found this great B&B (1897 Beekman House - awesome Victorian house and great owners in Dundee, NY) that had no guests other than us….excellent from a COVID perspective! ) We left Friday morning and didn’t expect that little bit of snow that early in the day. The roads were terrible most of the way, which resulted in an extra hour added to our driving…. Not to mention right at the start of our journey, it almost ended as we were nearly involved in a head-on collision on 422 on our way Friday morning, but thankfully just barely avoided a car that smashed through the barrier near the Limerick exit.

So anyway…we had high temperatures 10-15 and lows near 0. I learned a few things about the Tesla and how it functions in cold and snow. First, I have never felt so confident on snowy roads….this car just goes and goes. The dual motor AWD and traction control is nearly unstoppable….extremely deep snow would be the one thing that would likely stop it…or more accurately, damage the front bumper (I hope not to find this out). Many of the secondary roads stayed snow covered most of our trip and we never had any issues getting around.

In the extreme cold, the car warms up so fast, or better yet, remotely 1 minute before you walk out to it. Unfortunately, the cold weather just kills range (but we knew this), but below 10 takes that to the next level.

The biggest impact to us came when charging. I totally mis-calculated how much power the car needed to keep the batteries warm while charging. Why did I miss this? We’ll, I have been putting the car in the garage on our coldest nights, where it never gets below about 40. Second, I use a charger that delivers 12kw of power…. and I haven’t been closely thinking about how some charges have been inefficient lately.

So, here are the geek numbers. The B&B let us plug into a 12AMP, 110V outlet…. That equates to roughly 1.333 kw of power. We used this same charger at Deep Creek this summer and had no issues adding enough power every day for our day trips. Apparently, when it is near zero, the car uses somewhere between 0.7 and 1.0 kw just to keep the battery warm (I didn’t think about this at all)….so not much left to actually add any power to the battery. I was hoping to get 20-30% per night and was getting 4-8%. This presented us with a challenge as the Watkins Glen area really doesn’t have any close by superchargers. There are a few destination chargers (6-7 kw max) in the area which are nice for long stops, but not very practical….and in extreme cold, we weren’t about to stop and walk around town…so we had to plan our third day there around driving to Ithaca and Waterloo to hit Superchargers so that we would have enough for our 4th day and our trip out of town to get home.

The second charging issue we had, and I would never have thought of this….the car actually refused to charge when stone cold. We went to dinner and we’re in there for over an hour…it was maybe 4 while we were at dinnner. We hoped in the car to go 1/2 mile to a destination charger, and the charger wouldn’t work…. They had another, slower charger that I connected, but after 5 minutes or so, I noticed we had lost two percent….. I was a bit worried….we decided to give up and drive 10 minutes back to the B&B…. This must have been just long enough to warm up the batteries because when we got to the B&B with 18%, it started charging without issue…..we got to 25% overnight and used almost every % of that to get to a Supercharger the next morning.

Places like Watkins Glen right now is a real challenge for EV owners, particularly in the winter. In hindsight, we should have stayed at the hotel in town that has destination chargers on-site or in another parking lot a block away….or just taken the CX-5. Susan searched for Air B&B’s for a return trip this spring/summer, found over 300, but then down selected to ones with EV charging allowed (not necessarily a 240V plug, just “allowed” which I am guessing is a 110V outlet) and the list dropped to about 4…. 1/75 is not good. Rental homes, B&B’s and hotels with level 2 chargers is a must in a region like this if DC fast chargers or Tesla Superchargers aren’t put in town. Another option would be for more of the wineries to have stations….if you can get 10% charge during an hour long visit, and that gives you 20-30 miles, that is plenty to make it from winery to winery and then some….and people wouldn’t be in a hurry and they would honestly sell more wine. Win-win. I talked to the B&B owners this morning and they are going to do some research and talk to the chamber of commerce….hopefully they start to get some more businesses on-board.