CCS chargers were pretty sparse north of San Francisco when we leased the i3 (all the way back in September). But since then NRG / eVgo has put CCS/CHAdeMO chargers in San Rafael at the Northgate mall and at the premium outlets in Petaluma for people who want to go up to wine country. We decided this was a good excuse to use our Charge Now cards that came with the car before the end of the year to get free charging until the end of 2015. I activated the cards online first and everything went smoothly at both chargers (there was a bit more drama when we used the Greenlots CCS charger in Point Reyes a few weeks ago). The CCS chargers in San Rafael and Petaluma are both ABB Terra 53 CJ models rated at 50 kW, 125 A, 500V. I also learned that if you use your Charge Now card, the charger will shut off once your free 30 minute session is up. I took a bunch of datapoints during each charge session (I repeatedly snapped photos of the data on the charger screen for lack of a more elegant solution). I can post the data on how long it takes to reach various states of charge if people are interested.
CCS chargers in San Rafael, CA and Petaluma CA are now live!
- Thread starter wraithnot
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tiburonh
Well-known member
wraithnot said:
Excellent news re the addition of Petaluma (the one in San Rafael has been posted about previously). Please be sure to post about your experience at Petaluma on Plugshare.
For what it's worth, when I used the one at Northgate last week it cut me off after 45 minutes, not 30 minutes, but it sounds like all the NRG/eVgo chargers seem to change their performance on somewhat of a random basis.
Thanks!
jadnashuanh
Well-known member
Running at those high current levels, it might be the CCS unit is overheating itself, depending on ambient conditions, and shuts down to protect itself. That's a huge amount of power concentrated in the chassis, and the conversion process isn't perfect.
tiburonh said:
I posted photos of my wife's andesite silver i3 charging at both Northgate and Petaluma on plugshare. Plugshare doesn't seem to allow you to specify multiple EVs and I don't feel like getting two separate accounts so my plugshare posts are attributed to "Jeff's Model S"
When you had the Northgate charger stop after 45 minutes, were you using an eVgo card, or the BMW Charge Now card? The Charge Now card says it will provide free 30 minute charge sessions until the end of 2015 (if you use it at least once before the end of 2014) and the charger cut off exactly at 30 minutes without any error messages so I assumed it was due to using the Charge Now card. But we only stayed at Petaluma for about 25 minutes so I didn't replicate the behavior.
jadnashuanh said:
I did give the Northgate charger a pretty good workout because we started at 11% SOC and 8 miles on the guess-o-meter and ended with 88% SOC and 65 miles of range for a total energy gain of 13.85 kWh at the end of 30 minutes. But I'm inclined to believe the charger shut off after 30 minutes because the Charge Now card only gives you a 30 minute free charge and they didn't want people to get annoyed if their credit card got billed for the "free charge" because they let it go longer than 30 minutes. But I won't know for sure unless I can replicate the behavior.
Boatguy
Well-known member
Great news, I'll give it try!
jadnashuanh
Well-known member
Now, if the east coast, and particularly New Hampshire decided to install a few DC charging stations, I might get to use my expensive option on my car! It would be nice to have some along the I-90 corridor, too.
Boatguy
Well-known member
I tried the CCS charger in San Rafael today using the ChargeNow / ChargePoint card that came with the i3. It worked great, and shut down after 30 minutes. I arrived with about 42% charge and departed with 93%. The shut down after 30 min is no big deal. I removed the plug, put it back in, told the charger to start, flashed my card again and it started right up. They may get more clever in the future and lock us out for awhile after usage.
While the ChargeNow / ChargePoint website does show my DC Fast activation, the ChargePoint mobile app would never show my charging status and does not show that session in my recently visited or history. Some sort of disconnect there.
While the ChargeNow / ChargePoint website does show my DC Fast activation, the ChargePoint mobile app would never show my charging status and does not show that session in my recently visited or history. Some sort of disconnect there.
Boatguy said:
Glad to hear you can simply unplug and restart the session if you want to top off the battery. If my wife wasn't so keen to get to Petaluma right when the premium outlets opened, I would have given that a shot.
At Northgate, the battery went from 11% to 88% in 30 minutes and at Petaluma it went from 55% to 95% in 25 minutes. I got enough data points to tell that it took about a minute for the charger to ramp up to full power (about 42 kW) and that it stayed at full power until some point between 60% and 69%. Charging power then began to ramp down as the battery filled up. It was down to half power at around 80%, one-quarter power at 86%, and all the way down to 5 kW (the power of L2 charging) at 95%. At that point you're probably better off plugging into the L2 charger to top the battery off since you won't have to restart the session every half hour.
Since I had all the numbers in a spreadsheet at this point, I went ahead and calculated the rate of miles of range added per hour before the power starts ramping down. If anyone asks, with this model of ABB charger you can add range to a BMW i3 BEV at up to 180 miles of range per hour
The CCS charger in Pleasanton recently went live (3903 Santa Rita Rd Rose Pavilion, Pleasanton, CA 94588). And the CCS charger in Vacaville went live about a week ago, but I didn't realize it because it didn't show up in plugshare searches until a couple of days ago.
I'm fairly impressed with the CCS charger deployment in the SF bay area. Now they just need to put one in San Francisco proper to handle the one day a month my wife needs to drive a bit more than the i3 BEV's range.
I'm fairly impressed with the CCS charger deployment in the SF bay area. Now they just need to put one in San Francisco proper to handle the one day a month my wife needs to drive a bit more than the i3 BEV's range.
Boatguy
Well-known member
BMW marketing is really missing it here. These are like stealth installations. They should be featuring it, blasting us with communications and dedicating a few web site pages.
stumbledotcom
Well-known member
Boatguy said:
I believe marketing now would be premature. The network isn't extensive or robust enough. The Bay Area probably has as many SAE CCS stations if not more than other regions but there are still only six locations that work with the BMW ChargeNow promotion. That sixth one in Berkeley opened this past week but already was broken by the weekend. Marketing now would just create expectations and demand that the infrastructure can't support. Six months from now hopefully it will be a different story.
