Vger
Active Member
Too bad! Great initiative. Do you think it would help for others to write similar letters, so they get it that this is a significant potential demand?
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Charging at Campgrounds and RV Parks
- Thread starter doug
- Start date
Too bad! Great initiative. Do you think it would help for others to write similar letters, so they get it that this is a significant potential demand?
dirkhh
Middle-aged Member
I sent an email to the President of AVRC, Paul Bambei, with cc: to Barb Youmans, Senior director of Membership and Education. You can find their contact info at the following URL on the ARVC.org website:
Contact | National Association of RV Parks Campgrounds | Centennial, CO
If anyone wants to follow up, here's what I wrote:
Hi, Paul -
My name is Steve Zimmermann, and I live in Colorado. I'm a Tesla Model S owner who has driven this all-electric car over 23,000 miles on electricity alone in the last 18 months. On my road trips I've discovered that RV parks are often the best charging option available for the Tesla; specifically, the typical 50A NEMA 14-50 outlets found at most RV parks that, properly wired, can provide 240VAC at 40 amps (continuous), which is enough to add roughly 25 miles of range in an hour of charging.
My experience with calling up park owners and inquiring about charging my car (for anywhere from an hour or two in the middle of the day to overnight) has been mixed. Some owners are intrigued to hear I'm driving cross-country in an electric car, want to know more, and invite me to stop; some are doubtful; some don't want anything to do with me. The times I've been successful in obtaining a charge I've paid anywhere from $0 to the full overnight site rate, with $10 for a two-hour midday charging stop being about average.
I believe that your members could be missing out on an additional revenue stream as electric cars become more popular and more numerous on the nation's highways. Many times, an electric car owner driving cross-country needs to stop in the middle of the day for a few hours to charge; this could fit in nicely with the slack time between RVers checking out in the morning and new RVers checking in during the afternoon: the empty sites could be generating revenue instead of sitting unused.
What I'm proposing is that ARVC undertake to help educate its membership about car owners' need to charge their electric vehicles and the possibility of the members making some extra income by catering to that need.
Typically, depending on local electricity rates, my Model S will consume about $1.00 to $1.50 in electricity per hour while charging, and that amount of electricity will take the car another 25 or so miles down the road. So, in round numbers, an hour's charge is the range equivalent of about a gallon of gasoline in a modern gas-powered sedan's tank.
Assuming the charging car is occupying an otherwise empty site, to make it worth their while park owners would need to collect perhaps three times the cost of the electricity delivered to the car; in the case of a NEMA 14-50 wired for 240VAC/50A, you could round that to $4 or $5 per hour of charging, with a cap at the overnight site rate. I believe such a policy could be a good thing for both electric car owners and RV park owners, in that it removes a lot of the uncertainty on both sides of the equation.
There's a lot more to the subject of electric car charging; for instance, while 50A outlets are good, there are faster charging options available with dedicated EV charging stations. Most are not very expensive to install and maintain, and a faster charge is always welcome when we're trying to get somewhere in our cars. But all that can wait for a later discussion. First things, first: I'd like to ask your organization's help in creating a rational set of guidelines for your membership with an eye to helping them create an electric vehicle charging policy and rate structure for their parks, at no out-of-pocket cost to them and with the potential to create a new income stream, simply by taking advantage of the facilities they already have.
Thanks for your consideration,
Steve
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It's ARVC.org, though. Hope you sent it to the right e-mail address(es)! :tongue: It was a very nicely written letter, too.
bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
Nice letter, great advocacy for all of us. Thanks!
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(Hope people leave you positive reputation for this kind of thing ...)
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(Hope people leave you positive reputation for this kind of thing ...)
Nicely drafted letter.
I may consider sending similar. If I do, however, I'm inclined to add a small portion about the value of having folks with idle time at their campsite: possible patronizing of their snack bar or gift shop... as well as exposure of their site to folks who might not otherwise have seen it, and thus become possible fufture customers.
While most campsites probably don't have many opportunities to monetize our brief stay there, we might as well mention the few they do have. That's part of the play Tesla is making with merchants when they negotiate for supercharger locations... it couldn't hurt to mention it in this context as well.
Thanks for the ideas...
I may consider sending similar. If I do, however, I'm inclined to add a small portion about the value of having folks with idle time at their campsite: possible patronizing of their snack bar or gift shop... as well as exposure of their site to folks who might not otherwise have seen it, and thus become possible fufture customers.
While most campsites probably don't have many opportunities to monetize our brief stay there, we might as well mention the few they do have. That's part of the play Tesla is making with merchants when they negotiate for supercharger locations... it couldn't hurt to mention it in this context as well.
Thanks for the ideas...
Has anyone actually gotten a male 30TT to female NEMA 14-50 to work on the Model S? I'm at the state fair and tried on known working outlets and didn't even get a light on the UMC.
They don't work unless they are specifically made for use with the Model S. I don't recall the wiring details but a search would probably find the explanation if you're interested.
This one is said to be made for the Model S, but I haven't tried it:
NEMA 14-50R to TT-30P RV Plug Adapter
davewill
Active Member
Unless it's specifically made for EV charging it won't work. The ones that are made for RVs put the single hot wire on both hots of the 14-50. Here's the cheapest one I was able to find:
Conntek 30A 125-Volt RV/Generator Plug TT-30P to 50-Amp Electric Vehicle Adapter Cord for Tesla
I've used it with an OpenEVSE. Should word equally well with the UMC.
Conntek 30A 125-Volt RV/Generator Plug TT-30P to 50-Amp Electric Vehicle Adapter Cord for Tesla
I've used it with an OpenEVSE. Should word equally well with the UMC.
NigelM
Recovering Member
I see that Def Leppard with Styx and Tesla are there tonight! Did you take your Tesla to see Tesla? That would be a cool story.
I would have been surprised had they worked. TT30 is 120V and the UMC knows to expect a 240V 50A circuit when the 14-50P adapter is present. And in 240V mode does not use the neutral. Ground is only a safety reference. As TexasEV says, if the adapter takes the single hot received by TT30 plug and connects to L1 and L2 of the 14-50R receptacle then the UMC will see 0V on its power pins. In a pinch this works on an RV where many things are 120V but the 240V devices will not. Not ideal but its better than nothing.
Your second sentence is incorrect. The UMC knows no such thing. You can indeed give the UMC 120V through the NEMA 14-50 adapter and it will work. You can make or buy TT-30 charging adapters from the links above and you will be able to charge at 120V using the Tesla NEMA 14-50 adapter.
And the opposite is also true, you can give it 240V through the 5-20 adapter (which was intended for 120V) when using a 6-20P to 5-20R connector so it will set the amps correctly. The UMC sees amps, not volts.
Well, more specifically the UMC (as well as the car's chargers) accept an input range... ostensibly ~100-250V (although the car's chargers can accept 277V, I don't believe the UMC is rated for that... but I'm too lazy to go grab it form my car to look).
In addition, the UMC is also rated at up to 40A input (on a 50A circuit), and the interchangeable plug-head adapters have a method to singnal which adapter in installed (via a resistor), and thus set the pilot signal sent to the car. The car's chargers then know the maximum current it's safe to draw.
You are correct that the UMC/chargers don't care that an adapter is plugged in to a circuit that is wired to provide more/less voltage than is typical for that plug type... but it does indeed have a voltage range it works within.
Bugeater
Member
At one RV park they only had 120V service so they loaned me a Y adapter that plugged into 2 120V outlets in the same box. The boxes were all wired with 220V just split into the 2 120V outlets. Once I remembered to drop the charge rate down to 30amps it worked just fine! In the morning we had a full charge.
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