After many supercharging sessions my experience is the same. The good old pairing system is still in place.
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How pairing at Supercharging works
- Thread starter David99
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AwlBidnz
Old Guy to be driven around for yrs to come
Would more than one pair of charger connections ever be connected to the same charger? On one trip three of us ended up believing that #2A,2B,1A&1B were all effecting each other..We obviously had too much time at an SC & were trying to shorten that time, which wasn't working with those 4 connections. We had to convince ourselves that, most likely, two of the chargers were having issues & we were just kW drunk look'n for more.
With sharing, no, they are not ever tied more than a pair of two. But it does sometimes happen that a whole site is having power supply problems, and several of the pairs are having a hard time getting high enough power levels.
This. Superchargers are really hard to diagnose sometimes. There's a ton of factors that could affect charging speeds. Overall site power issues? Bad charging handle? Hot? Failed chargers inside the stack? Gunk in your charging port? Plus a ton more potential things. Any one, or any combination of many combine and make it tough to pin down the actual reason your one charge session is slower than normal.
cpa
Active Member
Amen to that!
These variables cause all owners to question why is my charge rate today 52kW at 20%SOC when last week it was 96kW at 22% at another location? Is it my car? Is it Tesla's hardware/software at the location? Is it the weather/elements? Is it sunspots?
There should be some way of communicating to us a diagnostic report after every Supercharging session. Just something as simple as today's charge rate is proper given the cold weather and cold battery. Or, your charge rate is slower than normal because the car detected unusual resistance in the charge connection. Or, this site is experiencing intermittent power fluctuations from the utility, and we have reduced the maximum speeds to allow for this. Whatever.
Doctor, I have this cough that won't go away . . .
Urban chargers are likely the same electronics but with the set to not apportion the charging between two stalls, rather to simply limit each stall to 72/75 kW. They have different pedestals and colors. It would make more sense to allow faster charging when not shared, but to set them to limit the power when a car is plugged into the other stall and requesting more than a minimal amount. Best of both worlds.
The best thing to do is to simply make sure the stalls are in order, 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B... Then the easy rule is to space out 1 stall from other cars. Then it's only when someone is in 2B and 4A that you have to read the labels to figure out where to charge.
jlv1
Twice as much fun
At least most SuC are ordered like that (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, ...), as far as I've seen on the east coast. There have been a few that aren't (e.g., Colonie, NY is 1A, 2A, 3A, 1B, ...).
The most confusing I have seen is Beaver in Utah. It had 4 and they added 4 more. he first 4 are 1A/1B/2A/2B the next 4 thy installed ar the other way! 3A/4A/3B/4B
cpa
Active Member
Check out Buellton. 5A is off by itself at the entrance to the stalls. 5B is way down the south side by the stairway to Mickey D's.
I think the algorithm has changed. It used to be first car arriving at a shared pair, was unaffected, and the second got what was left over. Now though it appears when charging two cars, the capacity is split in half to 72kw (75) max for both separately. I've been limping along at 72kw, then the vehicle next to me unplugs and leaves, my rate ran up to over 100. As long as my neighbor is pulling anything, my stall is capped at 72 (75).
Another way of looking at it is, if a 150kw SC is full, it appears to have the 72kw (75) capacity of an Urban SC. If your SC is half full (or less) you get a blast of extra speed, until someone pulls in next to you.
It would be cool if there was a way to answer the universal question, "I wonder which one of these empty cars has been here the longest?" <oh well>
I'm still experiencing the same behavior on V2 equipment that I always have. First car gets full power (144 kW), second car takes a quarter of the power (36 kW, dropping the first car down to 108 kW) until the first car's draw drops below half, at which point both cars get 72 kW. When the first car drops below 36 kW, the second car has up to 108 kW available. Urbans have a fixed split at 72/72. Superchargers in need of repair will output less power.
That used to be what I experienced. But no longer (within the last 90 odd days anyway). Someone fires up next to me, I drop to 72. Happened in St Charles MO, Fort Wayne IN, and Louisville, KY. It used to not matter, since the SCs in the midwest were largely deserted. Now though it is not uncommon for SCs to be more than half full.
I'll have to find a busy Supercharger to test this out. My recent 4,000 mile trip to Texas had wide-open Superchargers. I hope you're right, because an even split is nicer than the trickle of power that comes from the original configuration.
Yeah, I've seen many reports across a few sections of this forum of this behavior being changed some time in the past few months. Some? Most? All? of the 150-type Superchargers are defaulting to a half-and-half split when a second car plugs in, even if the Primary car was still supposed to be getting over 120 or 130kW.
I still haven't seen it investigated enough if this was some intentional change Tesla did, or if there is getting to be some frequent software glitch that is causing them to default back to some failsafe mode with that half and half functionality.
I'll head over to the local Supercharger after work and give it a whirl. It's almost always half full, so finding someone to pair up with shouldn't be a problem. Just gotta run the battery down to a point where it'll accept a reasonable speed.
I supercharge daily at different stations. The behavior has not changed across the board. Sometimes it seems to split 50/50, sometimes it seems the first come, first served method is used. I believe what really happens is they might try to optimize the load. Since 3 charge units always switch together, there are often situations where one car only uses a set of 3 units partially which then isn't available to the other one. I believe they changed it to minimize idle charge units. For example if car 1 charges at 80 kW, 28 kW are unused. I believe if there is a paired car 2 plugging in, car #1 gets capped to 72 and car #2 can use the remaining fully. I believe that's why it sometimes looks like a 50/50 split.
I like that theory. It seems like a sensible thing for them to do to make better utilization of the equipment.
except that it's going to piss off the person you're "stealing power" away from if you're not taking 72kw instead of 36kw.. I had just experienced this verbal assault last week. I arrived at a busy supercharger, 5 out of 8 stalls taken. each paired set had at least 1 car on it. so out of the 3 remaining, I randomly picked one.
Well, as soon as I backed in the lady in a Model X next to me on the paired stall with mine rolled down her window and started yelling at me that I'm "stealing her power" and that "it's going to take much longer for her to charge" and then she started yelling at me to go charge somewhere else. Then she starting trying to lecture me (in a nasty voice of course) about how pair stalls work.
seriously WTF is wrong with some owners. the sense of entitlement, and sheer stupidity, just blows me away.
like OK lady, I have 205k miles on my car and have been an owner for 7 years. I don't need any speech from her about how this works. In fact, I tried to explain to her that all paired stalls had someone on it so I had to randomly pick one. there wasn't any paired set free so I was going to have to pull up next to someone but she wasn't having it was continued to yell at me. She was just pissed off that out of the 3 open stalls that I had picked "hers" and that I was "stealing her power and inconveniencing her".
whatever lady. after realizing she was just pissed off that I picked the stall paired with hers I just ignored her and got back in my car and cranked up the volume so I didn't have to listen to her yelling at me still. I wasn't going to give in to her BS and move.
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