St. Joseph, Michigan Supercharger - stalls organized in weird order

[jsmay311]

I visited the St. Joseph, MI supercharger for the first time last weekend, and this was the first time I've seen a SC station that does NOT organize the paired stalls next to each other. (e.g., 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, etc.)

Instead, at this SC they are organized like this:

| 4B | 4A | 3B | 2B | 1B | 3A | 2A | 1A |

So this leads to unintuitive pairing of stalls, and you might end up with throttled charging if you don't pay attention to the numbers and you inadvertently plug into a stall that's paired with another one that's already in use, even if no one is parked in the spots next to you. I was actually able to get faster charging by parking in between 2 occupied stalls. So pay attention to the numbers!

 

[RDoc]

I hate superchargers with staggered pairing. The Bourne Bridge has it and it's always a trick to figure out where to park to charge quickly.
While I realize that having colored LEDs that show the state of an individual pedestal is beyond current technology, it would be great if they wired them so that adjacent pedestals were paired to make the determination easier and if possible put the numbers on the tops of the pedestals where they could be more easily read.

 

[Rocky_H]

Huh. I checked the original St. Joseph Supercharger thread to see if this had been mentioned there, and it wasn't.
Michigan Supercharger Locations
The thread is titled "Michigan Supercharger Locations" because it was so early and so general, and the St. Joseph one showed up by surprise in June 2013, before anyone had found it.

That thread is such a history lesson from being so early back in 2013. People were asking if they would need additional hardware to use them and even lamenting about how the site should have 14-50 outlets installed that they could use, since a lot of the early owners (60kWh) didn't have Supercharging enabled!!

Anyway, this is odd. Supercharger layout is generally one of two ways:
Pairs next to each other: 1A 1B 2A 2B, etc.
Or laid out with all of the A's and then all of the B's: 1A 2A 3A 4A 1B 2B 3B 4B
I've seen a few of both kinds. Sometimes you will see a mix only if a site was built one way to start and then had an addition a couple of years later, where the new stalls were done differently. But this 2013 St. Joseph site wasn't an addition. It looks like those original 8 were just done weird from the start.

 

[juls_esp]

I Visited this supercharger twice last month during my road trip, This was one of the worst/busiest supercharging stations
there was actually a model x who ended up waiting 10 minutes or so to charge.

 

[jsmay311]

I Visited this supercharger twice last month during my road trip, This was one of the worst/busiest supercharging stations
there was actually a model x who ended up waiting 10 minutes or so to charge.

In my only 2 visits, it was nearly empty (only 1 other car) on a Friday at 10am, and nearly full (6 out of 8 full stalls) on a Sunday at 7pm.

I imagine most summer Sunday evenings see a lot of traffic here with Michagan-weekenders returning to Chicagoland.

 

[mociaf9]

That is a weird layout. I think it might have been seen in other locations where there was an original installation that was then expanded. So, the original set had the somewhat unusual layout of AAA, BBB but the added on stalls from the expansion were of the type AB, AB. Which is what looks like happened here, only apparently this one opened up with the same 8 stalls initially. So, I'm really not sure why the mixed layout. Unless the original plans were for a 6 stall station and 2 more were added in the middle of planning but before construction and to minimize the scope of the alterations to the plans they went with the AB layout for those added stalls instead of redoing the original set to squeeze in an extra A stall in the middle.

 

[ElectricTravel]

I've been to ~90 superchargers so far and have seen maybe 5 that were laid out like this. It can be a rude surprise for sure.

If you come across one like this, try to make a note in Plugshare to help out future visitors. If possible, use the edit button on the app or website to add it to the info field rather than just putting it in your comments (a few locations don't allow editing). This will make it easily visible and permanently displayed, since it seems like comments get auto-deleted after about a year.