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Supercharger - Kingston ON
- Thread starter hingisfan
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- Canada ontario supercharger
At this charger now and getting 20kW. Maybe I don’t understand the nuances of supercharging to 100% capacity (trying to maximize range to get to Saint-Liboire 250Kw charger from this one in Kingston) but does it slow down the closer to 100% it gets? I assume not because the guy next to me said his charging speed was terrible too.
Can37
Member
Yes, the top of the battery takes forever to charge. You will likely get to your destination faster by stopping in Cornwall
Temperature and state of charge are the biggest impacts to charging speed. The fuller it is, the slower it charges.
The older 150kw (aka V2) chargers share power. You can tell if you are at a V2 by A: the cord is much thicker than V3, noticeably so. and B: the stall will have "1A, 2A, 1B, 2B" and so on stickers at the bottom of the pedestal.
The cord thickness is the easiest way to tell the difference though. There's also urban style chargers, that are limited to 72kW each and look totally different.
Finally to make it just a tiny bit more confusing, you rarely might find a pallet charger setup. These are usually temporary, can have Urban, V2 or V3, style charging pedestals. Sometimes are on a trailer with a battery, sometimes dropped into the actual parking lot. Power output from these depends on what is available at the site. Typically they have 2-4 charging stands, often if you see 4, only 3 are actually active because of the way parking works around the pallet. They are designed to be temporary, usually after awhile they are replaced with a full blown site update with a proper install.
Here’s where I’m at now, at another 250kW station in Quebec. It’s -7c and I’m on 2A. There’s a car on 2D and another car on 1A. I thought v3 chargers weren’t shared?
When I plugged in it went all the way up to 250kW and stayed there for a few minutes then dropped down.
Also the silver ring where the handle connects to the charging cable. Thickness can be tough to judge from a distance (easy if you get out of the car and are actually handling the cable though), but the silver ring can be easily spotted without getting out of your car.
Ramping up to ~250kW and staying there for only a couple minutes before coming down is normal. But it shouldn't crash all the way to 27kW like that. At that SOC, you should still be getting at least 100kW. Sometimes new stations like this don't have all the kinks worked out, so that could be it.
The other possibility is that your battery is cold-soaked. Were you driving on the highway for a while immediately before plugging in? If you were parked somewhere for a while and then drove a short distance before plugging in, your battery would be very cold at such a low ambient temperature and this would definitely impact your charge rate.
mrElbe
Active Member
When driving cross country always have the next charger as your destination in order to pre-condition the battery. I noticed recently that my battery starts this process 1/2 hour before predicted arrival at the charger.
There was a lot of highway driving, yes, but the stop at both 250kW SCs was inserted by the car when navigating for the trip. All this to say that in both cases, the car did initiate the preconditioning well in advance of arriving at the station, which should address the cold soaked battery question, if I’m not mistake? Or is cold soaked something else?
Strange experiences that you are having. Now that it has happened at two separate superchargers, I wonder if it could be how your vehicle is handling charging from a onboard systems perspective. I have no idea of whether it could help with charging issues, but some other minor issues I have had were resolved with a reboot of the system on my Model 3.
If you are preconditioning for a long time immediately before plugging in, then your battery should not be cold-soaked. I've seen some posts where people pre-condition for 5-10 minutes in freezing temps and then complain about slow charging rates. 5-10 minutes its not enough pre-conditioning to warm up the battery in an Ontario winter. The best way to ensure that you are pre-conditioning as much as possible is to navigate to the supercharger from a long ways away, like <100km. Then drive straight to the supercharger and plug in. If you stop and eat lunch or something and drive 1km to the supercharger and plug in, your battery is likely to get cold again while you are eating.
Yea, I've had some looooong preconditioning drives in New England when starting with an overnight cold soaked battery. Leave from a home, set a SC as my destination and it starts pre-conditioning almost an hour in advance of arrival to the charger. Supercharger preconditioning (vs normal preconditioning) is more than just warming up the battery for full regenerative braking, it takes the battery up above 75 degrees (F) for optimal supercharging. Getting to that temp when the ambient temps are well below freezing takes a lot of time, sometimes it can't get there at all.
Our own experience with pre-conditioning in quite cold weather, such as -20 C (-4 F), is that even a 30 minute pre-conditioning from a cold-soaked condition (car parked outside unplugged for a couple of hours before heading out) still allowed speedy charging at a Supercharger. The rate of charge dropped as the battery reached higher levels of charge, but just in the normal manner as in warm weather charging. We haven't had to try a Supercharger at -30 C yet (-22 F, which does happen around here), but I must say that our home Level 2 charger functions at the normal rate of charge at that temperature, after a brief delay to allow the current first to warm the battery.
RTPEV
Active Member
My battery started pre-conditioning as soon as I started my return trip yesterday, 1 hour and 42 minutes from the Supercharger stop...and it was a relatively balmy 50F!
That said, I think it was probably a "gentle" pre-condition. If it was colder and I had less time to the Supercharger, it would probably have been more aggressive about heating the battery up.
That said, I think it was probably a "gentle" pre-condition. If it was colder and I had less time to the Supercharger, it would probably have been more aggressive about heating the battery up.
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