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Where can I find the current Tesla Supercharging costs in Australia?
- Thread starter mathewparet@gm
- Start date
It changes all the time, but it's currently 66c/kWh at any Supercharger.
But remember, very little of your charging will happen at Superchargers. Your best option is to charge at work during the day, on cheap solar power. Your second-best option is to charge at home overnight, on cheap off-peak power. You can also charge at any number of cheap or expensive charging stations. Or just plug a granny charger into an ordinary power point if your daily driving isn't much above 100km and you can reach your parking space with a nice thick heavy-duty extension cord.
But remember, very little of your charging will happen at Superchargers. Your best option is to charge at work during the day, on cheap solar power. Your second-best option is to charge at home overnight, on cheap off-peak power. You can also charge at any number of cheap or expensive charging stations. Or just plug a granny charger into an ordinary power point if your daily driving isn't much above 100km and you can reach your parking space with a nice thick heavy-duty extension cord.
mobile charger, plugs into any power point but charges slowly. Slow is fine if you dont drive much during the day, as suggested by QBN aboveWhat is a granny charger?
A granny charger is the unit that lets you charge an EV off a bog-standard home power point, like when you visit granny & want to plug it in at her place.What is a granny charger?
Traditionally a granny charger comes with the purchase of an EV. You might also hear it called the UMC - Tesla's Universal Mobile Connector. You'll probably still get this, depending on when your car is delivered.
There are some minor electrical risks using one. Mostly just annoying stuff like tripping a fuse if you also run a kettle & a toaster at the same time on the same fuse. Part of the reason Tesla is moving away from including a UMC is because of stuff like this. A hard-wired wall charger is just safer in every regard.
There are many threads here about charging adapters, especially for folks who don't drive during the day (which kinda defeats the purpose, but meh) & who like to fine tune their charging to when their solar panels are producing. Any discussion about what's best for you needs to start with some basics.
During the day, is your car typically at home, or at work, or driving uber?
Is charging at work an option? Do you work for some hardcore greenies or tech nerds with supplied parking?
During the night, is your car typically at home for >6 hours?
Is your driveway/garage next to your fusebox? Will a sparky need to dig a trench to get power to where you park?
If you live in a flat, do you own or rent it? And is its body corporate competent or petty?
If instead of using a wall charger (I'm renting the place, plus don't want to invest in it unless absolutely necessary), I use a 15amp plug that doesn't exist yet (that is get an electrician to install one), I believe that would be a separate line, wouldn't it? And not end up blowing the fuse? My fusebox is sharing wall with the garage so that should be fine.
Also I believe if my house supports controlled load, wouldn't that be a separate one too?
Universal Mobile Charger (UMC), ie 240V plug one end for wall socket, Type 2 the other end for your car.
Best to assume they are always either in use or broken. Also “free” isn’t really what it’s stacked up to be if the charger isn’t convenient to you, available immediately you turn up to it, and you can’t be doing something else while the car is charging. Your time is likely worth rather more than the free-ness saves you.
I mostly charge at home (overnight and daytime from my home solar) plus use a Jolt 25kW DC charger fairly often when I am at the supermarket near it. On a trip I shoot for the fastest and most convenient charger with no concern for the per-kWh price - queuing for a “free” 50kW charger vs driving straight in to a 350kW charger (and being on the road again in 1/4-1/2 the time) makes any saving from the free one an illusion. Plus “on a trip” is a very small percentage of my annual mileage and charging is cheap - wherever you do it - vs all the other costs of that trip.
YMMV though, just experiment once you get your car, but my best advice is don’t base your plan on the NRMA chargers, however else you might be thinking of charging.
I'm sure you'll try, but the NRMA charging network is a farce. Most sites are single-stall. They're often queueing because they're free, and they're often out of order for weeks (sometimes months) at a time because they use unreliable Tritium chargers. As the number of EVs is escalating fast, they will become even more of a farce, except in certain remote areas where the locals don't vandalise things & where one stall is enough.
Personally when I can't charge at work (there's a really progressive parking station near work with a dozen load-controlled chargers that keep cutting out when there's cloud cover, but that work for most of the day), then I'll charge at home using the UMC. I don't use controlled load, but rather time-of-use. I program the car to start charging at 10pm. If the battery is particularly low and I want it to stop before power gets expensive at 7am, I just limit the charge goal down from 90% to whatever % the car will reach at 7ish. But if I really need every spare km the next day, I'll hang the expense and start charging earlier and/or let it continue charging later. The actual amounts I spend on charging are trivial, despite doing ~1000km/wk, but the principle remains. Power is cheap after 10pm and expensive around dinnertime for a reason, and I don't want to add burdens to the power grid.
Does make sense. I've used Teslas before (hired them at two different occasions for a week each) and I always used SuperCharger except for once when I used NRMA and it worked then. But again that was early morning about 4:30-5.
In my case there are 2 fuses for general power outlets. One covers the kitchen and bathroom, the other covers the bedrooms and lounge rooms. Both are 20 amps. I charge at 10 amps. That means I can still run the fin heater in winter, plus all my electronics, and I'll still have oodles of capacity to spare. But a kettle also runs at about 10 amps (albeit for just 2 minutes). And so does a 4-slice toaster. If I was running all of the above simultaneously, I'm in trouble. Best case the fuse trips. Worst case things start getting excessively warm.
10 amps means 2.3kW. So for every hour it runs, I add 2.3kWh. My car's battery is 50kWh (yours would be at least 60kWh), so for me, every hour is about 4½% (it isn't 100% efficient, but then, the power where I live is often above 230v, so it sort of evens out). If I'm parked at night charging for my 9 cheapest hours, that's 40%. So if I get home on 50%, I'll comfortably get back to 90%. Adding 40% is enough charge to replenish 3 hours of uber driving or other suburban driving. And I can comfortably add another 10% if I extend charging into to the more expensive hours.
That means installing a wall charger.
If your driving habits are small, meh, you're wasting money putting one in your landlord's garage.
If your driving habits are large (e.g. an Uber driver), the cost savings from using controlled load would probably offset the $750 you'd spend on the wall charger & the few hundred on the sparky, in short order. Especially if Tesla stops bundling in the UMC and you have to spend $550 to get one (or a little under $300 for a dodgy brothers imitation).
Generally a controlled load can't just supply an ordinary outlet.
It hardly matters though, controlled load is basically obsolete now - the overnight rate on a TOU tariff is generally within a cent or so of the corresponding controlled load tariff.
There's some electricity retailers with special deals for EV owners - eg. if you're often at home on the weekends, Red Energy has an EV plan which has free power between 12pm and 2pm on weekends. Powershop has an extra cheap overnight rate for EVs, depending on your location.
I'm still a fan of controlled load, for various reasons.
If it's an old style timer switch, yeah, forget it. Unless it's a block of flats and you're trying to pacify the body corporate by hard coding that it will never ever work at dinnertime.
If it's intelligent enough to respond to real time signals from the grid, it's especially relevant. ToU is a blunt instrument. EVs are going to be a massive drain on the grid, in time. Smart-ish controlled load turns that negative into a positive.
Enjoy it while it lasts!
It’s the way you should start your ev ownership given your relatively small km driven per week. You can always upgrade to either a seperate circuit or a wall connector once you see what isnt working for you
Turn the car charging rate down, or just charge overnight when you're not making toast?
I feel that getting a separate circuit - which might as well be 15A - is a wise idea anyway.
That's what I am thinking off now. That would mean cabling, plus a separate fuse, plus the plug outlet, correct? Or would there be other expenses I would need to consider?
