Life Without a High Speed Charger

Now that the holiday craziness is over it's time to get back to posting.  Looks like this one should have been posted a while back before we actually got the 240V charger but here it is anyway.

Harkening back to an earlier post in which we may have come to the conclusion that we were a little premature in actually bringing the car home, we learned to live with the trickle charger, but it wasn't easy.


The LEAF takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 hours to charge from empty on the trickle charger.  I leave for work around 5am and usually get home around 4pm.  Let's just say, assuming my  math is correct, that the time between 4pm and 5am is less than 21 hours.

But we had that covered. I also usually go into the office Monday, Tuesday and Thursday but most of my team only does Tuesdays and Thursdays, making Mondays sort of optional.  So in lieu of having the 240V charger I figured I'd work at home on Mondays until it was installed. Giving me the weekend and Wednesdays to recharge.  Except that my boss, on the second week of having the LEAF decided we needed to have an in-office meeting on Monday.  GotoMeeting wasn't going to hack it. Potential for whiteboarding and all that.

Back to some math.  On my first commute to the office I drove 25 miles and had about 74 miles left. Now that time I took the highway home and burned through a bit more than 25 more miles of the remaining range and would require more than an overnight to get back to a full charge for Tuesday.

So here was the plan. I would drive backroads to and from work and hopefully keep close to the 99 miles of range. This would drop me only half way. That would mean that I should be able to recharge to full in 11 or 12 hours. Then, depending on the level of charge when I got up, we could decide if Kerry, who would have 3 more charging hours before she needed it, or I, took the LEAF to the office.

Just to be safe, since the required meeting was in the morning and I could work at home in the afternoon, I left a bit early to both avoid the traffic and give myself enough charging time. Sure enough, I got home around 3pm with a little less than half a charge, plugged it in and it gave me a 13.5 hour charge time estimate (so far all the estimates have been high.) Enough for a full charge by 5am the next morning.

Sure enough the LEAF was fully charged when my alarm went off at 4:30.  And although the rest of the day was a bit on the disappointing side, the LEAF performed well.

More on this later, but all I can say is that life with the 240V charger looks to be much easier.

A quick note on the missing stats.  We sort of need to catch up on our stat entry which fell by the wayside during the holidays.  Look for them soon!