To have a comparison with the public charging station in Ballard that I looked at on Friday I took pictures of the north facility at Shilshole.


One of the two devices has no charge cables. The second device had both charging points in use.


I took pictures of the charging state on each of the vehicles. The PoS devices charge by time plugged in. The Seattle charger I looked at seemed to charge by KWh. Charging by power delivered seems to make a lot more sense. I was trying to get an idea of how much power these devices can deliver.
I’m learning about electric vehicle economics right now.
It looks like each of these cars is charging at about 1 kWh / 10 minutes. Because the rate at PoS is based on time, $5 and 4 hours might get 30 kWh delivered. The rate at the Seattle charger in Ballard was listed at $0.21 / kWh, with a maximum parking time of four hours. If the charge speeds are the same, 30 kWh in Ballard would cost $6.30. While the pricing structure is different, at least PoS doesn’t appear to be more than nearby.
Please leave comments about how usable the system is and how often you have to wait for available chargers.
I just plugged in for the first time. The signage is outdated – SemaCharge is now Blink. And my Blink app was outdated and wouldn’t sign in. Had to download a new Blink app. Then the charger IDs didn’t match the 4 IDs the app sees at Shilshole, so it wouldn’t start charging. Luckily I had an old Blink RFID card and it still worked.
Charging by the hour isn’t great. But I’m charging at the max rate (30A) so by kWh or by hour doesn’t matter too much.
The 4 hour max charge is kind of low… would be great if there was an 8 hour option… my Tesla will need nearly 8 to charge up from 25% to 80%.
Once the Fred Meyer supercharger station comes online, I expect I’ll mostly charge there… much faster and likely less costly.
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Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been thinking of getting a Polestar 2 but don’t really have an idea how much time it would take to go from 20% full to 80% which is what I’d hope to do most times I’d be charging.
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https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/images/clean-energy/ev-charger-level-2-miles.jpg is a pretty good chart showing current in amps, and miles per hour of charge you’ll gain. 30a means about 170 miles in 8 hours.
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I got a Polestar in the last month. Thanks for the idea of requesting the Blink card. The app often was struggling to report enabling the charger. The card seems to work every time.
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