1,500+ mile Zero-Emission Road Trip

In less than two weeks, my wife and I are setting out on a 1,500-mile round trip journey in one of our LEAFs from the Canadian border to California. We did a similar 1,300-mile trip last year, but didn't go all the way to California.

Details about the trip are in my blog post.

I created a system which will log our position, speed, SOC%, battery temperature, energy usage, etc., and upload it to a web site where you can watch it live while we drive. ZEroadtrip.com

We'll be tweeting along the way as well @ZEroadtrip or Like us on Facebook.

For anyone who lives along our route, we would love to meet you! We'll be stopping at many charging stations along the way, even if we don't need them, so that we can update PlugShare with photos and details, and so that we can meet anyone who anticipates our arrival by watching our live map, where you can see which chargers we intend to stop at.

Please share your questions, comments, and suggestions!

- Tyrel

Very cool!

But I'm on the wrong coast :mrgreen:

Right on! looking forward to your reports

If you go to the Canadian border, and then go ALL the way to the Mexican border, I'll give you an honorary vehicle graphic from BC2BC-2013 (I think it was number 7).

My house is in San Diego.

Also, to support your trip, I'll give you a special price on a JLongtm J1772 extension cord from Quick Charge Power.

Just shoot me an email at sales (at) QuickChargePower.com

TonyWilliams said:

If you go to the Canadian border, and then go ALL the way to the Mexican border, I'll give you an honorary vehicle graphic from BC2BC-2013 (I think it was number 7).

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Hah, thanks Tony, but we will only be entering California by about a mile and then turning back, partially in protest to their lack of participation in the West Coast Electric Highway (which we'll be using for 95% of our charging on this trip). I'll leave the Northern California Charging Void adventures to Steve Coram for now.

You ought to be able to do it all level 3 right? How many quick charges per day do you plan to do? Last 300 mile trip I did my battery temp was 11 bars and the first half was all level 2! But that was spokane to seattle on the hottest day so far this year. Do you plan to drive at night when its cooler?. Wave hello when you drive by my house. Its basically where i5 and I 90 collide. It's on plugshare.

johnrhansen said:

You ought to be able to do it all level 3 right? How many quick charges per day do you plan to do? Last 300 mile trip I did my battery temp was 11 bars and the first half was all level 2! But that was spokane to seattle on the hottest day so far this year. Do you plan to drive at night when its cooler?. Wave hello when you drive by my house. Its basically where i5 and I 90 collide. It's on plugshare.

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Yes, our plan is to do it with Level 3 but we may sneak in some Level 2 or even Level 1 at campgrounds to supplement. You can see the DCQCs we intend to use on our map at ZEroadtrip.com

Our longest leg is only 219 miles, which we can probably do with 3 charges. We'll try to travel as much as we can early in the morning and drive slowly to help keep the battery cool.

By the way, since you're in Seattle, you should join the Facebook group Seattle Nissan Leaf Owners, if you're on Facebook. There's a lot of Washington-specific discussion on there.

- Tyrel

OMG, that sounds fantastic! When at the QC at I-5 and Hwy 34 (and if you have time, of course), I'd love to meet and chat! I'm on plugshare in Albany, Oregon with a text number. This is awesome! I've done Albany to Seattle and back (525 zero talipipe emission miles roundtrip), so many of those QCs on your map going north I've used. Yes , the battery bars go up (highest was 10 bars, yikes). But, how fun will this be!

and coming back north on 101? yay, for coastal quickchargers!

Good luck, look forward to your progress.

Curt

PS good brewhouses in Albany or Corvallis, if interested. just sayin'...

finman100 said:

When at the QC at I-5 and Hwy 34 (and if you have time, of course), I'd love to meet and chat! I'm on plugshare in Albany, Oregon with a text number.

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We would love to meet up with you. We'll be staying the night at a friend's house in Albany on the other side of the river from you on the night of Sept 3rd (the exact location is hidden on our map). We would either swoop down to check out that DCQC that afternoon (if we're running early and our friend isn't home from work yet) or the following morning. I saved your number off PlugShare so I can text you when we know more precisely when we'll be there. We're not likely to actually need to charge, but it would be great to park there for a bit and chat!

- Tyrel

You might already know this but the charger at Whole foods in Seattle is only a 20KW unit. Might need to budget some time there. If you want to trade 5 bucks for a hour, you might consider the blink charger down at Tahoma market in fife. Also Campbell nelson Nissan in Edmonds has a QC, if you traded it for magic Nissan you ought to be able to make fife, or minimize the time you need to wait at whole foods.

johnrhansen said:

You might already know this but the charger at Whole foods in Seattle is only a 20KW unit. Might need to budget some time there. If you want to trade 5 bucks for a hour, you might consider the blink charger down at Tahoma market in fife. Also Campbell nelson Nissan in Edmonds has a QC, if you traded it for magic Nissan you ought to be able to make fife, or minimize the time you need to wait at whole foods.

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Yeah, we're planning to use the Whole Foods DCQC because we don't like Blink. Coming from Everett we'll still have a decent amount of charge when we get to Seattle, so using a 20 kW unit isn't going to make that much of a difference, as a 50 kW DCQC would be tapering down to about that speed at that SOC anyway. Plus we'll probably be wanting lunch about that time so we'll be there for a bit. It's not a race

On our trip last year we stayed in Lynnwood and got 100% charged, then topped off at a L2 near the airport to boost us to Tumwater.

True that we'd get a few more miles if we went to Campbell-Nelson, but we bought our two most recent LEAFs from Magic and love stopping to visit with them.

I like charging at Magic too. Even if it costs me 3 bucks. The guys there are nice, and the vending machine there is about the cheapest I have seen anywhere.

By the way, in case anyone is interested, here are some technical details for our trip. Let me know if you would like to know about anything else!

Charging:

Planning to use West Coast Electric Highway 50kW DCQC, which we pay $19.99/mo for, for the most part. There are a couple holes due to the EV Project (and its failures) where we'll find other DCQCs.

We may do some charging at some campgrounds to top off. I have an EVSEupgrade unit (2013 model), along with a 25-ft 240V extension cord and adapters for NEMA L6-30, 10-30, 10-50, 14-30, 14-50, and 14-60. This unit can do up 20A at 240V, or up to 16A at 120V. I have a TT-30 adapter to use at campgrounds which have that available.

Heat:

As with any long trip in a LEAF, temperature is a concern, especially in southern Oregon where ambient temperatures will probably be near 80 deg F. We'll reduce risk of overheating with several measures:

• Leave early in the morning when ambient temperatures are lower.
• Park in the shade whenever possible (also for the dog's benefit).
• Drive at low speeds as practical without being extreme.
• Don't charge at every DCQC. They are every 20-ish miles in Oregon, so obviously we don't need every one. I think it'll be better to drive 60 miles and charge for 30 minutes than to drive 20 miles, charge for 10 minutes, drive 20 more miles, charge 10 minutes, drive 20 more miles, charge 10 minutes. Let me know what you think about that.
• Bring a fan. I have no idea if this will help, but if we're camped somewhere with power, I'll turn on a fan to blow underneath the belly of the car.
• Picked campgrounds near water. Because it's cooler there. And worst case, we can take the car for a swim!
• Don't drive very far. Our longest days are only 219 miles, and these are mostly along Puget Sound in Washington which should be cooler.

Live Data:

The live data presented on ZEroadtrip.com is derived from Leaf Spy. I will be running Leaf Spy Pro with logging set at 15 second intervals. I wrote an Android service which checks the log for new data and uploads it to the site, which I also developed, once per minute. The map and data shown on the site will update live while we are driving. As long as I don't have too many bugs in it, anyway.

A quick tip. A person I know with a Leaf that often takes long trips using the West Coast Highway DCQC's had the following tip.

It is better to hit the DCQC often and keep the state of charge of your battery in the lower half (<50%) rather than in the upper half.

This is because the battery has more resistance (and thus heats up more) as it gets fuller. His strategy to go lots of miles is to hit every quick charger for 10 to 15 minutes and try to keep the charge between 20% and 60%. Only charge as much as is needed to get to the next charger with 20% left. Much less heating which is a major stress of the battery and eventually will limit the amount of charge your battery will accept.

Phil H.

webfootguy said:

A quick tip. A person I know with a Leaf that often takes long trips using the West Coast Highway DCQC's had the following tip.

It is better to hit the DCQC often and keep the state of charge of your battery in the lower half (<50%) rather than in the upper half.

This is because the battery has more resistance (and thus heats up more) as it gets fuller. His strategy to go lots of miles is to hit every quick charger for 10 to 15 minutes and try to keep the charge between 20% and 60%. Only charge as much as is needed to get to the next charger with 20% left. Much less heating which is a major stress of the battery and eventually will limit the amount of charge your battery will accept.

Phil H.

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I was considering that, but I considered as well that the DCQC pushes more power at lower state of charge. Throwing some sort of random numbers at it:

At 40% SOC it might be pushing 50 kW, and maybe it's 90% efficient, so it makes 5 kW of heat.

At 80% SOC it's probably only pushing 20 kW, and maybe it's 85% efficient, then you're making only 3 kW of heat.

good luck, be safe and enjoy the trip I will be very interested in the android service if you ever want to share..

jitubats said:

good luck, be safe and enjoy the trip I will be very interested in the android service if you ever want to share..

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Yeah, as I have time after the trip I will work on making all this software usable by others.

Computerizer said:

I was considering that, but I considered as well that the DCQC pushes more power at lower state of charge. Throwing some sort of random numbers at it:

At 40% SOC it might be pushing 50 kW, and maybe it's 90% efficient, so it makes 5 kW of heat.

At 80% SOC it's probably only pushing 20 kW, and maybe it's 85% efficient, then you're making only 3 kW of heat.

Click to expand...

Yeah, OK; now integrate that dissipation over the charging time to see how much thermal energy you're putting into the pack mass. 5KW for half the time is less heat than 3KW for the full time (Although I obviously don't know exactly what the actual charging times are for the two policies under discussion).

Some of you wizards correct me if I'm wrong. But the way I see it any battery has 2 parts, the perfect battery, and the resistance. If you double the current through the battery during charge, you will quadruple the power dissipated across the resistor part (because the voltage across it also goes up), But the Battery portion does not change it's voltage. It's caused by the chemistry within the cells. So the power put into the perfect battery doubles. So it will take half the time to charge, but generate more net heat during that time (through the resistance part). Actually though, that's more than double the power output of the initial condition, but not much more. I don't think the resistance part large enough compared to the perfect part to have to worry about.

But there is also something else to consider. If you are driving the car when the resistance of the battery is higher, you also generate more heat during that phase of the trip. I think this is a larger factor. Plus, I never watched that closely, but I was thinking the power delivered to the battery was pretty constant between 20 and 80 percent. in conclusion, I tend to think that you will generate less heat if run the car in the SOC range where the resistance of the battery is lowest, or maybe tweak it up just a little bit towards what you are thinking to account for the resistance of the battery while charging at the higher currents. If I remember right, it's the car that tells the chademo chargers how much current to shove through. It would be nice if you could tell the car to tell the charger to cool it a bit with all that current.

Seems like there's a lot of debate about whether more heat will be generated on a DCQC at low SOC or high SOC. Perhaps I should start another thread about that.