This week my company co-hosted a conference at the Westin LAX. The conference has been going for 9 years now, and at this hotel for at least 4 years that I can remember, maybe even 5. We are, in essence, a VIP group. So when I expressed a desire to keep my car charged while staying over at the hotel, the management was fully on-board with accommodating me.
I had already scoped out the parking lot and identified several 120v outlets that would allow me to park and charge without the portable EVSE and it's cabling sitting out in a public walkway and causing a trip/fall concern. The hotel did actually have a ton of 208v outlets in the halls behind the banquet rooms, but to access them I would have had to park by the service entrance and maybe even snake an extension cord of significant length between the outlets and the car, and I thought that to be a request too far. Besides, I figured that I'd only need to charge from ~50% depleted on any given day, so I'd be charging for a maximum of 12 hours on any given night. The outlet I finally zeroed in on was in a quieter part of the parking lot normally reserved for large vehicles (vans and larger trucks) and the hotel agreed to cone the spot off for my exclusive use.
I decided to lock the EVSE up, just in case there was any temptation towards making it disappear, and so I brought two Master combination locks (model 630D) previously recommended in other forum posts - one for the holes in the EVSE case and one for the hole in the nozzle latch that prevents it's removal from the charging port. In addition, I'd packed a short length of chain, which I wrapped around the fence pole you see behind the car in the picture below.
In talking to Glenn Sampert, the hotel's General Manager, I learned that they are massively interested in supplying electric vehicle charging in the not too distant future. In fact, they've even identified an area in the parking lot where they think it would work (a premium parking area close to the lobby, once used by an in-house car rental agency). Of course, I gave him my opinion of what would work best for them (a number of L2 units) and gave them some idea of what the cost might be. With any luck, they'll have made some progress on those in time for next year's conference!
I had already scoped out the parking lot and identified several 120v outlets that would allow me to park and charge without the portable EVSE and it's cabling sitting out in a public walkway and causing a trip/fall concern. The hotel did actually have a ton of 208v outlets in the halls behind the banquet rooms, but to access them I would have had to park by the service entrance and maybe even snake an extension cord of significant length between the outlets and the car, and I thought that to be a request too far. Besides, I figured that I'd only need to charge from ~50% depleted on any given day, so I'd be charging for a maximum of 12 hours on any given night. The outlet I finally zeroed in on was in a quieter part of the parking lot normally reserved for large vehicles (vans and larger trucks) and the hotel agreed to cone the spot off for my exclusive use.
I decided to lock the EVSE up, just in case there was any temptation towards making it disappear, and so I brought two Master combination locks (model 630D) previously recommended in other forum posts - one for the holes in the EVSE case and one for the hole in the nozzle latch that prevents it's removal from the charging port. In addition, I'd packed a short length of chain, which I wrapped around the fence pole you see behind the car in the picture below.
In talking to Glenn Sampert, the hotel's General Manager, I learned that they are massively interested in supplying electric vehicle charging in the not too distant future. In fact, they've even identified an area in the parking lot where they think it would work (a premium parking area close to the lobby, once used by an in-house car rental agency). Of course, I gave him my opinion of what would work best for them (a number of L2 units) and gave them some idea of what the cost might be. With any luck, they'll have made some progress on those in time for next year's conference!
