Charging while on the road

[NewLeafOwnerDD]

I have recently made 2 longer trips in my Leaf and find charging on the road challenging. On the first trip, three of the charging sites were broken. On this most recent trip of 250 miles, I planned short stops using the Abetterrouteplanner.com app. Traveling there was no problems, all the stations worked correctly. On the way home I wanted to stop at the same charging stations. The first station's charger was a little slower than the first time (maybe 25% slower) but the second charging station took 4 times as long to charge as it did traveling 3 days previously (122 mins vs 25 minutes). Does anyone know why this might be? Neither time did I have anyone else at the station.

 

[GerryAZ]

Several possibilities:

1. Battery temperature--high battery temperature will cause the car's control modules to reduce the charge rate to avoid excessive heating of the battery.
2. Some DCQC stations reduce their maximum current to reduce utility demand charges.

 

[cwerdna]

Yep on that above. If you use Leaf Spy, you can see the actual battery sensor temps instead of an unlabeled graph or bars.

 

[NewLeafOwnerDD]

Interesting, thank you. I will pay attention to this in the future. I have a trip to Arizona coming up this winter. I have to say I'm not looking forward to this after my first two adventures