For those of you who like to crunch numbers or who want details, here is a chart of those I was able to collect. Sorry I was unable to find a way to put it right into the blog.
Note that it cost us $228.71 plus a few extra hotels to cross from Nanaimo to the Haliburton Highlands. Only once we paid over $20 for a charge.
Note 1: Chargers rarely charge at maximum rate. Our Bolt only charges at maximum 50kwh so 100 promised equals a maximum of 50kwh delivered.
Note 2: Usually 45 kwh was a really good charging speed. It would always slow down toward the end to around 34kwh. This is because the battery is almost full and offers more resistance to taking a charge at high speeds. They don't recommend you charge over 80% at high speed chargers for risk of overheating and possible fires.
Note 3: In some circumstances they may split the load between the chargers if two cars are charging at once. This of course cuts the speed of charging considerably.
Conclusions
If you have downloaded the necessary applications and kept your credit cards up to date, you should have no trouble making the charging infrastructure work.
They all work pretty well and as expected, when they work.
There are a multitude of reasons why a charger might not work. The hardware could break. It could be vandalized. There could have been a natural disaster or a water sewage break with flooding. The owner might not have had it repaired for whatever reason. Therefore to be secure, we need more charging stations and more redundancy in critical locations. Most service providers put in two stations in the hope that at least one will always be working. As more EV's hit the road they will need more.
At this stage, it is essential to plan ahead and to check and see if chargers are likely to be working that day. For example, if I had looked at the track record of the Petrocan in Nipagon today, I would not have assumed it would be working. Several people in the last 2 days failed to charge there. I would have gone back to Thunder Bay from the Armstrong junction and charged there.
For EV travellers to have security we need more charging locations, more redundancy at existing locations, and more hotels to put in and maintain level 2 chargers. Driving across Canada is still difficult, precarious, and more stressful than it should be.
Who understood that EV chargers were so dependent on internet service and that chargers would be taken out of service when one service provider had a national outage -- or how long it would take to get them all back up and running?!
Time is whizzing by. Just think, soon I'll have to start my way back. Time to let this all go.
If you want to help, please write a letter to the Hotel Association of Canada or to your provincial or Federal Government and ask them to install more chargers.