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Driving

Day-trip: Nelson to Fletcher Falls and Ainsworth Hotsprings

I’ve decided that I should be adding more posts of regular trips that my family embarks on around the Kootenays themselves, since most of the EV “adventure” posts have so far been about longer journeys outside of our region.  I also will be adding a Page in the near future that will serve as a database of local trips that includes real data that I have collected so the growing collection of EV owners in our region have real data to work from!

Anyways – Marley’s mom is here visiting from Hamilton, Ontario this week, and with the beautiful fall weather, we thought a day-trip up the lake to see Fletcher Falls, with a soak in the Ainsworth Hot Springs on the way home, was just the ticket for her last day in BC.

Read More »Day-trip: Nelson to Fletcher Falls and Ainsworth Hotsprings

New West EV Family Goes to the Zoo – Part 1/2

Hello again from the New West EV Family!

In my last post we discussed planning our road trip south to the Seattle area with our 2013 Nissan Leaf and the preparations required to access the charging networks we would need to visit. In this post I will discuss the energy planning and the results of the first half of the trip south.

Read More »New West EV Family Goes to the Zoo – Part 1/2

A Tale of Two Journeys – Part Two

This post is the trip report of our journey to Sechelt and back in June 2015.  The trip came out of an invitation to participate in a planning workshop for future deployment of Direct Current Fast Chargers (DCFCs) in British Columbia (BC).  For a quick primer on different levels of EV charging, head here.

Part 1 of this series can be found here and includes a description of the planning process. For this post, we’re headed straight to the journey itself.

For the TLDR; version (“too long, did not read!”), skip right to the heading at the bottom for “Trip Takeaways”).

A quick reminder on our trip plan – we would work our way across southern BC on Highway 3, utilizing Level 2 charging infrastructure over 2 days until we reached the Level 3 DCFC infrastructure in the Lower Mainland on the 3rd day.

Trip Planner Tool - click to enlarge

Trip Planner Tool – click to enlarge

The post title is a reference to how the  trip would encompass two fundamentally different types of charging and provide a stark comparison of the reality (as of June 2015) of long-distance travel via Level 2 chargers vs the future: the expanding network of DCFCs!

The First Journey (seeing the sights!)

Knowing that we had set a pretty ambitious time to leave town of 10 am on Friday June 12 (hey that’s early when you have two young kids!), we did a fair amount of packing on the Thursday night, then got up the next morning and proceeded to cram everything in… and left at the bright and early hour of 11:30 am!Read More »A Tale of Two Journeys – Part Two

A Tale of Two Journeys – Part One

Introduction

In May I received an invitation to a workshop to help plan future deployment of Level 3 DCFC infrastructure in BC. The workshop was to take place in mid June in Vancouver and hosted by PlugInBC. The workshop was to include representatives from government, educational institutes, BC Hydro, various EVSE network service providers and several other EVangelists. I was invited to provide some perspective from outside of the Lower Mainland and was extremely excited about the prospect of attending. I immediately went into planning mode and floated the trip by Marley later that evening – I could either do the trip by myself, attending the workshop on Monday and getting home late Tuesday night (or heading straight to work in Trail on Wednesday morning), or we could move some of our holiday plans around to allow her and the kids to come as well… and of course we would have to do the trip in our EV! It would have been crazy to drive our gas car to attend a workshop on DCFC infrastructure – I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to explore the current state of Level 2 and DCFC infrastructure in the various regions of BC!  (click here for an explanation of Level 2 vs DCFC and visit PlugShare to explore what infrastructure is available in BC currently)Read More »A Tale of Two Journeys – Part One

Skiing and a Christmas Tree

For a video update on winter driving, go to the bottom… (original post follows)

Ski season started recently in the Kootenays!    I love skiing so this is one of my favourite times of the year.  There are a few ski hills close to Nelson, so in the fall I plugged the data into my spreadsheet model to see which trips were viable:

EV energy usage model by trip

EV energy usage model by trip

Read More »Skiing and a Christmas Tree