Is EV Charging Safe In The Rain? We Tested It!
Now, sometimes I do wonder how we find these locations because a lot of these CPOs don’t actually help us. And we’re here at a location today where it’s not on their app and it’s not on their website. It’s a new location. We’re outside the Ashtree Farm. And this is Evive. So, uh, we’ve got the Renault 5 with us. We’re not going to have this for very much longer. If you want to know the story of that, check our feed. You’ll find it in there. Uh but we’re looking at Evive today and particularly their business model. They have chosen the convenience route putting their charger decent chargers as well uh in car parks of good quality pubs and restaurants and that’s why we have here. Now as I said we had difficulty finding it because it’s not yet on their app and definitely not on their website. Uh but it seems a number of motorists are well aware it’s here simply because while we’ve been here we’ve had about five cars pull in charge and some of them have gone off again. This rain is getting much worse. So we’re going to be restricted in what we can do here. Uh but we need to get on with it. Now we always do have a look at the charges who makes them what power they are etc etc. And this is one that we have come across before but they’re not very common and that’s a seaman’s unit. and Seaman seem to be quite late in the day getting in on the act of EV chargers. Uh they’ve got one here which is a 240 kW unit dual bay. So that means at peak times almost certainly you’ll be sharing power between the two. Uh but 120 kW it’s more than ample for my Renault 5 which taps out under 100 kW and some of these cars as well will be under 100 certainly underund 120 kW. So, a good size uh power for this and a good location as well. The bays uh nothing special. They’re fairly typical EV only. So, what we have here is eight charging bays, none of them disabled or limited access with extra wide facilities or markings. Uh and they are all CCS2. So, very sorry all you Chadamo drivers. Uh but there’s nothing here for you. Now, the secret we’ve been holding back from you is the price. And I have to warn you, this is an introductory offer. This is not going to last very long. So, if you’re in the area, you want some charge, you can’t charge it out, get down here. Let’s have a look what they’ve got. So, the first thing is CCS2. Present your credit card or RFID identifier. So, we can use Electraverse here. And it says it on the app. We can use Electraverse here, but let’s go credit card. And it says, oh, look at that. 30, let’s clear it. 30 p per kilowatt hour. Says subscription on roaming rates may apply. Check your plan. Maximum amount retention. This is pre-authorization. £10 will be blocked on your account. £10 is a great pre-authorization. It’s enough to make sure you get a decent charge, but it’s not so much that if anything goes wrong, you’re going to have these stacked up clearing out your bank account. So, this is why all the excitement here 30p. Now, we’ve got conflicting stories. We have checked on the evive uh website and it doesn’t mention the three 30p here. We’ve checked on Zap Map. They do. They’re telling us it’s 30p and we’ve also checked on things like Facebook, Instava, Instagram, well well all these social media sites and they all seem to know this is 30p here. So, we think a lot of the drivers who found it must have seen it elsewhere other than on Evive’s own website or their own app. Strange. I sat in the car, opened up the Evive app, it found out exactly where it was, but it says there are no charges here. Yeah, if you’re going to do it advertising 30p, you need to tell everyone about it, not try and keep it a secret and let social media reveal this to you. So, the things I do for my viewers, maybe you can actually see the rain coming down. It’s getting really heavy. Uh, but we do have to charge these uh charge the car here to see what they actually do. Make sure we’re getting the 30p, check other things like the electroverse access uh and just do everything. So, I’m going to have to put my umbrella away and then drive over here, plug in, and uh let’s experience what it’s like to plug in in the rain if you couldn’t be bothered or haven’t got an umbrella with you. So, what we have here, let’s use the RFID. I’m going with Electraverse. Let’s see if we get 30p on Electroverse because many viewers have said when they use the Electroverse card, they don’t always get the offers. Let’s see what it does here. So, uh, we’re using this one and we’re going RFID. Yeah, it’s given us a tick for RFID. Ready? Let’s see if it is. Let’s plug in here. Oh, one of the heavy plugs again. And that’s in there. So, let’s see what it does. Establishing connection. Authentication. Parameter discovery. Cable check. Prepare charging. It’s gone. Oh, I’m getting wet. Of course, you don’t have to stand outside while this is going ahead. You could be sat in the car watching this. Cable checks completed. Prepare charging. And we’re away. Okay, so that’s I haven’t timed that. That’s less than a minute. At this point, I would normally just get in the car, sit there and do whatever I do, or just wander over to the pub, gonna have a coffee or a meal. What have we got here today? We’ve got 45 45% state of charge. Uh we are delivering 15 18 kW.8 kilowatt hours charging at 35.4. That’s actually not such a bad speed for that. uh established time to 80% uh is 1.59. That’s 1:59 p.m. It doesn’t tell you the time in minutes and hours. It tells you the time it will finish. Uh because it is now uh 1:37. So this is saying up to 80% will get to before 2:00. Uh so what’s that? 23 minutes. That’s not bad for a 50% charge on this. Now, one of the features I was told about this is this flashing lighty thing on the front. Uh I have to say if you plug it in at home, which I do on the uh Octopus 7P rate overnight, uh this goes off after a few seconds, so you can’t look out your kitchen window and see what it’s doing. However, oh, this one’s just gone off. Uh, I hope you got that beforehand because this was flashing to show you the indication of what it’s doing, but it seems it only comes on for a very short time and then times out. That’s a feature I’d like them to extend for longer so that if you walk back, you can see it instantly. However, it’s nitpicking because it is on the app. Uh, so if I’m going to open up the app, let’s just see. I’ve dropped my Electroverse card. Let’s put that somewhere safe. Let’s see what the app says here. So, the app says, uh, here we go. My Renault. Let’s see what we can see in here. And again, normally you do this in the car. There we go. So, it’s showing 47% state of charge. Maximum rating is set at the moment at 90%, but this is saying 80. Uh, and uh, so you can sit in the pub and you can watch this. When it gets to the reading you require, just come out and you’re finished. Uh, so let’s just check this again what it’s doing. So we’ve delivered nearly 2 kwatt hours of electricity at 30p. This is as cheap as Tesla. So I don’t mind doing this for a little bit longer. We do need a little bit of a boost charge today. Uh, still saying one uh 159 before it’s going to be complete. That’s a relatively short time. It’s about 20 23 minutes, which I think is pretty decent for this. Uh, and we’re currently charging still. So 35 kW. Uh, that’s quite a good rate. Uh my experience here um let’s just go through it from the charging screen it says select your charger. So you know on this location before you do anything you select your charger. It will say ready underneath. You select your charger as I did here and then it will say select your payment method. I use the RFID on Electroverse. I’m going to check the app on Electroverse in a minute to see what it’s actually charging us. Do you still get the 30 p per kilowatt hour on Electraverse or is that just for today on either contactless or on the uh the Evive app? So once you’ve done that, it says ready uh plug in. So you then plug in and then it goes through its safety checks. See, particularly in the rain, an awful lot of people totally misunderstand this. These chargers are absolutely safe as houses. They have a very extensive check procedure. So, no power goes through that cable until it’s gone through this procedure. So, if you drop that uh out of here into a puddle, nothing. It won’t cause a current, it won’t cause a flash, anything. There’s no power going through the cable. When you plug it in, the first thing it does sends a very low voltage. This is like telephone voltage. what you’ve got going through your home telephone. It’s nominal. It’s tiny amount. And that there now talks to the charger, talks to my BMS, the battery management system here. And they run through a series of checks and the car goes, “Yeah, that’s all right.” This goes, “That’s all right. That’s it.” etc., etc. And then once it’s all ready, the charger then says, “Right, I am now going to send you some uh power.” Uh but it doesn’t send a lot. It sends a token gesture through and the car will then say, “Yeah, I can take more. I can take more.” Whoa, stop there. And that now has established the connection, establish the power rating. And it’s currently running at 35 kW. That’s what the car asked for. And the charger is providing. Doesn’t matter whether these are 250 kW, 120 kW, makes no difference at all. The car is saying, “I don’t want any more than 35 kW.” So the charger says, “Okay, I’ll stick at 35 kW.” Massive amount of safety. One other thing people say, “What about the charge is now is now plugging in, plugged in and passing. There’s no danger from that. It’s not possible to get any access whatsoever. So even in the pouring rain, wet hands, wet charger, absolutely totally safe. So there’s no issues. This something that the EV critics always complain about. Oh, what happens when it’s rainy? You can’t charge your car. Yes, you can. Now, one other feature here, and that is I want to try and get the plug out. This plug will not move. It is rock solid. You can’t take it out. And if the car was uh locked, I’ve got to move away from it cuz if I move closer, it does unlock. So, it’s now locked. So, if uh Jonas, could you actually walk forward and try and pull that plug out? Uh I’ll hold the umbrella for you. Okay, back to you. Right, so what you can see there is it is locked. What I’m going to do now is use the favorite button of mine, and that’s the release button. So, I’m going to move here. Car unlocks. And at this point, if I want to, I can press that button. It’s unlocked. There we go. It’s unlocked. So, I’m now going to put this back. Just before I do, again, no worry about rain getting into this. This is now a dead circuit. But, I do have to say this is heavy. It’s very bulky, very inflexible. Uh, this if I if I own this one, it is only on loan to me. If I own this one, I’d be worried about putting something this heavy into that. Uh because we have stretched it. Uh we got in there because other bays were full and this was the best one for filming. So normally I would have pulled into that one and used the short cable there. So let’s put this back for the next owner. And that should tell me now. Should give me a summary. No, the summary is gone already. So that’s the end of it. So I’m going to put back the little rubber plug there. Close that. End of charging session. So, let’s get in out of the rain and we’ll just have a look on the app. Now, as always, I don’t leave my car here. People sort of accuse me of all sorts of things, but I pull in here to charge and I have charged. Fact, I only need two or three kilowatt hours. Nothing to do with it. But, uh, now I’ve finished charging, I’m just instantly going to move my car away. Plenty of bays left, but I’m always thinking there might be a rush. So, I’m just going to move out the way. Well, alas, the mess are dry. The heater is actually warming me up nicely. Hands are freezing cold. Uh, that’s the rain for you. Anyway, just going to check check a couple of things on the mobile phone, smartphone. Uh, which I don’t need to do outside. In fact, a lot of what I did there, you don’t need to do outside. It’s just for the the video to show people. Anyway, the first thing I got a message through from Renault app which says charging session is complete and it tells me how much I used. Going on to the Renault app, I find here uh you’ll probably be able to see that it says one charging session and that is uh 4.2 kilwatt hours. So, it was just a nominal one and the battery finished up at 45% uh state of charge. Uh but the interesting one for me is the Electroverse. I’ll tell you why in a second, but let’s just see what Electraverse has done here. And here we go. This is Premier Drive. So, that’s where we are. But the first thing it says is we’re at Premier Drive now. Really interesting because many people commented on the flying horse video that we did. Link to that one down below. Um, as to how much it cost me using the Electroverse card there. And the interesting thing is when you look at the screenshot, the last charging recession uh session it recorded was on the 6th of November. So that session I did at the flying horse and you all saw me use my uh uh my electroverse card has not yet come up on the feed. This one has. So it looks like it’s but totally skipped that one. And that might be a free charging session for me. So let’s have a look at this one. It says on here Evive Pomeier drive uh 1336 4 kwatt hours 10p that’s fitting in with the 30P. So what have we got here? Uh we got the date 4th of December time 1336 to 1343 MG4 kW duration 6 minutes cost 120 so 4.01 01 kwatt hours. This is 30p. So my electroverse card is getting the 30p that EVive have offered us at this location. So whether I use evive app or a contactless card or the electroverse, this is all the same. I have to say I’ve never come across a case where the electroverse card has charged more than whatever’s advertised, but I’m sure many of you have. Anyway, that’s the session here. Uh, just a top up session. So, we’re going to be on our way shortly because the weather’s closing in rapidly. So, we’re just going to finish this one up out inside the car rather than outside as we normally do. So, my experience here, uh, cracking location. There’s a lot going on around. If you fancy not a pub meal, but a McDonald’s fast food meal, you can just walk over there. It’s just like 150 ft over there. So, this is a great location. Chargers, the new ones for us. we see in mass market. We have looked at one of these very closely. In fact, we looked at one still in the box before it was installed. So, we’re aware of these chargers. They’re good chargers. They’re nice and powerful. They’re also quite cheap. So, 240 kW here, 120 kW shares easily power something like this, even the coner over there. So, location’s good, charges are good, price is amazing. At the moment, we’re told on various social media sites that this is only going to last until the 12th of December. There’s nothing on the Evive site or the EVAF which tells us anything about the special offer. So, yeah, check that map. Uh that’s the one that led us here in the first place. So, from a very very wet Ashton under line on the outskirts of Greater Manchester and in front of the Ashtree Farm. Uh this is Dave. Thanks very much for watching. I’m Dave.
We visited Ashton-under-Lyne to check out a new EV charging station from Evyve. And being December, it was cold and wet. So, what better opportunity to check how safe EV charging in the rain really is! These chargers were brand new and discounted to an incredible price, which won’t last long. What is EV charging like in the rain? How safe is it? Why did we even come here? Check out the video as Dave Takes It On.
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Dave Takes It On is presented by Dave and produced by his son Jonas. The channel is focused on the UK’s transition to EV charging, looking at what EV drivers can expect when out and about. Whether you’re unsure if you can use a 3-pin plug or need to find the latest EV charging prices, we have it all.
