Here's What It's Like to Charge an EV At a Campsite - Hint: Other Campers Don't Really Like You!

tflev is brought to you by flowcharger maker of reliable high quality charging stations for your electric vehicle [Applause] hey guys you may recognize this truck this is our f-150 lightning all-electric pickup and we will be taking it to alaska we want to be first to the north most point in north america but that means sometimes we may have to improvise and charge at places like a campground which is where i am right now in colorado we want to test it out tommy's going to help me he's behind the camera hey everybody yeah and we're going to see is it possible to charge the lightning realistically at a campsite so let's see what we've got going yep as andre mentioned the route to alaska is pretty remote and the fast charger infrastructure really isn't fully built out when it comes to driving from the mainland all the way up to alaska so a few areas we're gonna have to improvise by stopping at campgrounds now of course you think well can i just stop somewhere where there's like a standard 120 volt outlet well i think we'll soon find out that's not a great solution because it can be incredibly slow to charge up these huge batteries in these pickups but campgrounds are equipped with faster ways to charge now of course these are set up for fifth wheels are set up for travel trailers they're set up for large drivable rvs and you know with permission you can in theory charge an electric vehicle off of these plugs it's actually uh not that uncommon if you are you know an old-school evis you know this is a very common way to charge your ev and you know ask permission and a lot of the times they don't care because these rvs already draw a huge amount of power in a lot of instances running ac units and satellites and tvs and so charging a truck for a lot of these campsites is like yeah that's fine so we're going to see what the different options are let's open the frank on the lightning it has to beep of course very loud but large space here and underneath this floor we have a cable and a charger level two charger really provided by ford so for just for instance is similar to this now andre what's cool about the ford connected charge adapter here is they actually give us several different dongles including the truck so we can charge on both 120 volts and 240 volts so what we're going to do first is just try a standard 120 volt connection and see how long it'll take to charge up this f-150 yeah and i'll show you in a second this f-150 lighting currently is at about 22 charge so um we'll be able to see exactly how much energy it's asking for and how much we can deliver all right so like tommy said we're gonna try 120 volt circuit first and we have circuit breakers here as well um so let's plug it in it's going to be nice and grounded and let's plug it into the truck so you can see on the included four connector here we got a little blue light so we should be good to charge yes let's see if we can put some power into the f-150 lightning now charging speeds are measured in kilowatts right and the higher the kilowatt number the quicker the charging speed just plugging it into a standard three-prong wall outlet that's called level one and this is a very slow way to charge a truck now to calculate the kilowatts at which you are charging at very simple it's volts times amps equals the current so let's do a little bit of math here so figure we're charging at about 120 volts and this is a 20 amp circuit so in theory right around 2.4 kilowatts or 2 400 watts maybe a little bit less but let's see what the truck predicts until full yeah thanks tommy let's see what the truck is predicting okay so right now it's wednesday evening right yep it says starting at 22 battery uh will reach full charge by monday at 10 42 a.m which is what sunday saturday friday third about five days yeah that's not gonna work that's to go from 22 to 100 yeah so that's on 110 volt 120 volts yes so normally you would charge to about 80 right even that will take days so this is too slow ford does something with this lightning which i think every manufacturer should supply with every electric vehicle and they're not the only ones that do it several other manufacturers do it but they give you different dongles depending on your use case so let's get rid of this standard wall outlet one that's not very useful and okay we're gonna swap it out with this is called the nema 1450 and this guy uses the same outlet as a lot of your household appliances that draw a lot of power so stuff like what ovens maybe your dryer right but just clicks in and now we can plug it in now you'll notice here at this campsite we actually have three different ways of providing electricity so all familiar with that right what 120 volt outlet now we're going to step up to this guy which should be kind of a similar voltage this one at least the the plug is rated at 125 on the receptacle but a 30 amp unit and you can see that up here in the breaker as well it's kind of faint but 30 amps so we're going to see if this is any quicker but of course we don't really have the right dongle we're going to have to use but we do we do we do i i brought adapters oh fantastic let's see him andre you bought a bag of goodies yeah and look it's camping themed do you like that i do love that what are these so the team is going to alaska right like you said we have to go through canada we have to go to different areas so i kind of went a little crazy and i bought let's see five five different connectors and dongles so they're different use cases i have some look four prong to three i think this is the one we might be using yep um i also have brought different adapters for like a different dryer circuits in your house for house charging um i brought this yet another one wow you're set andre uh i brought also a capability uh to actually plug into a receptacle similar on the lightning in the bed here to maybe if you see a lot of lightning on the road maybe we can charge each other or a power boost yeah yeah so this is the guy i think we need now this is called a tt30 to the 1450 and i think we just plugged this in and see if we get any charging improvements all right let's do it tommy so i'm so happy we get to use some of our adapters and figure this out so connected here pretty strong connection and now let's see if i did a good job or if i failed all right go and plug it in actually yes okay let's see if we have a blue light or any light for that matter um no light no power uh off on um no bad news no lights that's what about if you turn the rest of them off that's not great let's try just the other connector all right so let's just go ahead and jump straight to the big one yes this is the nema 1450 right yep so we'll connect straight up to this guy turn it on we have blue light can you see that yeah i can so something is going on with a circuit obviously things can happen at different campgrounds right yeah it's not it's not turning on let's uh let's see what happens when we plug in on the quickest one and uh we'll go from there so we've jumped from level one to level two so we are charging at a much higher voltage right around 240 volts and a much higher amperage which we'll talk about in a second but let's see what the truck is saying well this is a good sign already and some blue lights yeah we're charging that's great okay let's monitor it over here please be charging whoa uh thursday 8 30 5 a.m that's tomorrow that's within what 14 hours ish yeah something like that so we've got 22 to full in like you said right around 14 hours andre so that's overnight but let's say you don't want to go to 100 let's say you just want to get you know 40 50 60 which is kind of in the meat of the battery i think it's doable over several hours no i appreciate that andre is in a big hurry but let's be honest if you're coming to a campsite if you are paying for the spot and the electricity then you're probably going to be staying overnight and if you're charging at level 2 you're better off just putting as much energy back in that pack as you can so i probably would stay here overnight to get a full 100 charge but check this out andre now this circuit we're running at a full 50 amps do you see that so this is a pretty beefy circuit but if you check out the included charge connector yeah let me pull this bracket off it's only rated for 32 amps and 240 volts so let's do a little math so 240 times 32 240 times 32 so 7.7 kilowatts so we are not actually near the maximum capacity of what this outlet can do it's just we're limited by this ford included box now we do have beefier chargers which we could bring like that giant ford pro station right that thing's rated up to 80. of course it's much more bulky so in theory if you had a higher amp rating on your little plug connector here you could charge it even quicker so we decided to try that tt30 plug on our neighbors stall and it still is not clicking on so maybe it's an issue with our dongle maybe it's an issue with the connection but the charger is not turning a slide on so we're gonna have to do some more experimentation andre because right now we've got this guy and we got this guy working but not this middle one all right tommy the final test i want to do is to run it for a little bit of time and see exactly how many percentage we can get or i don't know in 15 minutes 30 minutes are you up for this uh sure now i personally think that this is a little bit of a silly test because you're gonna be sleeping and camping here anyways and this is a big battery it's 131 kilowatt hours i don't think we're going to see any change in 15-20 minutes but andre's andre the editor here okay well let's let's pitch a tent and get set up i guess tell me this is very scientific i'm starting my timer so i can tell exactly how long we've been plugged in it still says by morning by morning we'll be fully charged very peaceful andre that's not me okay [Music] so first of all andre you chose a beautiful place to take the f-150 and do our test here isn't this nice we have a lake we have lots of friendly people it's awesome yeah so we're here at carter lake outside of loveland colorado just a great campsite but one thing i want to discuss which is uh going to be a big point of contention i think as we move into the future yeah is kind of the uh the ethical dilemma you face about charging an ev at the campsite because a lot of these folks seem pretty apprehensive about the idea yeah well so the point i think they're trying to make is okay you have a big battery big vehicle right it needs a lot of energy and if every spot had an electric vehicle all drawing energy right that the price of energy would go up right that's the concern so we are at a place here and um every power installation has like a 50 amp breaker so i'm not worried about taking down the whole place right and then when you consider our charges rated at 32 amps we're well within the limits now the question is when you paid the fee for the spot it was 35 yes right plus tax now does that 35 go toward a night worth of electricity for your mobile home one of these giant things where you've got multiple ac units running right refrigerators is that different than charging up an electric car well i don't think so but you know we'll see what happens in the future and the other beautiful thing about an electric vehicle like this the big battery let's say we're not fully drained right you can actually use the vehicle to power other things as well yeah so if for example there was a lightning storm and all the power went off here then all of a sudden your neighbors would love you because you have because we're plugging in their motorhomes into us 131 kilowatt hours with a battery to fill them up so kind of an interesting dilemma should there be an additional fee for charging at rv parks uh let us know what you think in the comment section we've been here for about 20 minutes or so just making sure everything's gonna work fine and we've added two percent back into the battery and roughly two miles of range we got from 55 to 57 of course that's just an estimate but that two percent is the real deal now a couple of things we learned first of all we need more information some of the charging boxes have little screens on them that'll tell you the voltage and the kilowatts that they are delivering this ford unit does not have enough information so we're gonna have to bring along um a charger that does that's very important so we can really monitor actively and the fordpass app tells you the percentage currently the kilowatt hours delivered but once again it does not show you the charging speed so that's a big deal second thing we learned um that three prong outlets we tried a bunch of them around here and none of them would work with the ford box don't know if it's an issue with the dongle um the voltage supplied or what's going on so a little bit more easier to that if you have any insight drop us a comment below and third of all this is a viable solution although it does seem to make some of these camping folks a little bit upset so let us know what you think in the comments below on that one as well now we've got one more thing to do we're going to stash away a little prize for someone this is the lightning to alaska series right and we've been stashing away these uh these wonderful little goodie boxes so we're gonna do that right now yep that's right this is our northern lightning amps to alaska goodie box we're basically geocaching these along the way so you can come on a journey with us if you want to and if you do if you find this of course it belongs to you if you're first there and please send us a picture of you with this beautiful shirt there's a little belt buckle here it says tfl there's onyx off-road goodies and a way for you to contact us and if you do find this little box send us an email ask it tfl truck with you and the box so we can let our community know that it's been claimed but yeah good luck quick hint we are out here at carter lake that's your hint and of course the footage close it up so there's a business card in the box send under an email and uh let us know a picture of you maybe your vehicle your truck your suv uh maybe you show the t-shirt that you just got or belt buckle etc let us know you got it please [Applause] as always thank you for joining us on this episode and remember ultimate.com is one-stop shop for everything automotive you can check it out for all the news of course reviews of brand new vehicles so thank you [Music]

Channel: TFLEV

Views: 227,054

Keywords: ford f-150 lightning, f-150 lightning, 2022 ford f-150 lightning, ford f-150 lightning electric, f150 lightning, 2022 f-150 lightning, ford lightning, ford lightning f-150, 2022 ford f-150 lightning price, ford f150 lightning, 2022 ford f-150 lightning review, 2022 ford f150 lightning, new ford f-150 lightning, 2022 ford lightning, ford lightning 2022, ford f-150 lightning test drive, ford f-150, 2022 f150 lightning, charging, campsite, campground

Id: Xnyc6oNsB_w

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022