Two weeks, 1,000 Km later

Time flies and it’s already been two weeks since we’ve taken delivery of our Nissan Leaf. We’ve just passed the 1,000 Km mark a couple of days ago. And not a single drop of gas!

Here’s an update of some of the events from the second week with the Leaf:

– Measuring consumption with the smart meter alone turned out to be a bit of a pain. You can do it during the week if you program the timer late at night, where you can clearly see the consumption from the charging station, but over the weekend, when you charge during the day, things get mixed up with the consumption from the rest of the house. So I threw the towel and decided to install a KWh meter right before the charging station. I contacted AeroVironment and they recommended the same manufacturer Bill Clendinning is planning to use (link below). I ordered the one with remote access, just for the fun of it. It shipped during the week, just hoping it doesn’t get stuck in customs…

http://www.kwhmeters.com/EKM-25IDS-N_v.2.html

– I got an offer for my old car, which I’ve been trying to sell for about a week. The most frustrating part is having to take the old car to work some days to do things like safety inspection and minor repairs, and not being able to drive the Leaf! If everything goes well, the sale should go through before the end of the week. (already got a deposit).

– Yesterday I was tempted to take the Leaf on a range anxiety adventure, but we decided it would be too risky, so we took the Corolla instead. The drive was from Kanata to the Lusk Cave Trail at Lac Philippe, 70.5 Km each way, about half over highways (417 in Ontario and 5 in Quebec). We could have avoided the highways turning it into an 80 Km trip each way. That would have been much more reasonable in terms of range, but it would have added at least an extra hour each way, a problem since we were travelling with other friend driving their (cough) gas-powered cars. If only we had charging stations at the park…

– I sent some feedback to Nissan about the Carwings notification. The unplugged reminder is nice but can be annoying especially when it starts crying wolf. For example, today I unplugged the Leaf in order to open up some space in the garage. The Leaf was fully charged. Nevertheless, Carwings sent me a notification saying the Leaf was “currently parked near a preferred trickle/normal charging station but not plugged in to charge.” Clearly, the software should be a bit smarter to realize it’s ok to keep a fully charged car unpluged. I sent the feedback to Neetika Sathe and she promptly forwarded it to a resident expert on Carwings.

Some ballpark cost numbers I was able to gather so far:
– It costs us $2 to drive 100 Km with the Leaf.
– To drive the same distance in the city, our Corolla would need 8 liters of gas, or $10.
– That means we save $8 for each 100 Km we drive.
– Or $80 per 1,000 Km
– Or $800 per 10,000 Km.
– We’re on our way to drive at least 20,000 Km per year. Our Corolla would need at least 3 oil changes to drive that much, at $50 a pop. In total we’ll be saving $1,750 each year, which is quite impressive.