ESB eCars

Yep, they moved it 50m further back in the carpark, but it's inaccessible behind some fencing. Can't see how it's being used. Have reported it and will update on Plugshare.

We have tried using ESB ecars a few times now.

The first time was my wife's first time using a public charger. We downloaded the app. I was surprised to see we had to prepay -as this is not required with Ionity or Teslas system.

When she arrived at the Junction 14 Mayfield she spent twenty minutes trying to get the app to work and eventually discovered that the app would not connect to the power terminal (not an uncommon occurrence we found out from eCars support afterwards). As she had not received the RFID card that ecars had sent out she would have been stranded there except a kind lady offered to use her card to pay. She then spent 40 minutes waiting for the 50kw charger to give her enough power to continue her journey. The missus was stressed out of her mind - was an awful introduction to the electric car charger network.

On Monday this week we were travelling up past J14 and this time I had the RFID card, only to discover this will not work unless the card is activated, cue more frustration on our end, messing around with the clunky app and for some reason we were only able to get about 10 minutes worth of charge. I am still not sure why this was.

Yesterday we tried our luck at J14 again, after activating our card, connecting to the terminal, discovered that the terminal was not working and there was a queue of cars waiting for the terminals that were.

So we kept going as far as Ballacolla and found eight Tesla Super chargers sitting there free waiting for us. Simply connected the charger to the car seamlessly with no messing around with apps, pre-payment, cards, low speed or broken chargers, queues, and were on our way in 10 minutes.

Surely at this stage the ESB would have implemented a system that just worked once you pay (as you do with petrol/diesel) or have associated an account/ car with a payment method. Also hard to understand how the national power infrastructure provider don't have enough high speed chargers at a key point on the main route between the country's two largest cities.

This was a good write up from last year on how they have set up the user experience- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/access-denied-user-experience-failure-esb-e-cars-brendan-carroll/.

Seeing this now. Thanks for updating Plugshare with a note.

Be nice if there was legislation to make units free vend in this type of scenario. EasyGo 75kW on Mellowes Rd out of action for 3 weeks now. Would be fixed in a jiffy if was defaulting to free vend.

More like

The button to press to restart it is on another computer the other side of my desk, having to press it means I have to get up and walk 4 feet. Besides, its Bill's job to do that and he is off.

Fob off a potential customer and time to make tea.....

That's management material there. If he keeps that up he'll be CEO in no time 😂

Maybe there is, but that’s a bit of a pain if you are simply traversing a motorway and don’t fancy going so far offline and only charging at 22kW instead of the 43kW the unit you headed for could give…

More top-quality e-Cars charging point layouts - the recently-opened Knocklyon SuperValu site:

Its not optimal but it works...

They’re probably afraid it would be more likely to be hit if it was moved forward. Longer cables would solve all this nonsense. With the latest pricing, they should be able to afford them.

I had that photo in my head as I went to DC charge in Dungarvan, Co Waterford this morning.

Outside of the city, there's only 1 DC charger in the entire county. There's 2 parking spaces but the CCS cable is too short for the vast majority of cars using the right-side parking bay.

I knew from the app that an EV was AC-charging overnight but what bay was he using? Thankfully, he was using the correct one and I could DC charge without parking arseways.

The downside was I had to share the electricity with the other EV so I didn't get the full charge I was expecting...

A lot of people find this out the hard way.

There is only about 1/3 the number of 50kW+ chargers that are needed right now today and even though more chargers are coming online the number of chargers per EV in the road is getting worse as sales are high but number of new chargers is a trickle.

In terms of chargers not working and or being dodgy this is a common issue for non tesla units. In the UK it was estimated around 1/3 of chargers were broken at any one time. I have seen chargers work intermittently for over a year before they finally broke and were replaced. Many AC chargers are 5+ years old and many DC chargers are old and worn. Even the brand new chargers have issues often not working within days of being installed.

Teslas supercharger system is far superior but up until recently they had no sites at all in Northern Ireland. In some ways they have it easier supplying the car, the charger and the software and not trying to work with lots of other manufacturers and cars. Even the parking layout was easier when they only catered for tesla parking layout. They also picked large hub sites so if one breaks there is another one next to it.

ESB on the other hand rolled out 10 years ago at a time when EVs were a trial. They put single units dotted around the place. At the time and until recently nearly all these sites ran at a financial loss and in Northern Ireland there is still no fees. Due to the financial side (and competing with free) commercial operators were very slow to roll out and Ionity is manufacturer subsidised. As to why we do t have a worid class network, in part it's due to lack of investment from the government and even the green party seem to be anti vehicle even EVs. In terms of supports we are probably 5 years behind the UK and Northern Ireland is probably 10 years behind UK.

Thus lots of people but fancy 50k electric cars then struggle to public charge them.

In terms of plug in and pay to charge like tesla there are technical problems. Chademo does not have that feature. On CCS in theory it can be done but many cars and chargers cannot actually do it. The network for this is probably 5 years behind Tesla, and many older chargers cant do it without expensive changes that no one is willing to pay for.

Touch to pay by credit card is an option on some Irish chargers (none if them esb), mainly easygo 50kW+ chargers but again it's a bolt on separate box, most chargers don't have it fitted, and when trying to use it, it often does not work and costs more (sometimes they pre authorise £100 before charging begins at Maxol in NI). Touch to pay by credit car is generally required on newer UK chargers but no requirement here. In the past each provider wanted their own app, own RFID card and they were not keen to help competitors, and don't show competing chargers on their app. This is only good business, but bad for consumer.

Many of these issues are being solved in UK and may happen here but I don't see any evidence for anything happening on the ground. In fact all the talk about future supports for public chargers may only help delay rollouts as suppliers wait to see what they can get for free in terms of 50% funding or similar.

Typically those that regularly drive long distances get a long range Ev with 60+kWh battery or have a second car a petrol or diesel for these type trips. Public charging is main downside of EV ownership.

I thought the 10 hour thing was only for 22 kW AC chargers.

And that AC charging at a triple head charger was still subject to 45 mins limit before overstay fee

That's because the charging units they continue to install are designed to be placed at the centre of four parking spaces, like this picture below. If they are designing "single-sided" charging bays, they need to install the other type of charging unit.

In my image above, if there were ICE parking spaces, rather than a bit of free space on the left (for the glass bottle recycling area), this setup would mostly only be usable by 2 EVs (the SuperValu ICE parking is quite tight, so there'd be no room for parking sideways a lot of the time, and it wouldn't go down well either).

I wonder if others experience this scenario..

Nissan Leaf 2020 model, tried twice to fast charge at a ESB charger just after others had completed fast charging (separate locations, once CCS, once Chademo) and both times the charger started the charging, then stopped and reported a vehicle problem, forcing me to AC charge (a zen experience! )... so I thought "2 out of 2 aint good", that my ChaDeMo socket was faulty.. but then a day later I tried to fast charge at another ESB charger (Ennis Circle K, no EV there before me) and it worked fine, no issue.

...so do the ESB ecars chargers need a few minutes after completing a fast charge to stabilise?!