EasyGo public chargers

Mill lane is live but there are lots of other planned sites in castlebar Easygo do tend to main spaces eventually. They may do all at once when all the planned sites are ready.

I believe the new chargers are in the car park on the left on the way up to the hotel. We were there several months ago and they had just started the works for them.

Easygo are indeed rubbish. Need more competition and reliability

I guess they are focussing on the counties that Ionity/eCars are ignoring. The "west" is a bit of a wasteland in terms of charging infrastructure so that makes sense for them, I presume. It also means they will have less competition and can get better utilisation rates for their investment.

Also, I think they said on one of their podcasts a year or two ago that they limit their grid connections as the costs go up massively once you go over a particular threshold (cant remember the figures now) so they will generally only have the slower end of the DC charging speeds.... money talks here.

If you want high speed charging infrastructure you are talking 10s of millions, so very deep pockets required, which is easy for Ionity since they are industry funded. EasyGo can realistically only serve the 50kW market unless someone writes them a big cheque!

Precisely this...

Clonakilty has always had 31 kW type speeds from day 1.....

I don't know why it was never fixed.

I assume its down to whatever agreement is in place with the site owners.

The Clonakilty unit was supposed to originally be part of a wider deal that was supposed to be in place with Musgraves (who own Supervalu and Centra).

However I know that in Dublin ESB eCars are getting into Supervalu and Centra type places....

Is this down to who owns the car park - ie the carpark might not be owned by the people who run the Supervalu or Centra.

Or did either Easygo or Musgraves (or both) call off their deal.

This is further complicated by the fact that Supervalu and Centra are franchise type operations.

So the Supervalu in Clonakilty is Scallys Supermarket and is or was owned by the Scally family.....

Am I and Plugshare correct in thinking that Bandon is actually ESB eCars.....

Not that this excuses Easygo failings in anyway of course.

Most easygo 50kW units automatically stop at 80%. You need to press the 100% button when you start charging. This is intended to encourage moving on and not staying until 100% on DC chargers. They also have overstay after 60 min (I think). Overstay used to be per minute but was moved to a fixed amount for some reason.

Easygo has complained about cost of grid upgrades and stated 75kW would be their max power until it made financial sense.

I think they are attempting to partner with hotels, chains of hotels, chains of supermarkets and chains of councils, eir phone boxes, as it's easier than dealing with individual site owners and councils may want nothing except a photo for the papers.

Hotels etc may want kick backs and they may be spread all over the country away from main roads.

You can see ePower put in a DC charger at an airport hotel in Dublin as demand in the area is crazy with taxis 24/7/365.

I do wonder them installing somewhat obsolete 50kW units and single units per site. As a user I want 2+ units per site with at least 50kW not 30kW and I would think a full 75kW would be my minimum. If I were them I would only install hubs at prime national routes. I would do a deal with supermacs kinnegad and make that site the go to location on that route. They may already be too late with other hub type sites already under construction nearby. They really need to pick a few sites that already have massive supplies or that can be upgraded relatively cheaply, and concentrate on these.

In terms of chargers sitting there not powered up for months lidl Wicklow town 50kW unit took 6 months to be powered up from when the charger was on site. This was part of a "new" store so any supply upgrades may have been ordered a year in advance. ESB networks staff have been in trouble for allegedly taking ages and taking bribes to skip the wait.

I have never seen that button! Where is it? All I saw was start and stop button, admittedly I have only used 2 easygo dc chargers so far

Birr ofally looks to be 75kW and sharing capable, not yet powered on

I have guests from England staying for a couple of days before they head off to explore Donegal. They're driving a Leaf 62kWh and have an EasyGo tag, which they're planning to use as their main method of charging while there. They're not rushing anywhere, so have decent range from full (they reckon around 200 miles), but obviously will need to charge once or twice during the trip.

From a quick scan through some of this thread, it seems that EasyGo charging rates/availability etc don't seem to be that consistent, so I'd be grateful to hear from anybody with general tips/advice on using these which would help their trip to go more smoothly. 🙂

I'm not aware of any easy go chargers in Donegal, all mainly ESB chargers. While you can use easygo on the ESB chargers, I believe rate are more expensive.

The only DC chargers in Donegal are Ecars so better off just downloading the ecars app. AC chargers are a mixture of Ecars, chargepoint and tesla destination chargers.

Or someone joking and sticking signs on the chargers to piss people off?

Or using it as a private reservation system.

I see my charging stop at positive 73c I think it is. Next time ring the helpline and they should be able to help. I have started a charge with a few euro credit in the past.

Touch to pay by credit card is an option on most of their DC chargers too. Present card to black box. I don't know if you plug in car first as I don't use that option. If paying by credit card the charging fee may be higher and they may "hold" something like 30 euro from you card for a few days to be sure after the charging session is ended they can bill you the final total.

Check the location on plugshare app too as they can often give trouble. Charleville cork for example says online and ok but many people having issues. Often public charger can take multiple attempts to get going and the whole plug car in first or last can vary by charger type.

EasyGo has never been a good experience for me. Automatically stopping at 80% is irritating but I understand the reason for it. The app is flakey as hell, I’m never able to top-up or add a card because of some unexplained Braintree error and the helpdesk just said to use the website. My charge stopped a few days ago and I was unable to restart it remotely because it said the charge point was occupied - by me🤪

Having to log into app every time is a pain and no auto top up is a recipe for lots of customer support calls.

I get a pop up at 80% warning charging speed will slow and I always press the 100% button but dont usually charge above 90%.

I have a prepay account and would have thought there would be an auto top up function? My wallet emptied after 23 minutes and the session stopped. I topped up successfully then got an error message when trying to charge and a red charging light on my e-tron.

An easier function would be to charge your credit card on the fly surely. Start and finish charge using the app and charge the credit card. Saves the need of having accounts and auto topup etc

To my knowledge applegreen and plugsurfing accounts have this function

A bit if an eye test. 200 charge points per year, that's 4 a week by my maths.

More details in subscription only podcast https://www.independent.ie/podcasts/the-big-tech-show/the-big-tech-show-irelands-ev-charging-network-is-awful-but-things-are-finally-starting-to-look-up/a418339813.html

Some of the chargers that they installed recently appear to be very quiet. They’re probably hoping that usage will grow over time so it might be <500h/yr now but over 3,000h/yr towards the end of life.