I used up my battery miles rather quickly. I started out with 52 miles on the guess-o-meter and blew through 44 of them on the first 33 miles on the road. This was because I was traveling on SR-417, otherwise known as "The Greenway", where the speed limit is 70MPH and although I was lucky enough to catch the draft of a large red semi in the right lane traveling at around 62-65 miles per hour, that kind of speed is going to eat electrons the way Pac Man devours those little while dots.
With 8 miles left on the guess-o-meter, I switched into Hold mode and traveled the next 45 miles on gasoline. When my screen switched over, my guess-o-meter for the gasoline in my tank showed 188 miles of fuel left. I drove on gas the way I drive on battery power - slow and steady, using the same hypermiling techniques of employing regenereative braking when possible, not running my air, and coasting as much as possilble. Because the gas engine serves as a battery regenerator and not an actual powertrain engine, this seemed to work very well. I pulled off the highway showing 153 miles on the gas-o-meter and switched back to battery, calculating that I could travel the remaining 10 miles with the 8 miles of battery power I had left.
I actually did quite a bit better than that, and when I parked my car in front of the power outlet on the lower level of the Hammock Beach parking garage, I still had 3 miles of battery power left. I'm still kicking myself about that a little bit because of course I'd rather have coasted into my parking spot as my battery depleted, but no alas - I will survive.
I did take quite a hit on Voltstats. Considering I had been at #78 on the leaderboard the morning I left Orlando, I have taken quite a dip as of this morning, and all my stats have skewed due to the 45 miles driven on gasoline.
There I am at #121. Considering my trip home will be very similar, I expect to dip even further and see my EV% get precariously close to only 90%. Fortunately, I have no road trip plans in my immediate future, so I should be able to mitigate this damage in just a month or two.
This graph doesn't look too bad - only a slight surge in the unsightly blue region indicating gasoline usage.
Again, as I continue to drive the majority of miles on battery, that blue should shrink even further.
Now, as far as charging goes, I had a very interesting experience here at Hammock Beach. On a positive note, when I pulled up at the valet and explained my situation - I have a Volt, it needs to charge, yada yada, I was met with great enthusiasm on the part of the valet to be helpful, and he directed me to the lower level of the garage where I could plug my EVSE into a wall outlet and charge as long as needed. This I did, setting up my EVSE inside my car, passing the charge adaptor as well as a long extension cord through the window, and plugging the extension cord into the outlet and the adaptor into the charge port of my Volt.
I took this photo before I straightened out my extension cord and removed the kinks from the line, but this I assure you, I did.
Now, here's the weird part - my car charged very slowly. By this, I mean it took 23 hours to go from 3 miles to 48 on the guess-o-meter. I'm sure this was due to several factors, but the two I think I can point to most readily are:
1. The long extension cord. I think it's 50 feet. For sure it took much longer than usual for the charge to start and this would be due to the path of the current from the wall.
2. There were several other plugs, as you can see, in the outlet, charging various battery packs for the workers at the resort.
The good news is, even though something was limiting the charging speed, my EVSE was able to negotiate a charge rate with the electric power from the wall that was safe for both the outlet and the Volt. It's not like I'm going anywhere until tomorrow. And this was one of the few free charging opportunities I've had, so that was a bonus as well.
Tomorrow I'll be heading home and then - back to my regularly scheduled Volt Life.
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