I’ve installed a perfectly functional public EV charging station near downtown Nampa!
There’s 32A worth of 240V fury a couple blocks off downtown, set up with the EVMatch charging network, and the setup works great!
(Comments from Blogger)
2019-09-16 by Aaron
And this is the cool, not common things I keep coming back to read 
Although “We meet at a school, but we own a church building. This causes no end of confusion…”, lol. I can imagine. Probably a challenging budget if you wanted to get an actual bigger church building, at a guess. And now your XLR cables make a LOT more sense now, since you literally are building and tearing down every week.
2019-09-16 by Russell Graves
I’m glad you enjoy the somewhat random walk through topicspace that is my blog! I enjoy being able to write about “just about anything” an awful lot more than having to wrap things around a particular topic. Even if it is an archaic approach to blogging…
I thought I’d explained the reasons for my XLR cables… I suppose, reading through the post, it wasn’t at all clear that we did setup and teardown every week. I thought “mobile church” implied that, but that’s probably a term that only means something within a certain group of people who do that sort of thing. The cables work great, though!
But, yes, we set up and tear down every week. Our Sunday service lives in a shipping container during the week (which is a nice upgrade from the 27’ trailer it lived in prior to that). We start setup at 7:45 and are usually torn down completely by 1:00 PM. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a rather efficient way to run a church. Unless you buy a building or something… though we got a really, really good deal on the building because of how deferred-maintenance it was. When you’ve got a church of people who are willing to show up and put in an awful lot of labor for weeks on end, you can do that sort of thing and have it more or less work. Plus, the building is in a good spot to be useful to the local community. There are a few local groups that meet weekly already, and we’re hoping to expand that to include a good bit more once we have the last quarter of the project finished out.
It’s an interesting model for a church, somewhat deliberately inefficient, but it leads to a lot of opportunities to get plugged in and actually serve in the church, not just show up and consume. A significant majority of our regular attenders are serving in some sort of way, which is awesome.
2019-09-17 by Aaron
Sounds like a much more fulfilling, real community way to run something. Definitely better for the members and the community at large!
(nevermind, I found the update article. I thought I had read it already, but google fu was failing me)
https://www.sevarg.net/2020/04/27/slow-dumb-charging-quit-charging-for-ev/
Ignore the rest
Hi Russ,
Any update to this topic? Is the EVMatch ecosystem still good for you? How often has it been used (both by your congregation and randos)? Maybe the pandemic means you don’t have a typical period to assess usage, but it’s still interesting even if skewed.
You’ve also mentioned your Duosida mobile charger a few times. Is it still acceptable, or have you replaced it due to it not being UL listed, and not sufficiently waterproof (according to the internet)?
Well, I’ll still update… since things have gone a good while past that update.
In that they’ve given us another year for free, sure… but there’s literally no way in which paying a cent for their service makes any sense for us. See below. I opened it up to just “always on” about a year ago, because it seemed like some people were having trouble with the remote activation thing (it may have been during a time when we were messing with networking during construction, I don’t recall exactly), so it’s just been always-live for a long, long while now.
Our extended free trial is ending later this year and I intend to cancel their service, because it makes no sense for us. Paying for power is, quite literally, cheaper than their service fees.
It typically is charging 2-4 time a week - usually Sunday morning, and then some other night, potentially, if someone is in there for other things. This is church member use. Non-church-members, if we see one a month, it’s a busy month.
Still the primary charger for the car, via some 12AWG extension cord with 240V ends on it. I hear one ought not leave it in a puddle, but ours is up high, out of the rain, and has been working great. I might replace it if we got a car that charged faster, but that would be a major rework of stuff, because we’d probably be running charging for the Volt out somewhere else then.