u/BroadSwordfish7

I wanted to share my experience with hotel chargers in France. I asked about the feasibility a while back and most of the answers were not to bother. However, I went ahead with it anyway and thought it may be useful for someone looking to do something similar.

Previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricVehiclesUK/comments/1mx29o6/hotel_chargers_in_france/

We've just come back from 2000+ miles round France, staying at 7 different hotels, all with chargers.

The planning:

Usual process for us looking across Booking,com/Hotels,com/Trivago for what hotels we like, only addition was to use the 'EV charger' filter. There were so many hotels with chargers I didn't feel this limited are options at all. However, we were looking for hotels 20/30 minute drive out of towns/cities, I can't say how many city centre ones have EV chargers.

Once we found a hotel or two we liked in each area I emailed them asking a few questions about their chargers: how many they had, what the speed was, whether there was a cost and whether it was reservable. I also checked Electroverse and Plugshare but Plugshare didn't have good coverage. The responses were mostly reassuring, the majority of hotels knew about the chargers in terms of whether they were able to be reserved and what the cost was. They didn't know the cost if it was operated by a third parted and charged per kWh mind, but I could find that on Electroverse.

Cost:

Across the 7 hotels: 2 were free to use, 2 were a fixed amount for a 24 hour period (one €8, one €26) and 3 were operated by third-parties, on a standard cost per kWh basis. The third-party operated ones were all about €0.30/kWh

Experience:

I managed to charge easily at all 7 hotels. Although one hotel had a Tesla charger that wouldn't work with my car so I had to use their other charger.

I was able to reserve a charger in advance at 2 of the hotels. All chargers were 22kw, it seems they're all 22kw in France. My car can only take 11kw AC.

At two hotels I experienced ICE-ing (and EVs using the space but not charging, not sure what the name is for that!). At the first hotel the staff just shrugged their shoulders and said there was nothing they could do. They did have about 15 chargers so it wasn't a big issue but shame they didn't care to fix it. The other hotel only had 1 charging post (with 2 charger ports) that were often blocked by ICE or EVs, I spoke to the hotel reception and they were amazing, immediately saying they'll go and get the number plates of the cars and get in contact with the guests to move - I left them a great reviewing, calling this out.

We did use public chargers on two days, where our journey was over 3/4 hours. A mix of Tesla and Ionity, not a lot to say on that as I think everyone knows the public charging experience in France is superb. We could have easily gone round France without any charger planning as there are chargers at so many aires, you might just pay a bit more for the convenience (€0.60/kWh, Vs my ionity rate of €0.33/kWh)

Overall it was a very simple experience and was very nice setting off with 100% each time! Im not here to advocate it being a better strategy over forgetting hotel chargers and just public charging, just saying it's a viable option if it's one you want to go for.

If you want to give it a go and are happy putting a bit of extra work in planning upfront then go for it.

Usual story, no one told me about investments when I started working so for the first 5 years of my career I just put money into a high interest savings account and moved it around where I could. I know little about investments / what's best to do with my money so would appreciate some guidance.

I think instead of working 5 days a week to say 65, and then stopping cold turkey I'd prefer to significantly reduce my working hours at say 55, but then keep working in some capacity, to 70.

We'd ideally like children (is that allowed in FIRE? 😄) in the coming 5 years. Wife will then likely move to 4 days for a while, maybe 3 and then ideally about 50 years old she'll drop right back/stop completely.

Our current situation is:

Me: 34M, £77k salary (c£8k bonus), no student loan

Wife: 32F, £90k salary (c£15k bonus), plan 2 student loan - about £40k left

Current savings/monies:

We own our home (worth c£675k) with remaining mortgage of £200k (4.1% interest)

Wife - £40k in cash ISA (c4% interest)

Me - £45k in S&S ISA in Trading 212 (Vanguard FTSE All-World fund), £40k in cash ISA (c4% interest)

We've then got about £10k between us in current accounts at 3-4% interest

Pensions:

Me: c£100k (£90k from old Company, £10k from current company). Currently separate, think I need to combine these into a Vanguard SIPP at lower fees and so it's all in one place

Wife: 3 different pension pots, totalling c£130k. Again think I should combine these into one.

We live quite frugally, neither of are massively interested in spending money on flashy new things, will always buy second hand cars and run them near to the ground for example.

Apologies if I've missed some obvious things, new to this and willing to learn. Just really don't want to turn round in 15 years time and some f*ker goes oh why didn't you do X with your money...

Is there anything I could be doing better to achieve my goals? Speaking with Claude the suggestion was move the cash ISAs into S&S ISAs and combine the pensions

Is it possible to activate battery pre-conditioning ahead of arriving at a DC charger with a high SOC, say 70% or does it only work within a certain SOC window?

I appreciate this may be different for different cars. I have an Audi Q4 E-tron 40 2023. Battery pre-conditioning only works through setting an Audi approved charger as the destination in the MMI, you get no warning preconditioning has activated and there's no way to manually start it.

Hi,

Pod Point are discontinuing their old app (called Pod Point) as of 15th June, meaning everyone needs to move across to their new app, called Pod Home.

I've had a pod point solo S3 for 4 months and have used IOG to control the charge without issue. It connects directly to the car as IOG can't work with the solo S3.

I used to set the pod point app to 'manual' which allowed IOG to control the charge. However, moving across to the new pod home app I can't see an option for 'manual'. I've opted out of pod home controlling the car through smart scheduling and made sure I've got schedules turned off in the pod home app.

Has anyone managed to get IOG working with the new Pod Home app?