Reisender wrote:
wapiticountry wrote:
time2roll wrote:
wapiticountry wrote:
Centralized charging stations would be a no go from the consumer point of view. From personal experience I can tell you they are not going to want to park their vehicles away from their sites, even for a relatively short period of time.
Actually it is currently working very well at every other venue.
Do people just go crazy at an RV park?
Apparently so. Having owned parks for going on 20 years, not having parking at the site for personal vehicles is a huge issue. I would never, ever reconfigure or build a site where the occupant had to park anywhere but on the site itself. Maybe it is because they usually have a lot of personal items in that car related to vacation travel. Things like expensive cameras, spotting scopes, expensive fishing gear, climbing equipment etc. Or maybe they just don't feel comfortable having their personal car out of sight. But it would be a big customer service negative in my opinion if the charging had to be done at a location away from their RVs.
Good to know. So adding a pay to play J1772 EVSE on a half dozen sites would probably suffice. Get the 24 foot cord version. My guess is customers towing with an EV truck would pay through the nose for the convenience of “fueling up” right on site. Or just add a second 50 amp plug with a padlock and charge a flat rate for access. Maybe 50 bucks a day to use it. Maybe more.
Like every other park in the country, I do not have the ability to just add a charging station at a site. My electrical distribution system is not set up to just add another 50 amp circuit on the loops. Doing so would actually violate NEC rules by overloading the main circuits. To add them I would have to trench and add another main distribution line. That is a major, major expense above and beyond the cost of any charging station.
Even if I added them to your six sites, how do I go about managing the occupancy? Do I not rent those sites and turn away reservations to keep them open hoping someone needing EV charging eventually shows up? If I take reservations for them from non-EV guests do I then turn away EV guests? Do I move the advanced reservation customers to less desirable sites to accommodate the last minute EV reservation? Or do I just put the EV charging stations in the least desirable sites so that doesn't become an issue? Simple solutions usually aren't very simple.
