After just one week of having our Blink Level 2 chargers, I’m noticing a difference. As I expected, being able to add another 10-11 miles of range in only an hour has paid off. For the first time, I’ve gone more than a month without buying gasoline. The first 3 weeks of this, we just had our Level 1 chargers, and I was having to resort to gasoline occasionally. Since getting the Blinks, I haven’t used gas at all.
I also noticed, that when charging a completely drained battery, the Blink shows I’m putting in 12.8 kWH, instead of the 12 kWH I’d been using as my electric cost estimate. I had gotten the 12 kWH figure from a web posting from a taxi driver who drives a Volt. The Blink units keep track of electricity usage for the current month as well as the previous month, so when the December 1st rolls around, I’ll update the blog with actual electric usage figures and cost. That will also allow me to make sure my cost justification for the chargers was valid. The average cost of the two Blink chargers was $352.50, as I noted in an earlier post. If you haven’t read that post, we got the units free of charge and only had to pay for installation, due to a government program.
Since we have a Level 2 charger for each Volt we own, I am being careful to not switch between chargers, so Bonnie and I can see how we are each performing as drivers. She used to complain that when I drove her hybrid, her MPG would drop. It is true, I like to accelerate more aggressively than she does, but the Volt is changing that, so we’ll see…
My MPG, shown on the OnStar RemoteLink app has finally gotten over 150 MPG. It was 146 just 5 days ago! It counts electric mileage as 250 MPGe, which is not accurate, but there’s no way to really determine MPGe without knowing the current price of gas. Using the same methodology I used in my three month report, I now calculate my overall MPGe to be 99.4. This has risen from 98, in just one week!
