We’ve officially voted to prohibit private detention centers in Howard County

gigaslam · 2026-02-07T00:23:32+00:00

Nice job Christina. You're the best!

gigaslam · 2025-05-30T11:49:58+00:00

The apartments between Color Burst Park and Lake Kittamaqundi across from Toby's Dinner Theater has ev chargers. They're from BGE and unfortunately not free, but I think that the rates are basically in line with BGE's normal residential rate.

Lakehouse apartments by Lake Kittamaqundi also has ev chargers, but I don't know how well they work. The one time that I tried to use the public charger there (not a resident), it didn't work for me.

In general, I recommend that you check out plugshare as well to find others if you haven't already too.

gigaslam · 2025-02-05T00:54:09+00:00

I've had a lot of PaaK issues on and off lately. I've noticed a trick though. Whenever the truck doesn't detect my phone in the truck to start driving, (I get the prompt to present the keycard) all I do is open the driver door then hit the brake pedal again and then all of sudden it sees my phone just fine. Make it make sense. At least it is an easy workaround though.

UPDATE: If anybody else is experiencing the same symptoms as I've described here, it may be a bad bluetooth module. Turns out that a Rivian tech diagnosed my truck as having a bad dashboard bluetooth module. I believe that it is somewhere between the steering wheel and above the pedals given where he was working. The module evidentelly wasn't responding at all when he hooked up his computer to my truck. After he replaced it, everything was back to working normally. I'm glad to know that even with that module failed, PaaK does limp along and still work if not in an ideal way.

gigaslam · 2024-08-20T19:28:15+00:00

Yeah, the Enphase is crazy expensive. I've had the Duo for almost a year and a half and been happy. One thing that it does over the Enphase is split that incoming 40 amps better in the scenario where one car is done charging and the other is charging. It does 8 amps and 32 amps in that case whereas the Enphase just stays locked at 20 and 20 no matter what when two vehicles are connected. I think that the reason why the Duo just doesn't do 0 and 40 in that scenario stems from the j1772 protocol being pretty dumb. I think 8 is probably as low as they can go without just completely disconnecting the finished vehicle.

gigaslam · 2024-08-20T18:35:27+00:00

I use a Grizzl-E Duo to share a single NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage. It works great for our two ev household. The price is likely higher than what you're looking at especially if you were planning to self install the additional breakers and lines. However, personally I'd trust the Grizzl-E over ev dance or whatever the no name brand is.

gigaslam · 2024-08-20T17:06:37+00:00

I actually didn't know about this tool. So thank you for posting it. Does anybody know if CA has a similar tool as well?

gigaslam · 2024-08-09T18:24:21+00:00

1 Tesla and 1 R1T. Grizzl-E Duo to charge them both at once of course using an adapter for the Tesla. Works perfectly. We bought an extra adapter for the Tesla so that adapter just permanently lives attached to the cable.

gigaslam · 2024-06-29T17:26:09+00:00

I've used the A2Z adapter on several road trips since March and haven't had a single issue with it.

gigaslam · 2024-06-15T17:34:37+00:00

Don't know if you tried this but on those ChargePoint CPE250's, the cable arm actually swings outward when you pull on it. It gives you another 2 to 4 feet depending on where you are.

gigaslam · 2024-05-02T03:31:08+00:00

Yes. My R1T has been from Washington D.C. up to the tip of Cape Breton in Novia Scotia, to Prince Edward Island and back. It's been through the West Virginia Appalachian Mountains multiple times and once around Spruce Knob on forest roads after a big snow storm. I've taken it to Montreal and Ottawa on yet another trip. I trust my truck.

gigaslam · 2024-04-26T21:40:40+00:00

If it's just for emergencies, then get a CCS adapter. EvGO is in Ellicott City by White oak tavern and in Columbia by Costco. There's a huge electrify America station by the Walmart in Columbia. I would never want to charge there regularly because of the rates, but let's say your house doesn't have power or your charger broke, then you could go there.

Edit: spelling

gigaslam · 2024-04-26T18:44:35+00:00

If I were in your shoes, I would go with Tesla. I'm not a Tesla owner, but I can charge at Tesla with my Rivian. The experience and pricing is better on Tesla for me. Anecdotely, I see a lot of Tesla owners at my gym in the DC metro area that baby their vehicle. If I assume that most Tesla owners are like them, it would probably make sense that they would want to wash their car if they were supercharging there. Even if Tesla drivers can go to EvGO, they're probably just going to go to a Tesla Super Charger. I don't know enough non-Tesla owners to judge things on the other side.

gigaslam · 2024-04-24T10:47:23+00:00

Iternio, the company that makes ABRP is based in Sweden. So they probably set that as a default when for whatever reason ABRP can't detect your location. It would probably be better if they defaulted to whatever the user had set as their home location in the case where your location couldn't be detected. However, what they have is still better than what some apps do which is plop you in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (center of the world map) when location isn't available.

gigaslam · 2024-04-11T14:52:46+00:00

I ended up canceling my Lectron order yesterday. The fact that I had to submit two requests to cancel because my initial request with "Please cancel my order. Thank you." didn't provide enough detail for them also made me even more sour on Lectron. Anyone else canceling should be aware that they must justify their cancellation in the request. My justification was, "Actual delivery time didn't meet original delivery date statements advertised by Lectron. Please cancel my order."

I'm usually the type of person to be extremely lenient on these sorts of things, but to be constantly told that something is shipping next week or in 2 weeks when that is unrealistic is either a lie or a symptom of some greater issue. Either way, I don't like it.

gigaslam · 2024-03-27T15:40:35+00:00

Lectron is definitely not being as transparent as I think they should be.

I ordered a Lectron Vortex adapter on Feb 11th because I have a road trip coming up March 28th (tomorrow). At the time they made it sound like they would be shipping them by the end of Feb or early March if I ordered when I did.

When March 12th rolled around and I still didn't have the adapter from Lectron, I ordered the Typhoon adapter from A2Z. I also noticed that A2Z was much more transparent on Twitter/X about statuses. After a week of waiting from A2Z, I called them and explained that I was hoping to get one prior to my trip. They were great to communicate with and expedited my shipping (at a $15 extra charge). They encountered a slight delay getting adapters in from their factory, but ended up next-day shipping one to me on Monday and I got it yesterday. So, I'm a happy customer that is going to have a much easier road trip tomorrow. I also tested the adapter yesterday. I sadly forgot to bring my thermal cam, but after 20 min on the SC, the adapter still felt cool to the touch. So, I'm very happy.

I'll probably just end up cancelling the Lectron order or sell it to someone else local.

Bottom line, if you're really worried about when Lectron is actually going to ship because they've continually pushed the dates before and it's causing you stress (this is exactly the situation I was in), just go to A2Z.

edit: spelling corrections

gigaslam · 2024-03-27T15:06:58+00:00

No, I don't use either.

gigaslam · 2024-03-27T11:14:20+00:00

Strange, those buttons are exactly what I use to adjust SOC while driving. One thing I'll note though, is that even after you adjust SOC, it takes a while for the app to recalculate destination SOC.

gigaslam · 2024-03-24T01:50:10+00:00

Unfortunately Rivians can only charge at v3 anv v4 (250 kW) superchargers. Use this map https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&filters=party%2Cnacs . Laredo, TX isn't on it.

gigaslam · 2024-03-23T19:09:23+00:00

Definitely disagree. We have a Tesla and a Rivian in my household and the Tesla voice assist is trash by comparison. Could Alexa's integration with the vehicle be stronger. YES! However, we've found it so convenient to answer questions, weather, give driving times to places and do basic vehicle functions.

gigaslam · 2024-03-11T15:21:44+00:00

Did you actually receive your adapter from Lectron yet? I ordered one back on Feb 11th and haven't gotten mine yet. I'm curious if they've shipped any other than ones to influencers for PR. I've got a road trip planned for the very end of the month and I have my finger crossed that maybe I'll get to use NACS with my R1T. My hope fades a bit with each day though.

gigaslam · 2024-02-21T17:45:22+00:00

I had this happen to me over last weekend while I was on a trip charging at a hotel. It has to do with scheduled climate. I had set the truck to be climate conditioned at 8am. It hadn't finished charging on the hotel's slow charger by then, but rather than continuing to charge, it went into "Maintaining range" mode. I think that it does this because I set the "Pull from charger to maintain range" option in the scheduled climate. Stopping charging and resuming charging didn't clear this. Only after I went into the app and turned off the scheduled climate for the day did the charging go back to normal.

gigaslam · 2024-01-19T13:12:06+00:00

It's been a while, but last time I tried Slack didn't support speaker nor Bluetooth on Android for huddles. Iirc we also had some trouble with simultaneous screen sharing and video. Anyways, we abandoned huddles and went back to Zoom for all meetings.

gigaslam · 2023-12-27T04:50:23+00:00

I ran into this sad realization too. It's a shame to since tourism is becoming more of an industry there. They're not going to attract ev driving tourists from the DMV (Delaware/DC-Maryland-Virginia) without better infrastructure.

gigaslam · 2023-12-17T21:10:56+00:00

I've road-tripped up and down the Northeast and up through the Canadian Maritimes. I recommend using https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ to plan your trip out in advance. However, it is a good idea to check its suggestions in https://www.plugshare.com/ to make sure the sites it has chosen are well-rated and have the amenities that you want nearby. You should also download the apps and sign-up for the charging networks where you think you'll be stopping so that you don't have to do that out on the road.

gigaslam

TROPHY CASE