Charging Etiquette

This document is meant to help provide some guidelines, or at least start discussions, around the use of EV chargers. The primary use case is around level 2 charging, although some of these guidelines apply to SuperChargers as well.

Ultimately, we hope they will be adopted and either posted wherever EV charging equipment resides or communicated to anyone who might use them.

For the foreseeable future, there will be less EV charging spots than EVs that would like to use them. This is especially true for locations that have very few chargers (e.g. one or two) and people who want or need to spend many hours charging there. As such, please consider these guidelines:

  • Don’t plug in unless you really need to when not at home. While it’s good practice to be plugged in all the time at home, that becomes problematic when away from home because you are preventing someone else from using the charger.
  • Do not stay in the EV charging spot any longer than you have to, especially if there are limited charging spaces available. If you are destination charging overnight, try to move your car the next morning (or, depending on when your charging stops, at night) so others can charge if they need to.
  • If you are using valet parking and are done charging, consider telling the valets that you are done and they can move your car to be able to plug in someone else’s.
  • Do not block any EV charging spots or prevent them from being accessed while charging your vehicle.
  • Never touch, let alone unplug, anything connected to someone else’s vehicle.
  • If you see charging equipment (adapters, etc.) that are not clearly marked for public use, please do not assume they are for public use. This goes with the above bullet point.
  • Consider providing a means for someone to contact you if they need to charge; if you’re done charging but can’t get to your car, maybe you can unlock the charge port and they can park in range of the cable, for instance. There are of course privacy risks for doing this, unless everyone adopts checking in to an app, e.g. PlugShare, which would allow some form of messaging.

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