Dinner Plain the Easy Way

The latest instalment for anyone interested in our electric expeditions is a somewhat mundane and un-adventurous trip up to Mt Hotham and Dinner Plain.

Some of you may be aware of our last trip to Dinner Plain, back in 2015 when the car was mere months old. That was more of a "let's see what we can do" adventure than a regular trip, as there were no superchargers on the Hume as yet and we'd also been led to believe (incorrectly) that fitting normal chains to the Tesla was difficult for clearance reasons. For that reason heading up via Omeo meant we had little chance of needing to use chains and we had the Tesla ones (not Hotham compliant) to meet the carry obligations. We made it, but it was a slow trip involving attempts to amuse ourselves in Bairnesdale for 6 hours (not easy) and pushing some range limits pretty close at times.

This time it was a whole different ballgame. Armed with a supercharger network and decent diamond pattern chains (in the end no issue with clearance at all) we could plan to go the most direct way via Harrietville and Mt Hotham through to Dinner Plain.

We started out with a rare charge to almost 100%. Not needed to get to Euroa but to minimise the time required to charge there to continue on.

Trickling up to 100% on 10A at home whilst we load up

Trip Planner in the car estimated we'd get to Euroa with 36% remaining, in fact we arrived with about 32% most likely due to lower temps and slight headwind that the car couldn't account for.

Easy run to the lunch stop

Euroa was the usual boring stop with bad coffee, and unfortunately we needed to charge there longer than normal to try to minimise our reliance on the untried charging option at our lunch stop at Boynton's Feathertop Winery in Porepunkah.

One of the reasons we'd picked Boynton's for lunch was the fact they had 3-phase power available that they'd generously offered for us to use to top up whilst we dined. Larger wineries quite commonly have 3-phase power which makes them good places to stop for a couple of hours. Even though we theoretically could make it all the way to Dinner Plain from Euroa without charging, it would be very tight. Heading up mountain roads in to potentially unpredictable weather and road conditions we wanted to have a decent buffer available to us, so by charging at Boynton's we were able to add about 50km of range per hour.

Once we got to Porepunkah out of curiousity I checked what Trip Planner thought of our chances of getting to Dinner Plain before I started charging. Initially it said to "stay below 75kmh" to make it, but that almost immediately revised to "charging necessary" so we had clearly made the right decision to not try to push it.

Squeezing the car in between the wine vats we had a moment of trepidation when the socket they showed us was a 20A variant for which we had no adapter. Fortunately it turned out they had several sockets and some of those were the required 32A so all was good. We were the first Tesla they'd had there looking to charge so there was a lot of interest in the car from the staff, who apparently were all going out to take a look and grab photos while we had lunch. Chatting with their marketing manager they were very interested in Tesla's Destination Charging program so I promised to send them some information.

A relatively tight squeeze

Over a leisurely lunch with our friends Steven and Leonie (who by pure chance were down from Queensland and staying in Bright as we passed through) we charged back up to about 220km of range (73%) and with 29% predicted remaining at arrival we had no worries at all about heading up the mountain, especially with the weather being fine.

The drive up to Mt Hotham was beautiful. With clear roads and skies we got a relatively rare glimpse of the beautiful alpine winter scenery and and even rarer opportunity to see some clear stretches of road and push the car (not literally) up the hill "enthusiastically" :-).

Prettier..

..and prettier

We stopped in the Mt Hotham village to quickly capture the car at its new record altitude (since it never got higher than Dinner Plain village last year).

Top 'o the world. Nice colour co-ordination

We rolled in to the driveway at Rundells Alpine Lodge pretty much right on our planned time and with the predicted 29% charge remaining, and plugged in to the destination charger there (Rundells are part of Tesla's official Destination Charger program). Being a single phase 40A charger (roughly 40km/hr) the car was showing about 4.5 hours to fully recharge overnight, and it came with rockstar parking right at the front of the hotel.

Je suis un rockstar

We had beautiful weather for the whole weekend up there, and by further complete chance it turned out one of Tara's school friends was staying at Rundells for the weekend as well, two rooms down! This gave a few extra entertainment options including kids and mums heading off for tobogganing sessions.

Thrillseekers

Sliding selfie

I passed on tobogganing (and any sort of snow sports, given a reluctance to risk falling again on what remains of my shoulder) but we had two great dinners in Graze restaurant in the lodge, one of which was shared with our lovely friends and semi-permanent Dinner Plain winter residents, Greg and Lyndell.

So after a pretty relaxing couple of days we set off on the even less adventurous return trip.

Being generally higher at the top than the bottom, coming back from mountains tends to be an easier prospect than heading to them, energy-wise. Thus it was with Mt Hotham and we happily converted potential energy in to electrical for much of the drive down, thanks to regenerative braking. We were easily able to make it back to Euroa in one go, using only about 35kWh to do so (65%).

There was a very pretty energy graph in the car at one point beautifully illustrating this, which we totally failed to get a picture of, but if we had I would have put it just here.

We only needed a short 25 minute top up to have plenty to get home. We headed off with a predicted 20% remaining at home, and in fact that was exactly what we arrived with.

So that was it. Hard to imagine the trip being any easier really. Perhaps with proper Destination Chargers at Feathertop or Gapsted so I didn't have the hassle of using a 3-phase adaptor.. Oh, and that's happening :-).