If you own or are considering buying an electric vehicle, it’s perfectly normal to wonder where you can plug it to get it recharged. To know the EV charging stations’ location or having to put your credit card number each time you recharge your EV’s battery can sometimes be a hassle. That’s why some providers of public chargers offer services that make all of that easier, for example, using an EV charging app.

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The government plans to expand the network of public EV charging stations across America so that drivers can find one near them no matter where they are. In the meantime, the experience of finding a charger, paying, and keeping track of your recharges isn’t that easy. Using an EV charging app can make the experience of seeking and finding a charger a tad more user-friendly.  

Types of chargers for electric vehicles: getting to know them

Before diving into more about EV charging apps, it’s good to know a bit more about EV chargers.

All drivers who are used to recharging their cars with fuel or gasoline are familiar with how to do it and the related terminology. Everything that has to do with recharging electric vehicles may lead to learning new concepts. Here are some things you need to know to better understand how this works:

• kW. A kilowatt is a unit of measurement. It’s used to understand how much power a motor generates in a certain period. 

• kWh. It means kilowatt per hour and is the way the battery capacity of an EV is measured. Likewise, it shows how much energy is transferred in one hour, per kilowatt of power. 

• Volts (symbol V). It is a unit of measurement that determines the different potential energy that exists between one point and another.  In the case of electric vehicles, they represent the force that causes electric charges to move inside a wire.

Now that we have clarified the basic terminology, we can list the existing types of EV chargers and their differences. Let’s see:

• Level 1. These are the most common chargers. When buying an EV, it comes with a Level 1 (L1) battery charger as standard. That means you most likely have an L1 in your garage.

Level 1 chargers run at 120V and recharge a battery at a rate of 5 kWh. That will depend on how the power works where you are at the time of the recharge. The average time to fully recharge a standard electric car is 24 hours.

• Level 2. These are the most common chargers in America, and they’re often located both at public EV charging stations and in residential areas. 

Level 2 chargers operate at 240V, which means they’re quicker than L1. L2 doesn’t require much power and that’s why EV manufacturers frequently recommend installing one of these at home. An average EV can get its battery 100% of recharge in about 8 hours. 

• Level 3 (better known as DC fast chargers, or just DCFC). Instead of using alternate current, they use direct current. That translates into a superfast recharge. 

DCFC operates at more than 480V, so they’re only found at public EV charging stations. A standard EV battery can get fully charged in about 20 to 60 minutes. 

Benefits of EV charging apps

Fingers crossed, in the following years electric vehicle chargers will proliferate everywhere. But today they’re not so easy to find, nor is the payment experience so pleasant.

For this reason, the different suppliers of EV chargers have found several ways to solve this problem. For instance, the company EVCS created a mobile app that allows you to keep track of how many charges have been made, as well as use a search engine to find the nearest EV charging station.

An EV charging app is very useful for all those people who enjoy having everything organized.