Gallatin City Hall
Gallatin TN have added two EV charging stations outside City Hall on West Main. This gives Gallatin TN the largest EV charger density in Sumner county, with more charging locations than Hendersonville TN or any other Sumner county city.
Sidewalk side of Blink unit showing breaker panel location. Note I opened the panel door for the photo.
The charging stations have an integral breaker mounted on the rear. The style is a new one I have not seen on a Blink charging device before. It looks both convenient for a vehicle owner to use and also provides safety should a child open the breaker box. Why didn’t they mount the breaker out of a small child’s reach?
Breaker in breaker box. Wires well insulated along with pull handle.
The spaces are identified with an “EV” sign, the parking spaces themselves are no different to the other street parking spaces, so I wonder if gasoline vehicles will realize the difference before they have finished their parking maneuver. I’ll have to drop by on a busy day to see if they remain open to Electric Vehicles.
On my visit I attracted the interest of a passing motorist who was interested how much the stations cost; for right now they are free to use until Blink networks and the City introduce per charge or per hour pricing.
Getting myself some city provided juice 🙂
These spaces are very well placed to give access to the city square. Too bad most of the restaurants have closed during this recessionary period. Other than food, the only reason I’ve had to park close to here is to attend traffic court and to take care of a traffic light camera violation. Well at least I’ll get some free juice if I have to come back here again. Driving an EV makes one drive more carefully, so maybe I won’t be back again to see the judge anytime soon; I hope.
Location of EVSE’s opposite the First United Methodist Church.
Bravo to Gallatin City in leading the way for Sumner county in installing an electric vehicle infrastructure. At one point I thought Hendersonville would lead the way with their ambitions plan to pepper the city with EV charging stations, but progress has been glacial allowing Gallatin to come from behind and take the technological lead.
Tesla Model 3 
Tennessee is really progressive in building out EV infrastructure :). Folks like myself in NC are envious.
It has been a rough week for my LEAF with the questions about the GE Wattstation and all the stuff in Phoenix, AZ. I commend you for keeping that part of your site updated. As a fellow LEAF owner I sure hope for a good outcome.
Best Regards,
Ken Clifton
Hi Ken,
Not sure Tennessee are all that progressive, they got a lot of EVProject money allocated to them. When that runs dry, which it pretty much has (waiting for installations to catch up to allocations), then I don’t believe we will see much more buildout of the EV infrastructure here in TN. The number of LEAF’s is quite low compared to CA or OR.
It’s interesting the WattStation stories. A month or so ago I attended an EV rally and a GE WattStation was on display. Due to one of 3 Blink EVSE’s having a touchscreen issue, they decoded to unhook the Blink and hookup the WattStation. I volunteered my LEAF for the experiment. It didn’t charge, had a red fault light on it. Now I’m almost glad it was DOA and refused to charge 🙂
Good luck to you too with your LEAF. I’m off this week to have the 1 year battery check done, just over 13,000 miles. It’s been a pleasure up to now.
If you were closer, I would offer my SOC meter to you. Gary Giddings built it for me. Based upon what most folks have said about the Nissan battery check, the customer does not get very much usable information. The GID count and the pack voltage seem to be the most valuable metrics. That is not to say that the battery check does not have value.
Regarding the Wattstation, I believe the fault light was related to grounding. Some folks have said that the heavy cable to the J1772 plug on the GE units has only one wire for the pilot signal instead of the two wires on most other charging stations. Improper grounding could lead to serious issues since the pilot signal on the Wattstation would be using the heavy electrical ground wire. I believe this is actually why the diode in the LEAF’s internal charger is getting damaged — and why chargers with two pilot wires still work even after the diode is fryed. I can attest that the AeroVironment (Nissan) charger does have two pilot wires down to the J1772 connector since that install.
Best Regards,
Ken Clifton