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Livermore, California
EV Level II Chargers

Home2 Suites By Hilton

2025 Constitution Drive,
Livermore, CA 94551
925-960-1242

Updated As of July 10, 2018

This IS NOT a Tesla Supercharger location but it is a great hotel to stay overnight if you are a Tesla owner, or any other EV owner. They have 6 Level II EV Chargers right at the front door to the hotel. When I stayed there in July 2018 there was no cost to charge your vehicle. Just plug in and it works! The chargers are 30amps and will charge a Tesla at the rate of 15mph.

I spent a week at this hotel. Each evening when I arrived at the hotel I would plug in before going to bed. By morning when I got up and went out to my Tesla it would be all charged up! During my entire stay the most EV's that I ever saw at the chargers were 2. Thus, I didn't feel like I was blocking up a charging spot by leaving my Tesla there all night. I would have monitored my Tesla more carefully and moved it out of the charging spot when charged if I had ever seen the spots anywhere near capacity, but there were always at least 4 other charging spots available at all times.

NOTE: Sometimes the EV chargers would reboot by themselves, especially at midnight. Usually this wasn't a problem as the Tesla would just re-start charging automatically when the power to the charger came back up. However, there were a couple of times when the Tesla did not resume charging after one of the reboots. So, it is a good idea to use your Tesla Smartphone App to check periodically to make sure it is still charging. If it does stop, just unplug and re-plug in your Tesla. It should resume charging without any further problems. Before leaving your vehicle make sure you check the charging rate. I once found one of the chargers was only providing charging at a 10mph rate. I moved it over to a different charger and that one provided a 16mph rate, 60% faster than the other one. Each charging post has 2 chargers on it, one on the front and one on the back.

Unfortunately, from time to time there would be non-electric vehicles parked in the clearly marked "ELECTRIC VEHICLE" charging spots. Being so close to the front door to the hotel I can see these as tempting spots to park. However, there were several other parking spots also located near the front door of the hotel marked "VANPOOL". I never saw any "VANPOOL" vehicles parked at the hotel during my entire week there. If these non-EV's want to park closer to the front door, it would be better for them to have violated the "VANPOOL" space parking than block up an EV charging spot. If a VANPOOL vehicle has its parking space blocked, it can park anywhere in the huge parking lot. An EV can not charge anywhere other than an EV charging spot if it needs to charge.

I think it would really help if those in charge of marking parking spaces would mark them as "ELECTRIC VEHICLE ONLY" rather than just the words "ELECTRIC VEHICLE". That one "ONLY" word may be enough to disuade many who tend to park non-EV's in those spaces.

I don't know what all the rooms in the hotel are like but we stayed in room 249 on the second floor which had 2 queen beds plus a sofa bed and a full kitchen. The kitchen had a full size refrigerator, microwave, dish washer, and all the cookware, dishes, cups and glasses needed to prepare your own meals. The room itself was huge! It was obviously set up as an "Accessible Room" where a wheelchair could easily maneuver anywhere in the room, even the bathroom. The one set of elevators was totally at the opposite end of the hotel, but we found a stairway across from the door to our room that would take us right down to the lobby or out to the front of the hotel. That made it so that our Tesla was just a few steps from our room.

In the lobby is free coffee 24/7 and a free buffet breakfast is available every day from 7am to 10am. The business center has two computers and a printer that are free. WiFi is free to all guests. I found the WiFi to be extremely fast which might have been because our room was directly above the lobby and business center. The staff was very friendly and accommodating. The hotel itself is within view of I-580 and a very short drive off the exit.

Downtown Livermore is just a couple of miles away and features many unique restaurants. Livermore is wine country and has 6 wine trails. Most of the wineries are only open on weekends, but there are many wine tasting rooms and restaurants open all week in Downtown Livermore that feature the wines produced in the region. Most of the restaurants provide free corkage of wine bottles purchased from the vineyards and wineries in Livermore.

We've heard that traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area can be terrible, but we ran into very little traffic during our stay during the week of the 4th of July, 2018. We visited friends in Fremont and Santa Clara and had no problem driving to and from them along the interstates. We did once drive the California Route 84 "shortcut", but that had more traffic and lights than the interstates. We would definitely consider staying at this hotel again anytime we needed to be up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I just hope the word about the place does not get too much out to the EV community as it may become a place to just charge up for free without staying at the hotel. Anyone with an EV that is compatible with Level II chargers can just pull up and plug in, even if not a guest at the hotel. There is nothing to stop anyone from plugging in at this time.

Photos: (Click on each photo below for a larger image.)

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