Charging in Plovidiv, Bulgaria

From plugshare we knew that electricity shouldn’t be hard to find in Plovidiv. Arriving at about 8 p.m. in the evening, we started to search for an hotel immediately. Even if there is a charging opportunity in a city, we still prefer staying in an hotel that offers us an electricity outlet. It is just convenient if the car is right outside of the building where we are staying at. This simplifies logistics a lot. After being denied in four hotels, we finally found one hotel where a super helpful receptionist managed to find a Schuko wall plug. Of course that Schuko did not give us a whole lot of electricity. To have 95% of the Tesla’s battery charged before leaving to Turkey, we put the car the next morning in the garage of a shopping center nearby.

Plovidiv is a nice city. A stroll through its roads sweetened our waiting time for the car to be fully charged. We left for the direction of Turkey in the early afternoon and reached the border with about 45% of our battery left.

Charging in Vishovgrad, Bulgaria

Our friends Julia and Miroslav live in an old house from the 1930s in a tiny village named Vishovgrad. The old workshop, equipped with a few old, soviet-styled, wood making machines, has three-phase electricity. The outlets looked old and different, but they had electricity on all three phases. We did not have the right adapter for this kind of outlet. Benedikt opened the socket and manually put the different phases together with one of our “open-adapters”.
As you can find it often outside western Europe, the outlet did not have a protective conductor there is only three phases and the earth conductor). We had in Albania problems charging with an outlet like that (check this post). This time in Vishovgrad, Benedikt had time to try out some more combinations of different phases. He removed the 5th conductor from the extension cable and the adapter. That way the NRGkick and the car accepted the 11kW electricity and the car nicely charged overnight.
We had plenty of electricity to return two days later to Sofia. We found out in Sofia, that the Lenovo repair shop was not able to get a new motherboard for our laptop in time (and it would actually take 2 more weeks till it would be in Sofia). We charged one more time in the city center (check out this post) and left with a car at 100% charged to Plovdiv, a city south-west of Sofia.

Charging in Sofia, Bulgaria

Our laptop broke in Montenegro. We knew that there is a Lenovo Center in Sofia. Therefore, our first destination in Sofia was the mall, where a Lenovo store was located at. As we experienced it before, we found a nice 11kW electrical outlet in the garage and our car was charging, while we were trying to get our laptop repaired and while we had dinner.

The next day we were planning to drive towards the south-east of Bulgaria. To make the 200km to Vishovgrad, the village where our friends Julia and Miroslav live, we needed a bit more energy. Since the hotel that we found (at 11 p.m.) could not offer any electricity outlet, we charged the next day at a public charging station in front of an insurance company in downtown Sofia.

The tiny road was packed with cars when we arrived. An employee of the insurance company helped us by somehow making most of them leave. We charged 22kW for about 2 hours and left with almost 100% to the south-east of Bulgaria.