- Joined
- Aug 15, 2021
- Messages
- 1,308
I received a ton of site updates (not new sites) from AFDC this morning, which is a bit odd for a Monday morning.
So when I took a look at what the updates were, it turns out they were almost all (except for one EVgo and one EA) Volta. And specifically, they were with the operating hours of the stations.
If you are not familiar with Volta, almost all of their stations have limited operating hours (which is strange to me, since most of their sites are located in mall/outlet center parking lots, so it's not like the parking lot is fenced or gated off, so why limit the hours?).
The hours of operation are listed as a free form text field in AFDC (not stored as a specialized time data structure, at least not in AFDC). So here is an example:
So the "change" that came through this morning, is that the above hours of operation was changed to this:
Yep, you guessed it, looks like some kind of daylight savings related issue (I don't think that they suddenly changed the hours of operation of their sites from 6am-midnight to 5am-11pm). Granted, their back-end system may not be handling DST correctly anyway, and maybe their charging stations really do turn off at 11pm, but I suspect it's not intentional, and perhaps only temporary until they figure it out. So I would keep that in mind if you plan on visiting a Volta station after 11.
The interesting thing is that somewhere in their system, they must be generating this text field and pushing it out to AFDC, and they must do this automatically periodically (every day? week?). And it's that system which may not be configured correctly to account for DST.
In fact, during the last major Volta housekeeping, they did in fact change a lot of the times of their east coast sites from 9am-3am to 6am-midnight, so I suspect they just recently figured out how to handle local time zones when dumping data out to AFDC. Now they need to figure out how to handle DST!
So when I took a look at what the updates were, it turns out they were almost all (except for one EVgo and one EA) Volta. And specifically, they were with the operating hours of the stations.
If you are not familiar with Volta, almost all of their stations have limited operating hours (which is strange to me, since most of their sites are located in mall/outlet center parking lots, so it's not like the parking lot is fenced or gated off, so why limit the hours?).
The hours of operation are listed as a free form text field in AFDC (not stored as a specialized time data structure, at least not in AFDC). So here is an example:
So the "change" that came through this morning, is that the above hours of operation was changed to this:
Yep, you guessed it, looks like some kind of daylight savings related issue (I don't think that they suddenly changed the hours of operation of their sites from 6am-midnight to 5am-11pm). Granted, their back-end system may not be handling DST correctly anyway, and maybe their charging stations really do turn off at 11pm, but I suspect it's not intentional, and perhaps only temporary until they figure it out. So I would keep that in mind if you plan on visiting a Volta station after 11.
The interesting thing is that somewhere in their system, they must be generating this text field and pushing it out to AFDC, and they must do this automatically periodically (every day? week?). And it's that system which may not be configured correctly to account for DST.
In fact, during the last major Volta housekeeping, they did in fact change a lot of the times of their east coast sites from 9am-3am to 6am-midnight, so I suspect they just recently figured out how to handle local time zones when dumping data out to AFDC. Now they need to figure out how to handle DST!
