On Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:44:48 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Yep, very common around here. Most hotels have outlets in the parking
lot to plug the block heater into, too (power's cheap enough that they
just provide it as a free service, I suppose)

A block heater isn't going to take a lot of power, a couple of hundred
watts at most. Some what less than trying to charge a 50kWH battery in
a few hours...

Indeed, but the cost of laying cables isn't about how big the cable is
mostly*.

True enough, but I was commenting on the provision of free block heater
power. 50 cars at 100W is only 5kW not a great load for a hotel. But if
you have 50 cars with 50kWh batteries on a 10hr charge thats 5kW/car (at
least) and load of 250kW that power ain't going to be provided for "free".

--
Cheers
Dave.