Home Charging System / Charger Kit

[ajdelange]

my god people. the charger is built into the car !

The discussion in this thread is about EVSE (Electric Vehicle Service Equipment) and in particular Tesla's HPWC (High Power Wall Connector). Nobody thinks either of these is a charger (well maybe someone does) even though we are sloppy and often refer to EVSE as a charger. It is common to refer to the small portable EVSE that ships with the Tesla's is often referred to as a UMC (Universal Mobile Charger) but everyone understands that it is really EVSE. Everyone also refers to those kiosk like things at SC's as chargers. The chargers area actually in the cabinets behind the fence. Again, everyone understands this.

i have a gadget that you can ever plug into 120 volt outlets and sends 23 amps to the charger on board the car.

I'm not sure what this means. There are 120 V outlets (T-23) that can supply 24A to the car but this sounds more as if you mean regular 120 V outlets which must not be used to draw more than 12 A if on a 15A breaker or 16A if on a 20 A breaker.

ithe charger is not on the wall of your garage. at our collision repair shop i have every 230/60/1 nema 15-50 plug wired with a neutral wire and plug any tesla model anywhere in shop or outside park lot

EVSE, in particular, the Tesla HPWC, do not use the neutral. You can wire it if you like but it's not used. More significant is that the UMC does not come with a 15-50 adapter. People reading this thread will want to install 14-50. Thus if you are using the UMC with 15-50R you have to be using an adapter that you made yourself or that you got from someone other than Tesla. If that adapter looks, in terms of charging current limit, like a 14-50R or plugs into the Telsa 14-50R adapter you are OK. Otherwise you must set the car's charging limit to 40A. Note that if you go through Tesla's 14-50R adapter (i.e. 15-50P --> 14-50R --> Telsa 4-50P --> UMC) charging current will be limited to 32 A. A third party manufacturer might have the proper programming resistor in his product to allow the full 40 A.

CHARGER IS ON THE CAR The silver box from tesla you can buy is nothing more that a cord from power source to tesla car and it looks pretty

The HPWC is a great deal more than that. To begin with and relevant to the reason one should not install 15-50R receptacles is the aforementioned adapters furnished for use with the UMC. One of the UMC's functions is to determine how much power the car can have which depends on the outlet. The UMC gets information about the outlet by reading the adapter. In the Gen 2 HPWC that information is programmed into the HPWC by a rotary switch. In the Gen 3 it is set from a page served out by the HPWC over WiFi. Thus the Gen 3 contain extensive communications hardware and software sufficient to interface the car's charging circuitry, via the communication wires in the cable to the internet and local WiFi network. Thus the car is able to communicate how much power it wants and this can be compared to the amount that is available considering the total draw of other cars on the same WiFi network and the capabilities of the wiring. The HPWC then sends a message to the car telling it how much power it can have. It continuously monitors the network so that, for example, it can grant more power to the car it is connected to if another car on the network completes charging. The HPWC also checks that the grounding conductor is present and properly connected and of course contains a contactor to disconnect the car from the mains except when charging is authorized. It also checks with the mother ship for firmware upgrades and downloads them when they are available. Thus to call it nothing more than a cord is a greater error than to call it the charger as it is, obviously, a very significant part of the charger.

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[Handy Artie]

I have 200 amp service on a GE panel which doesn’t allow half slots but only had one full slot left. I was able to get tandem monopolor breakers from Ace Hardware in 2x15 amp and 2x20 amp sizes to free up another adjacent full slot for a 60 amp bipolar breaker. He chose to put both garage door openers on the 2x15 amp tandem. (Siemens).The electrician wired up the 48 amp circuit to this breaker with 6 gauge wire X 2 and 10 gauge ground wire through a conduit to the Tesla wall connector. He charged me $650 for the labor which included drilling out the panel box and securing the

flexible conduit to the drywall surface inside the garage. I provided the breakers and the generation 2 Black wall connector.

 

[CyberG]

Yes, the HWC must connect to both phases (poles) on the panel and that must be done with a two pole breaker which is two single pole breakers with the toggles tied together. The electrician certainly can rearrange things in the panel in order to get two adjacent slots and to make wide slots (I don't think there are any skinny format two pole breakers above 50A) by replacing fat style breakers with slim ones. You may have breakers and panels such that a new 60A two pole just cannot be fit in but that would be unusual.

Note: If the wire feeding a breaker that has to be moved is not long enough to reach it's new location the electrician will simply splice in a longer wire.

Thanks for the reply. And good to know. Any thoughts on cost for all that? The actual gen 3 charger will be basically on the other side of the wall inside the garage.

 

[ajdelange]

Nits:

I called the UMC a "Universal Mobile Charger" which is what most people call it but in fact it is a Universal Mobile Connector"

No. 6 wire behind a 60A breaker is a 60A circuit. The breaker is there to protect the wire. When feeding EVSE it must be derated to 48A but it is still a 60A circuit.

In the spirit of No. 120: the Gen 3 HPWC is part of the charging equipment but is, by its own name "connector" or, generically, EVSE. Breakers are pretty cheap. The high ticket items in an installation are labor and wire. A total installation can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand $ depending on the complexity of the system you want, the configuration of the service and how far the EVSE is to be from the panel(s).

 

[Handy Artie]

Off the same 200 amp GE panel, I have a 1600 watt Titan Tankless hot water heater which draws 56 amps which requires a 70 amp bipolar breaker, also wired in 6 gauge according to code. The same electrician put it in for me about 10 years ago for $350 in labor plus breaker and straight metal conduit.

 

[ajdelange]

For comparison I had my first HPWC installed about 50' from a loaded 200A panel with loaded subpanel. The subpanel had to be replaced several breakers moved. They ran No. 1 SE partly in walls, partly above ceiling and, in the garage itself, across unistrut hanging from the ceiling. A separate disconnect was required as the circuit was over 60A (Gen 2). This cost me around $2000.

But adding a second HPWC cost me only perhaps $350 for wire, conduit and a conduit bender (you can make a pvc conduit pretzle with one of these things if you want to) plus, of course, the cost of the HPWC itself.

 

[Handy Artie]

Woops, the Titan is actually 16 kilowatts.

 

[larryboy31]

I am a total newbie to Tesla. I looked at the rollout and after 5 days or so I reserved. I am 75 and don't drive much anymore. I probably average less than 20 miles per day and I have a couple of ICE cars that will need to be cycled once in a while. I think I will be just fine with a standard electrical outlet. Can you get an adapter to charge a CT with 120V current? It looks like 15 hrs of charging would get me around 90 miles of driving, I have a 1000 gallon propane tank, a 6KW generator that runs on propane, and a device that allows me to plug the generator into my electric meter without endangering anyone trying to fix an outage. When I am not using the AC I average about 15KWH a day. Seems to me I could hook the house up to the CT in case of a power failure and then charge the CT by running the genny 2 or 3 hours for every day it was my power source. You guys know so much more about this stuff than I ever will so I appreciate your thoughts. Thanks Larry

 

[ajdelange]

You are going to get a UMC (Universal Mobile Connector) with your truck. This will come with an adpater that lets you plug it into a 120V outlet. These are usually on 15 A circuits (or they can be) and therefore the UMC will limit the current it will draw to 80% of that or 12 A. At 120 V 12A is 1.44 kW. The charger in the vehicle is about 90% efficient so you will be transferring about 1.3 kW to the car which is 1.3 kWh for each hour of charging. The CT's are going to use 0.4 - 0.5 kWh for each mile they go. Thus for 20 mi of driving you will need 8 - 10 kWh which you will get in 6 - 8 hrs charging from a 120 V outlet. But keep in mind that the car uses perhaps a half mile's worth of electricity for each hour it is idle in what owners call "vampire" or "phantom" drain. Thus for 20 miles of driving your power requirement may be 32 miles per day. This could imply an extra 4 hours of charging time. Nevertheless if all you do is 20 miles of around town per day you will be able to get by with the 120V adapter alone.

But you may not want to be so limited. If you come home from a road trip with 20% left in the battery it's going to take a long time to get back to a fuller charge. Of course if all you need the day after you get back is 20 miles worth you can get that back in 10 - 12 hrs as before.

For $35 you can buy another adapter that plugs into the UMC at one end and any of several different wall receptacles at the other. You may wish to consider installing a 240 V outlet of whatever size (there are several) to increase your charging speed. Basically there are three options
1)Install a NEMA outlet and use the UMC with it
2)Install a NEMA outlet and plug one of the popular EV chargers (Juicebox...) into it
3)Install a Tesla HPWC

All these cost money but make charging more convenient. You just come home, plug in the HPWC probe and in a couple of hours you are ready to roll again. The UMC stays in the car (you should probably have at least the NEMA 14-50R adapter on board in any case) for road trips etc. You can, of course, see how life is with 120V charging (I've seen one person post that he lives with it) before deciding to to go beyond that.

As for charging from a generator: It's not recommended (I don't know why) but may require an adapter to connect the neutral to ground) and it is, in any case, an awfully expensive way to charge a car.

 

[ldjessee]

I have so far lived with a standard 110/120 outlet for our Nissan Leaf, but it almost never gets driven more than 30 miles before the pandemic... now we are luck to do that a week.
Charge it once a month now, but used to charge it once a week during the summer and two times a week during the winter.
At work we have a level 1 that seems to do about 6-7kWh max and sometimes we plug in there, but again, have not done that in coming up on 4 months now.
Even though the Leaf has a much smaller battery and is a much smaller car, I think the minimal range it is normally driven kind of is adjacent to your own mileage and so you might see how that works.
Now, we let it get low, so it charged for over 12 hours... but it was not like we had to stand over watching it. We plugged it in and the next day we unplugged it.

 

[larryboy31]

You are going to get a UMC (Universal Mobile Connector) with your truck. This will come with an adpater that lets you plug it into a 120V outlet. These are usually on 15 A circuits (or they can be) and therefore the UMC will limit the current it will draw to 80% of that or 12 A. At 120 V 12A is 1.44 kW. The charger in the vehicle is about 90% efficient so you will be transferring about 1.3 kW to the car which is 1.3 kWh for each hour of charging. The CT's are going to use 0.4 - 0.5 kWh for each mile they go. Thus for 20 mi of driving you will need 8 - 10 kWh which you will get in 6 - 8 hrs charging from a 120 V outlet. But keep in mind that the car uses perhaps a half mile's worth of electricity for each hour it is idle in what owners call "vampire" or "phantom" drain. Thus for 20 miles of driving your power requirement may be 32 miles per day. This could imply an extra 4 hours of charging time. Nevertheless if all you do is 20 miles of around town per day you will be able to get by with the 120V adapter alone.

But you may not want to be so limited. If you come home from a road trip with 20% left in the battery it's going to take a long time to get back to a fuller charge. Of course if all you need the day after you get back is 20 miles worth you can get that back in 10 - 12 hrs as before.

For $35 you can buy another adapter that plugs into the UMC at one end and any of several different wall receptacles at the other. You may wish to consider installing a 240 V outlet of whatever size (there are several) to increase your charging speed. Basically there are three options
1)Install a NEMA outlet and use the UMC with it
2)Install a NEMA outlet and plug one of the popular EV chargers (Juicebox...) into it
3)Install a Tesla HPWC

All these cost money but make charging more convenient. You just come home, plug in the HPWC probe and in a couple of hours you are ready to roll again. The UMC stays in the car (you should probably have at least the NEMA 14-50R adapter on board in any case) for road trips etc. You can, of course, see how life is with 120V charging (I've seen one person post that he lives with it) before deciding to to go beyond that.

As for charging from a generator: It's not recommended (I don't know why) but may require an adapter to connect the neutral to ground) and it is, in any case, an awfully expensive way to charge a car.

Charging with the generator would only happen if the power was out for a week or so. 3 days is our record over the last 40 years but who knows what might happen in the future.

 

[ajdelange]

Capiche but you will probqbly go farther on a gallon of gas if you burn it in one of your ICE cars.

 

[Homestead]

Tesla.com advertises only the one Wall Charger. It does not list it as being compatible with the CT. Should I wait until the Wall Charger is updated or is it a safe buy now? I have a 150 foot run to the CT garage and will need some summer months to get the electrical system in place. Always impatient, I wanted to purchase sooner rather than later.

 

[Alan]

Tesla.com advertises only the one Wall Charger. It does not list it as being compatible with the CT. Should I wait until the Wall Charger is updated or is it a safe buy now? I have a 150 foot run to the CT garage and will need some summer months to get the electrical system in place. Always impatient, I wanted to purchase sooner rather than later.

A standard 220v dryer receptacle is all you need. It will charge the S at a rate of 30mi/hr

 

[ajdelange]

We will not know exactly what Telsa will do but I think it's pretty safe to assume that a Gen 3 HPWC will be compatible. The only issue you may have with it is that 150' is a pretty long run that may be long enough to jump you up to a requirement for AWG 4. Ordinariy AWG 6 is adequate. Your electrician will know and will know how to terminate No. 4 properly if it is indeed required.

An HPWC will permit your CT to charge at up to 11.52 kW, it's maximum capacity. Do not install a standard 220V dryer receptacle. The fastest you can charge with that is 5.76 kW which will give you about 11.6 miles added range per hour in a CT (unless, of course, a rate that low is acceptable to you). The HPWC will give you twice that (about 23 miles per hour).