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I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

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Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#181

Post by natch »

seattle_spring wrote: post #177
sliken wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I had an EV, I'd have agreed with you. Imagine your gas car increased it's range by 50 miles every time you came home for the night. How often would you fill up your gas tank? For me it was much rarer than I expected. Sure longer road trips over 300 miles I'd often spend 15 minutes getting 140 miles of extra range. How far away are these hikes or cities? I spent something like 10x less time charging on the roa…

Now imagine how much better it'd be if you could fully charge your car at night instead of add only 50 miles.

Totally! That’s where a 220 plug comes in. But still absolutely no need whatsoever to install a charger. Just plug right in.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#182

Post by natch »

seattle_spring wrote: post #179
natch wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like 10 minutes with a 250kw charger if it’s on your way. Big if, of course. But again you can always charge at home instead if it’s just a nearby city.

Yeah again, I'm not arguing against EVs (not sure how people even arrived at that opinion), I'm arguing that owning an L2 charger at home provides more than "barely a convenience over 110V". If you have only a 110V then, no, you cannot "always charge at home." It's literally the argument I'm making.

I think what was expressed was that there are exceptions (so, not literally always). Like road trips. We don’t need to get hung up on this. There are phrases that apply like “for all practical purposes.”

And having an L2 charger beyond a simple 220 wall outlet is no faster than the 220 wall outlet. Sure you can upgrade and get a fast L2 charger but you can more cheaply upgrade your 110 wall outlet to 220 and it will be just as fast as any installed L2 charging unit. In other words the installation of a charger is superfluous when it comes to speed of charging, which is what you have been talking about.

You might have heard of people getting faster charge times with an L2 charger versus their friend’s 220 volt outlet. But the opposite happens too: 220 outlets vary depending on amps, and so do L2 chargers. It’s possible to have an L2 charger that is slower than a 220 outlet, depending on the amps of the L2 charger and the amps of the 220 outlet.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#183

Post by kylecordes »

breput wrote: post #48
bhhaskin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. It sounds like most of the upgrades are about convenience to the power company. Not anything safety related, which is why older properties are exempt. You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner. It is easily the number one consumer of energy. Older neighborhoods utilities where never designed to do that.

> It sounds like most of the upgrades are about convenience to the power company. Not anything safety related, which is why older properties are exempt. That is definitely not true. An 80 year old house might not even have grounded outlets, let alone GFCI or AFCI protected outlets. > You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner Nobody worries about how many electr…

240 at 20A is sufficient for an overnight charge for nearly all uses of EV cars and SUVs. So even less impact.

Also a device is available that shares the EV circuit with a dryer circuit; set your car to start charging very late at night when laundry is not running. Zero additional max load for the house.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#184

Post by natch »

rconti wrote: post #97
natch wrote: post #12

Profanity alert. Don’t read this if you are sensitive. You. Do. Fucking. Not. Need. An EV charger, to charge your EV. A 110 or 220 outlet with a cord and an adapter will work just fine. Apologies for the US centric terminology but I expect the situation is roughly the same (though numbers vary) elsewhere. We did TWO Teslas in an apartment for two years sharing (alternating cars) a single plug of a single 110 outlet.…

That only works if you have a short commute. I've charged my Tesla 3 maybe 3 times on 110 and it's a dumpster fire. One time parked at an AirBnB hoping to gather enough juice over the course of a weekend to get useful range heading home while we carpooled with friends. 3 miles per hour of charging is simply not enough. 12h x 3mph = 36mi range added, and that's not enough to reliably expect even a 30 mile roundtrip, l…

As I said we augmented with supercharging as needed. Doesn’t work for everyone though as not everyone lives near a supercharger. And there was one person working from home, and one with a short commute.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#185

Post by Kirby64 »

bdcravens wrote: post #165
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many electricians do you see using a torque wrench?

It's code to do so as of NEC 2017.

Only if the outlet provides torque specs with its instructions. If there's no specification, torquing isn't required. Stupid 'workaround', but most outlets likely do not have torque requirements.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#186

Post by Kirby64 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #131
gorkish wrote: post #105

Siemens has a new product that basically bypasses this entire problem by installing as a mezzanine connector into the power meter. Called the ConnectDER https://connectder.com/ Regardless of what people will continue to claim, a 110V 15A outlet is really not enough. It's possible if you live your life on a strict schedule, drive very little, are very diligent about keeping your car plugged in, and don't mind having t…

Now obviously driving mileage is normally distributed. But that said, the average American drives ~ 12,785 mi / year [1]. This means, on average, 35.03 mi / day. If a 110V/15A outlet can offer 1.65 kW, and we assume a conservative 3 mi / kW, then you only need to charge for 7.08 hrs to offset your daily driving. Assuming 8 hours a day for charging, as long as you drive less than 40 mi / day you should charge your who…

Averages don't really work when most folks driving tends to be pretty lumpy. An example I've experienced personally:

* Take a trip ~150mi round trip to a nearby town.

* Return home with car at relatively low state of charge (since, I started with ~80% SOC).

* Immediately next morning, I need to take a trip ~200mi

Couldn't do it if I was charging using 120V. I could do it even with relatively wimpy 240V (20A), though.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#187

Post by bdcravens »

Kirby64 wrote: post #185
bdcravens wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's code to do so as of NEC 2017.

Only if the outlet provides torque specs with its instructions. If there's no specification, torquing isn't required. Stupid 'workaround', but most outlets likely do not have torque requirements.

Correct, though when I put the 240 in my garage, both the outlet and breaker had torque specs.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#188

Post by natch »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #171
natch wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no financial advantage to having an installed charger versus an outlet. There are other advantages. It might fit your hand better during the 2 seconds it takes to plug in. It might be better in the rain if your outlet is exposed to driving rain in wind. It might look more impressive to the neighbors. It looks more impressive to the landlord or wife or anyone who might be approving a budget for upg…

The point with scheduling is that on a normal plug, it make take long enough to charge your car that you can't charge it completely during the time window where electricity is the cheapest. So the parent comment was arguing you need faster charging to save money by doing all your charging in that time window. But yeah I have a hard time believing it's gonna be a big enough saving to offset the cost of the charger.

Cars have the scheduling built in.

Unless you buy an electric car from one of the companies that is actively promoting gas cars and trying to make their own electric cars super crappy in hopes the entire concept will fail. Meaning, any gas car maker.

Yes, scheduling saves money. But even paying high electric rates during peak hours can still be way cheaper than gas, depending on what exact rates we're talking about, which varies by location.

But the plug has nothing to do with scheduling if you just use the car's own scheduling or plug/unplug yourself.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#189

Post by IndrekR »

natch wrote: post #117
IndrekR wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy electricity at the (hourly) market rate, you want to charge when it is cheapest and charge reasonably fast. On a typical 11kW home charger here in EU, that means about 6 hours for full charge or 1..2 hours for daily top-up. All the benefits for buying the electricity at hourly demand based rate disappear when full charging times approach 24h. This has two benefits: it is cheaper to charge and the grid work…

An installed charger is not needed for scheduled charging if the car already does it. Buy an EV with good modern features and you’ll be fine with just an outlet.

To be cost efficient with day-ahead hourly pricing, you need a faster (level 2) charger as there are only few extra-cheap hours in a day.

Re: I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property

#190

Post by IndrekR »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #171
natch wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no financial advantage to having an installed charger versus an outlet. There are other advantages. It might fit your hand better during the 2 seconds it takes to plug in. It might be better in the rain if your outlet is exposed to driving rain in wind. It might look more impressive to the neighbors. It looks more impressive to the landlord or wife or anyone who might be approving a budget for upg…

The point with scheduling is that on a normal plug, it make take long enough to charge your car that you can't charge it completely during the time window where electricity is the cheapest. So the parent comment was arguing you need faster charging to save money by doing all your charging in that time window. But yeah I have a hard time believing it's gonna be a big enough saving to offset the cost of the charger.

Payback time here is about 100 full charges (IONIQ5, Nordpool day-ahead pricing).
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