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The "standard" car charger is usually overkill—but your electrician might not know that [32:26] (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you think a device with regulation circuits is more likely to be overloaded and start fires...?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My guess would be yes, somewhat, probably. but maybe not much. As he says in the last part of the video: If it gets hot, you have a problem.

    Better ask an electrician.

    The devices sold as "EV wall chargers" are not really chargers. They're simple power suppliy units, whether or not it has bells and whistles to time the charging and what not.

    The actual battery charger is in the car. It will attempt to suck as much energy from the PSU as it can and it will itself balance the load and all that. Having a separate unit also trying to regulate the load seems like something that will inevitably create more heat than necessary somewhere in that chain.

    Generally speaking you do not need to protect the car from unstable supply. It will protect itself.

    I will still recommend getting a proper "EV charger" to ensure that it can utilize all the phases unlike a regular garage plug. Also to ensure that it is properly grounded, which can be an issue for some cars.

    At least here in Europe, where we have 3 phases. It's much better to have all 3 phases wide open and let the car suck a little on each, instead of having it overloading a single phase through a granny plug.

    I know the American 2 phase circuit is different, but I still believe it's better not to put any more heat inducing obstructions in the chain.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I wish we had 3 phase, but the fact is many European homes only have 1 phase. The distribution is 3-phase, but the residential wiring is only set up to use only 1 phase and upgrading the whole electrical system of our home is simply too expensive. This is in Norway, but it's similar in many countries.

    We recently installed a charger, and the electrician put in a 32A breaker. He told us you should never run continuous draw above 80% of the breaker, which gives us 25A * 230V = 5.75 kW as our max charging speed. Not fantastic by any means, but means we can go from 10 to 80% overnight, which is good enough for us. If we need a fast charge, the local gas station has a 250 kW charger anyways, so we could top of if need be - though we have never needed that so far.

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