Question about home charging

[Zekester]

Some states offer a tax incentive towards purchasing and installing a level 2 charger, recommend looking into that as well.

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[RickMachE]

I just got my 23 RT1 a couple of weeks ago and I was curious about my home charging setup.

Right now my garage does have power going to it, but im not sure if its solid enough to run a level 1. It's a detatched garage using 120v plugs but theres a garage subpanel with 2 30A fuses and there's 15A coming from the main breaker panel.

I'm getting quotes from electricians right now (some who even specialize in EV setups), but as of right now, would I be ok just setting up a small level 1 charger until I can get the level 2 upgrade that I'm looking to do?

Also, in regards to mounting. The electrician I talked to suggested not building the charger in my garage (inside is just large cement bricks), but on the outside. I'm also assuming that'll be a nightmare to mount something onto as well?

My commute is 4 miles one way to work and 4 miles back, that's about it.

I'm not sure if the charger at my job is an L1 or not (took about 6 hours to go from 50% to the recommended 80%) so I use that when I need to (it's a free charger, I'm definitely gonna use that) but I'd like to have the home option as well when I decide to take small trips on my days off from work. That way I can go without having to worry too much about range anxiety.

Some of your comments indicate you might have some confusion with levels.

Level 1 is 120v. You will get 1kW per hour or so. With an ER battery, that's about 1.1% per hour.
Level 2 is 240v. Amperage varies - can be very low, and slow, or up to 48amps, and very fast (48amps would be 11.5kW from the charger, about 10.6kW in the car).

You mentioned your work charger took 6 hours to go from 50 to 80%. 30% of 91kWh = 27.3/6= 4.55kW per hour in the car, or about 5.1 from the charger. That's level 2, because it's way over 1kWh.

The charger that came with the car will do about 7.2kW from the charger, 6.5kW to the vehicle. So your work charger is slower that that, but is free).

As for what you should be doing now, plug in the 120v charger in the garage and see if it works successfully. It likely will.

I would have the electrician mount a 240v line outside the garage (he can mount to cement just fine), if he can do at 50amp breaker with a 40amp industrial outlet.

 

[nuMach]

Just a heads up.
Can only speak for Canada, but US is generally very similar.

Condo, mobile park, or row houses with a central buss and meter room, your units panel is fed from the shared service.

Even if you have a standalone 100A service in your home ....

Adding a load *50A breaker is 50% of your 100A panel.
Adding load to a shared service is closely scrutinized by the inspection department.

You may be required to add an EV energy management controller to kill the charger over your homes' load when it approches 80% of the feeders capacity.
As example - if you are adding 40A on a 50A breaker(charger) to a 50A base load with laundry, heater, oven, etc together. The charger coming online will be shutdown by the EVEMS controller until the homes load drops enough to come back online.

These puppies are ~$1000 Cdn, and not much labor when done at time of charger install.

Contractor will need to do load calculations ahead of permit application to see if one is required.

Bit of a gotcha for the home handyman.

 

[Mach-Lee]

Just a heads up.
Can only speak for Canada, but US is generally very similar.

Condo, mobile park, or row houses with a central buss and meter room, your units panel is fed from the shared service.

Even if you have a standalone 100A service in your home ....

Adding a load *50A breaker is 50% of your 100A panel.
Adding load to a shared service is closely scrutinized by the inspection department.

You may be required to add an EV energy management controller to kill the charger over your homes' load when it approches 80% of the feeders capacity.
As example - if you are adding 40A on a 50A breaker(charger) to a 50A base load with laundry, heater, oven, etc together. The charger coming online will be shutdown by the EVEMS controller until the homes load drops enough to come back online.

These puppies are ~$1000 Cdn, and not much labor when done at time of charger install.

Contractor will need to do load calculations ahead of permit application to see if one is required.

Bit of a gotcha for the home handyman.

Yes, it's simpler to just limit the 240V circuit to the max amperage that doesn't require load management. 240V 20A will work in most situations and is still 3x faster than Level 1 charging. Plus is super simple to install with common #12 Romex.

 

[sukhoi_584th]

@Mach-Lee a minor correction that you can only do 16 A on 12 ga NM-B due to the constant load derating.

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