But it's pretty clear you would have done fine even with Level 1, which is free for many people.

But this is the point of my article. A lot of people imagine they need enough power to recharge their car from 0 to 100 in one night. They should realize that is nice but not necessary and not worth spending a ton of money on.

Level 3 chargers are also not 50 amps! This was just a typo, corrected before you even left this comment (which makes me wonder where you saw it.)

Generally, the electrical code wants breakers never to blow in ordinary operation. It is designed that this should be extremely rare. The rules don't make it absolutely impossible but it is quite a low chance. Now, some practices are grandfathered in. When you have a room with several plugs, you can obviously plug several appliances in at once, so they are a bit practical about it (though most kitchens are wired with multiple circuits for that these days with high current appliances getting their own circuit.)

I think if the car charger or car is smart, there is no reason to draw power for the few minutes that everything is on at once. It's easy for the car to scale back. Electric chargers are a sign of new thinking in the codes, where the current is limited not by physical things but software. While your electric car can draw 30 amps you are allowed to plug it into a 15 amp circuit, as long as it has been configured to know it's on a 15 amp circuit and not to draw more than 12 from it.

You don't own the street spot in front of your house, so somebody else can park in it. The hard part would be running your cord over the sidewalk. However, many cities have curbside chargers for curbside parking spaces run by the city -- but these are built and run by the city, and are public.

Maybe cities could be convinced to let people install those, but I don't know if they would let you get any ownership rights in parking there. They might fake it with a "EV parking only for residents with local permit" so that it's 99% likely the space is used by you or a very rude neighbour.

Again, for the average car owner, the car is almost always at full every day. For people who drive above average amounts, that's not true and they want more charging. For the rare days when you are a bit low and need to do a long trip, you spend a short time at the fast charger. Not ideal, but better than spending $6,000 which is not cheap.

Some people can install a charger for well under $800. For others, the quote to do it legally can range to $8,000 or more.

There are homes costing millions of dollars with 100 amp service. It is just a factor of when they were built.

Please feel free to point out errors rather than saying they are generically present. The article contains no instructions on how to wire, but rather on what to ask your electrician about. (BTW, university level electrical engineering classes, which I have taken, are not generally about electrical codes for residential wiring, so I am not sure why you cite that.)

Codes do vary by location of course. But it remains true that there are panels where the code would not allow the addition of a 50 amp 240v circuit but which would allow a 20a or 30a, thus vastly lowering cost. The article is not about how to wire, it's about understanding just how much current you actually need.

Your comment is written like a user, but the links suggest you work for the company. That's not something that this site or other sites take kindly to, and a bad way to start things off if that's the case.

I looked at the site. The devices there have 14-50 sockets on them, which is dangerous unless the EVSE can be set to limit the current to 24 amps. With Teslas, their EVSE does not do this with that plug, you want to use one of the two dryer plugs. Odd choice when the competitors have selected the right plug.

The second issue is that I suspect most customers will want a unit that has a pass through for the dryer, but then a long cord to the EVSE, which usually does not go right where the dryer is a typical parking setup. I would need 35' of cord in my case, AWG10 or better of course.

I do like that you have the breaker switch, so users can assure it is off before unplugging it, I presume. Alternately, these would probably do better hardwired into the dryer socket, which most electricians could probably do for whatever their minimum work rate is. It's better if a high power plug can't be unplugged.

These boxes are useful (if configured correctly) though there seems to be an obvious win in just making a special EVSE designed to pass through to a dryer from its plug. Rather than just switching off the EVSE when the dryer is one, that EVSE can just reduce the max current in the pilot wave based on what the dryer is drawing. That can be important with some new dryers that also have low current modes. Of course, you would want to somehow get your hand on Tesla plugs since I don't want to add another $100 to put the adapter on a J1772 I will never use. I don't know if you can buy those.

I'm going to look at Dryer Buddy and Neocharge at some point, perhaps do a shoot out. When yours is safe, with 2 of the same plug on it rather than a 14-50, I could include it.

But please don't post a note like the one above, that says you "turned to" a solution that "I am using" when in fact you make the product. That's a very bad thing.

I guess I won't convince you. The general rule for all online activity is that if you are the maker of a product, you identify yourself extremely clearly as that. You don't equivocate or make subtle truths. You say, explicitly, "Hi, this is Henrick the designer of ." Nothing less than that when you talk about it. Ever.

The breaker is good. To my mind though, the $35 adapter is a better choice as it tells the car what current to draw. The breaker (which has its own cost) is also not needed if that is used.

I am referring to the Tesla EVSE, which has switchable plugs, and each plug tells the EVSE what current it can handle. I realize other EVSEs take different approaches.

What I really want is better than that. I want an EVSE that knows how much current the other appliances are using, and adjusts the EVSE pilot signal up and down.

Note that the use of the extension cord is not strictly to code, but if you do it with care should be OK. You can also consider telling your Tesla to use only 20 amps instead of 24, just to add some more margin if you like.

No, there is no practical way to take DC from your panels and put it directly in the car. So yes, there will be some losses. I mean, it's physically possible to make a DC charger driven by solar panels, but the car needs a carefully controlled voltage and your panels don't put that out. While DC fast chargers are huge expensive things, in theory one could be built that was just a solar charge controller which might be a lot cheaper since it would not do very much current and not be meant to be that fast.

But then you would only be able to charge (with that) in the daytime, when your car is not going to be sitting in your driveway, is it? And it would need to be fancy, switching from solar to the car, to grid to the car, to solar to the house, depending on what's going on. All of which means more cost than the losses you will take using what you have now.

There are a number of ways. By far the simplest though is your car will tell you how many kwh it has used. Your trip odometers will tell you how many kwh you used over a given distance, and give you wh/mile which you can multiply by miles. This will not tell you energy lost to keeping the car computer on, or charging losses, though.

If you plug your car into level 1, you can get a kill-a-watt which is very cheap and will tell you everything about the electricity used. If you plug in level 2, there are lots of home energy monitoring systems they sell that will track usage of different circuits in your house, but they tend to be more involved to install, but there are electronics hobbyist devices that let you measure current in any wire, and you only have to snap them around a wire, you don't need to interrupt it. You can buy a "clamp AC meter" if you can get your hands on one of the conductors going to your car, and compare current in it vs. what the car says the current is.

More tricks: Do you have a smart meter that tells you the watts? Read what it says while your car is charging, then stop it charging with the app and see the difference. make sure nothing else in the house goes on or off in that few seconds.

Or if your power company breaks down power usage by 1 hour chunks, as mine does, just look at the reports from the night when you charge. At night your house current will stay pretty constant except your fridge or AC (or furnace) in winter. You can safely unplug a fridge for an hour or two if you keep it closed.

This is hotly debated. Generally it is agreed that charging to 100% should only be done in advance of a trip that will need that which should be rare. Unfortunately, the i3 battery is so small that this could be many trips.

The "ideal" charge level is about 63%, in that it is estimated lithium ion will get maximum life at that charge state. However, you also don't want to take it too low so that's not a state most people use except when storing their cars. Some people charge to 90% each day, a lot of people like 80%. Since you don't want to go below 20% most of the time, going 80 to 20 on an 85 mile battery like in the i3 would only offer you 50 miles of range. If that is your normal day, it's a good choice. 90 to 20 gives you a little more.

There is no reason not to top it off to 80% though, except when storing. The minor downsides outweigh the benefits. The main reason not to is to save the trouble of plugging in if you don't plan much driving the next day.

If your power comes from fossils in your area, using a natural gas dryer is the green thing to do. You will cause less fossil fuel to be burned if you run your dryer on gas instead of having them burn gas at a power plant to make electricity, that's only about 50% efficient. So you will double the gas burned if you use the electric dryer.

That's even true if you have solar panels on your house!

The only time its not true (barely) is if you buy grid power from solar/wind farms, but people even argue about whether it's true there.

But do the math. If you have solar panels on your house, and run your dryer in the day, you can pretend you put "solar electrons" into your dryer, but that means you did not feed them back to the grid. So a grid power plant had to fire up a little hotter, burning twice as much gas (or worse, coal) than you would have burned in your gas dryer, to serve the other people who no longer got your "solar electrons."

So if you want to increase global warming, use an electric dryer.

Until the day comes when we have an all renewable grid, that is, then junk your gas dryer and put in an electric one. (Or hang your clothes to dry.)

In theory if you buy your power from grid renewables, your money over time goes into building more renewable grid power. You will find arguments on this question in other posts on this blog.

It remains the same. Full 7kw home charging is "nice to have" but not worth spending a fortune on for most drivers. People with long commutes do need more than Level 1, as before. Once cars can drive to charge themselves, you don't need to install charging at home at all if it's expensive.