“Need” can be a funny word.
If you’re in the US and are considering an electric car,
at some point someone is likely to tell you that if you want to charge it at home you’re gonna need one of these in your garage:
a NEMA 14-50 receptacle.
Over time this has become almost the defacto-standard for electric car charging, as it can provide a healthy 9.6 kilowatts of power.
But unless your household drives a TON - I’m talking 200 miles each and every day -
you don’t need this.
Having this much power available is nice to have, and if you can swing it by all means go ahead!
But installing one of these isn’t always feasible.
Maybe you’re limited by your home’s electrical service,
or maybe you don’t have a garage and you want something a little more waterproof.
The good news is that electricity is incredibly versatile,
and in that same vein electric vehicle charging is incredibly flexible.
However, based on conversations I keep having,
way too many electricians don’t quite understand just how flexible electric car charging is.
Now, to be clear, it's not my intention to throw electricians under the bus here.
I don’t have to deal with running a business which interacts with the public -
I just make YouTube videos!
And it makes perfect sense to offer what is generally a one-size-fits-all solution to “I want a charging station.”
But since I often answer questions people have about electric cars and what’s needed to charge them…
well I just can’t shake the feeling that not enough folks - and this includes both professionals and clients
- are aware that charging stations can be installed on a branch circuit of any size.
And many models available can be field-commissioned for the installed circuit capacity.
This means there are countless options for running power to charge a car,
and many of them are much easier and cheaper than what an electric car enthusiast is likely to promote.
Especially when more modest charging avoids a costly electrical service upgrade.
For an example of a less-intensive option, let’s go on a little field trip to my parents’ house.
My folks moved last year and this house didn’t have a charging station,
but they did have their Chevy Bolt to charge.
Now, like all electric vehicles the Chevy Bolt can be charged with a standard household outlet like this one.
A startling number of people aren’t aware of that so I’m gonna repeat that:
ALL electric cars can be charged from a standard household outlet,
and many of them come with the cable you need to do that.
And if it didn’t come with this, you can get them inexpensively.
It’s very slow, but a lot more useful than many people think:
if you drive 40 miles a day and have a small to midsized car, this outlet will probably take care of your needs overnight.
But having a faster charging station is useful and has other benefits, too, especially when you have variable electric rates.
So, my parents wanted to go for a 240V charging station.
While their new home didn’t have a charging station yet, its layout was quite fortuitous for adding one.
The attached garage is adjacent to the electrical room in the basement,
and the breaker panel itself is less than 25 feet away from the shared wall.
Now, of course, not everybody has such an easy situation,
but in this case the work and materials required for the installation of a charging station were pretty trivial.
I’m not afraid of a little electrical work and I’ve installed several charging stations at this point, so I offered to help.
However, this house happens to be in Chicagoland where the outlets are sideways
and all electrical work has to go in conduit like you see here.
Which is, uh, annoying!
However, we do get to use MC cable in certain situations.
I am glossing over which situations because codes are highly local and very annoying to parse but the important thing is
it’s the closest thing we get to Romex and the largest wire size it comes in is 10 gauge.
That would limit us to a 30 amp circuit,
and thanks to the 80% rule a car charging on that circuit would be limited to 24 amps of charging current.
But, at 240 volts, that’s 5.8 kilowatts which is a lot of power!
and since everyone in my family actually knows what living with an electric car is like,
we all agreed that would be much more than fine.
So, we opted for cheap and easy.
Now, I’m about to show you everything we did to install the charging station.
But I want to be clear here that the purpose of this is for illustration only.
Doing electrical work yourself is very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing,
and in many locations it’s flat out illegal.
So, do not take this as a guide.
I just want to illustrate the scope of work here because it’s a lot simpler than I think many people understand.
On that note, before I continue I want to repeat that charging stations can be installed on a branch circuit of any size -
meaning cars can charge from 20A and even piddly little 15A circuits, too.
Of course that limits power and slows down charging speeds,
but it means if you’re in a situation where you’ve only got 100A service or maybe even just 60A service,
you can almost certainly still have a pretty capable 240V charging station.
If load calculations reveal you’ve only got the wiggle room to add just a 16A load,
you can have a 3.8 kilowatt charging station that will add about 70 or 80 miles of driving range every day with a 10 hour overnight charging session.
And that’s a conservative estimate based on winter driving efficiency and a midsize car like mine.
If you’re worried about the unpredictable nature of life,
I would encourage you to look into the rapid charging options that are available in your area.
Those fast charging networks are growing quickly
and they can be your backup in emergencies and on the odd days you have extra errands to run.
So try to stick to just your typical daily needs when thinking about installing a charging station.
I promise a "slow" one at home that’s just for you is so much nicer than a fast one which is down the street.
So, to run a new 240V circuit you need to have two free slots in your breaker panel.
If yours is full there’s a pretty good chance you can consolidate existing circuits and free up space,
but you’re gonna need to consult a professional to find out whether or not that’s possible in your situation.
Luckily for us, the previous owner of this home had installed this 100A sub-panel, likely when they finished the basement,
and there were tons of open slots in here.
Plus there was plenty of capacity.
These 20 amp breakers feed baseboard heaters that all told only draw about 12 amps
so it would be no problem at all to add another 24 amp load to this panel.
So, a quick trip to the hardware store to pick up 25 feet of 10 gauge MC cable,
a 30A Square D Homeline circuit breaker, a junction box, and a few fittings
and we were off to the races.
All told the materials cost for this job was about $200,
and that includes a set of spade bits which we absolutely knew we were going to need before we got started, he said sarcastically.
In the span of an hour or two we had power out to this junction box which we tucked underneath the stairs that lead into the house.
But of course we’d also need a charging station.
I’m of the mind that electric car charging stations for the home should be as simple as possible so we elected to go with the Grizzl-E classic.
I will withhold my rant which explains why until later.
Anyway, when you buy a Grizzle-E Classic, it’s going to come with a NEMA 14-50 or 6-50 plug on it
because this charging station can supply up to 40 amps of charging current.
But, we only installed a 30 amp circuit.
Oh no! What a blunder!
Except no mistake was made, folks, because the Grizzl-E Classic has this little bit of high technology inside of there called DIP switches.
And when you put them in the correct positions as outlined in the installation instructions,
you can lower the charging current to match the capacity of the circuit it will be connected to.
By default it’s set for installation on 50A circuits,
but there’s a setting for 40 amp circuits, 30 amp circuits, and 20 amp circuits.
Since we’re going with a 30A circuit, I configured it for 24A of charging current, the maximum allowed continuous load thanks to the 80% rule,
and that was that.
Are you wondering how DIP switches are all that’s needed for this charging station to match the circuit?
Well, if you’ve seen some of my earlier videos you probably already know
but for those who haven’t, here’s the thing about AC car charging:
this device is not a battery charger.
It is simply a power supply, in fact the proper term for this is electric vehicle supply equipment or EVSE.
All these things do is send a signal to the car which says “hey, I’m a charging station, here’s how many amps I can supply.”
The DIP switches on the Grizzl-E's circuit board simply change the signal.
By adjusting their positions, this charging station will now announce that it’s capable of delivering 24 amps.
And once connected a car will send a signal back which says
“Hi, I’m a car, please give me power.”
And then the charging station will close this large relay
[click] which simply sends the incoming AC line voltage
right down the charging cable and to the car.
That’s how all AC charging stations work.
All this device does is connect these wires to those wires,
delivering the same AC power that’s coming into the unit directly to the car.
Then, the car will use its own onboard battery charger to convert AC line voltage to the proper DC voltages it needs to charge its battery pack.
That’s why the charging station needs to tell the car how many amps it can pull: the car is the electrical load on the circuit, not the charging station.
And a car like mine, a Hyundai Ioniq 5, can draw up to 48 amps
which would very much overload this circuit and trip the breaker quite quickly.
But so long as the charging station is putting out that signal which says “you can only take 24 amps”,
well that’s all the current my car's gonna take.
Every electric car that’s been sold since the J1772 standard was released in 2009 understands the signals that come from these charging stations,
and so even though plenty of cars can charge at a higher power level than this circuit can safely provide,
they’ll all know when they’re connected to this charging station that they are only allowed to pull 24 amps.
That will keep the circuit within safe operating limits and will prevent the circuit breaker from tripping.
And for those asking “well what if the car ignores the signal and pulls too much current?”
Well should that happen the charging station's gonna notice, de-energize the cable, and enter a fault condition.
And if for some reason that doesn’t happen…
that’s what the circuit breaker is for.
Don’t overthink this.
So, with this charging station now configured to send the 24A signal,
all that was left to complete the installation was to remove the NEMA plug from the charging station and attach a wire whip,
the sort often used for air conditioners.
Then I connected the wire whip to the junction box,
connected the wires together using the appropriate wire nuts
(yes I used wire nuts please enjoy the show in the comments)
and finally I closed the breaker in to actually energize the circuit.
And, aside from securing the cables and wire whip, we were finished!
This was just an afternoon project knocked out by a couple of knuckleheads,
and by far the most time consuming part was figuring out a mounting solution for the charging station itself.
But I am a knucklehead with a thermal imaging camera and just to be sure everything was copacetic,
before we buttoned it all up I let my car charge for a half-hour and then took a thermal peek at every connection point to see if anything was getting too hot.
Every connection was just a bit above ambient temperature, and essentially the exact same temperature as the wires themselves.
In fact the warmest thing was the circuit breaker itself, which illustrates why the 80% rule exists.
So, with everything hunky-dory, I closed it all up and it was happily ever after.
Now, I want to touch on the fact that we hard-wired this installation and explain why.
In the wonderful world of NEMA connectors, there does exist a 30A, 240V receptacle and plug.
Electric clothes dryers use them, and actually there are few varieties out there.
In theory we could have installed one of those receptacles under the stairs and either replaced the cord on the charger with a dryer cord
or purchased a 24A charger which was equipped with a dryer plug, which are readily available.
And, side-note, if you’ve got an electric dryer and it’s in or close to your garage -
you’re already completely set for electric car charging!
There are intelligent splitter boxes available which will allow you to plug in a car charger and the dryer into the same receptacle
and it will prevent them from operating at the same time.
I would highly recommend looking into that if you’re in that lucky but fairly common boat.
But, for new installations there’s some potential code weirdness regarding the need for ground fault protection in garages.
In some jurisdictions all receptacles in a garage need to be GFCI protected, which can be very annoying to make work with high-power receptacles.
Truthfully I don’t know whether that’s required in their area yet,
but EVSEs have their own built-in ground fault detection and will de-energize the cable in the case of a fault,
so hard-wiring it seemed the best way to ensure code was respected.
And it also eliminates the weak point that is the receptacle and plug, though I’m gonna touch on that more in a bit.
It’s, uh, controversial.
Since installation, this charging station’s been dutifully charging my mom and dad’s Chevy Bolt.
And it has never been “too slow” - my parents haven’t even noticed the downgrade from their old 7.2 kilowatt charging station.
See, if the car were completely dead, it would take about 13 hours to charge back to full rather than 10.
But since that has never once actually happened in the car’s life and it usually gets plugged in around 40% or higher,
the real-world charge time is at most about 8 hours:
an essentially perfect overnight charge taking place when the humans are asleep.
And even still, that only happens once or twice a week for them.
For a different example, my car’s got a slightly bigger battery pack than the Bolt, so it takes a little longer to charge,
but even still on this 24A charging station,
the car reports that it will only need 7 hours and 40 minutes to get back to 80% when I plugged in at 29%.
In other words, on this charging station my car needs about 7.5 hours to recoup half of its battery pack capacity,
which is enough charge to go about 120 miles in the summer and between 80 and 100 in the winter.
This is the main reason I want more people to know about and consider smaller charging circuits.
They are much easier to install yet still extremely capable.
But until people have first-hand experience with an electric car,
range anxiety can be a stubborn mental block.
I have struggled quite a lot to communicate that there’s no need to get an empty-to-full charge every single night.
Almost nobody's real-world usage pattern requires that.
I mean, are you topping up your car at a gas station every day?
Unless you’re a professional driver, probably not.
So if you have a charging station like this, it can almost certainly be your exclusive source of energy for day-to-day-driving.
It definitely would be for me, even back when I had a 70 mile daily commute.
And as I said before, thanks to the fact that public fast charging networks are growing rapidly,
if you have a surprise errand pop up you can run over to your local DC fast charging station,
and there’s probably one on the way to wherever you’re going.
The only vehicle class that will truly be limited by 5.8 kilowatts of charging power is large trucks.
Something like a Silverado EV with its gigantic 210 kilowatt-hour battery pack
would need 36 hours to charge from empty to full using this charging station.
And that’s assuming perfect efficiency.
On the other hand, that truck has a bonkers driving range of about 450 miles so long as it’s not towing anything.
So if we go by its energy efficiency, which is reported to be about 2 miles per kilowatt-hour,
well then you can still expect to get at least 10 miles of range per hour it’s plugged into this thing which certainly isn’t nothing.
A 12 hour charging session may only replenish a third of its battery pack charge,
but when that’s still over a hundred miles… is that really so bad?
Only you can answer that question but I want you to ask it and think about it.
I mean, that’s more driving range than lots of early EVs had period.
So, that’s the main mission I had with this video:
increase awareness of smaller charging circuits and how much they can actually do.
The thing is, unless you live and breathe electric car charging,
you may not have realized how many charging stations can be field-commissioned to match different circuit sizes.
And now that I’ve gone over that, well feel free to stop watching.
Bye!
And for the rest of you, this is what I love about electricity!
It’s so dang flexible!
There’s wires in them buildings already, and in nearly all cases there’s at least some spare capacity to go around.
Getting access to it is the main challenge,
but in the end it’s always a simple matter of running wires from the electrical panel to wherever you want a charging station to go.
And when deciding where you want it to go, keep in mind that one of those places can be outside.
Plenty of inexpensive charging stations - including the Grizzl-E - have enclosures which are rated for outdoor installation.
And that might be a great option for you if you have, say, a detached garage with limited power but your driveway is adjacent to the house.
It’s gonna be way more expensive to trench new power lines out to the garage than it is to install a charging station on the side of the house,
and with today’s EVs that pretty much all have a range of 200 miles at a minimum
(I mean the Chevy Bolt does and it’s an 8 year old car now)
you seriously don’t have to charge it every day.
If you’re OK with charging it outside when you need to and then putting it in the garage the rest of the time,
then I would highly suggest just doing that.
I think a lot of people see so-called “best practices” as rules when
there are no rules!
You can charge an EV however you need to,
and having a charger at home is awesome no matter where exactly it happens to be.
Now, I know that plenty of you are out there who would love to drive an electric car but can’t install a charger for it
because you live in an apartment building or perhaps a neighborhood with on-street parking.
When I talk about how easy it is to install one of these, I don’t wish to dismiss your situation.
In fact I am just as frustrated as you are because the simple fact is all you need is wires.
Multifamily housing does have unique challenges, but really there are only two:
who pays for the electricity which is consumed,
and how do you get that power from where it is in the building to the parking lot or garage.
I would love for utility companies to start spinning up programs to solve those problems,
especially because right now the answer we seem to be going with is
“well DC fast charging can take care of those folks”
which is just stupid.
It’s very stupid.
It’s not only unfair to expect renters to shoulder the cost of that ridonkulously expensive infrastructure
which homeowners like me with private chargers rarely use,
but it’s a worse experience!
I never notice the 5 or 6 hours my car spends charging because I’m sleeping when that happens!
But you will notice how long a fast-charging session takes because you’re waiting for the car to charge.
Honestly I think that’s what makes electric cars such a contentious issue.
I spend way less time charging my car than I did at gas stations.
I just plug it in when I get home and go inside.
And because that’s such a great experience, I don’t mind that it takes a little longer to go on a road trip.
But if you have to live with an EV as if it is a gas car,
then routine 20 or 30 minute charging sessions suck and are a legitimate downgrade.
While DC fast charging times are improving,
I am very annoyed that we’re spending so much oxygen covering that progress
rather than explaining the simple fact that slow charging when your car is parked and you’re not using it is where it’s at.
Ideally that happens at home, but it could also happen at work.
Electric cars can be used differently from gas cars
and we should be leaning into that difference and not trying to replicate the liquid fueling paradigm.
And as a bonus, the infrastructure for AC charging is orders of magnitude cheaper to deploy.
This whole setup wasn’t even $600 and it’s gonna work for years and years.
It shouldn’t take a Midwesterner to tell you that our priorities here are just all wrong.
And speaking of weird priorities,
well here comes my deferred rant on smart charging stations.
If a charging station requires the use of an app to configure it for a smaller circuit,
my first instinct is to throw it into the ocean.
I mean I wouldn’t really,
but the mere idea of a charging station like this having an app or worse getting software updates
just rubs me the wrong way.
A lot of this is because I understand what these things actually are: power cables.
And because of that fact, many of the smart features more expensive charging equipment can provide can also be handled by the car.
You want scheduled charging? The car can do that.
You want energy reports? Most cars will give them to you in some form or another.
You want to lower charging current even more for whatever reason?
Lots of cars let you do that.
Even demand-response can be done by the car, though I will say I have privacy and security concerns there.
But I have those same concerns about internet-connected charging stations.
Look, for a charging station, I desire simplicity and reliability more than anything else.
The more features you try to build into one of these things, the more can go wrong.
Even with relatively simple equipment like this Siemens charger,
I’ve experienced weird bugs where the charging station needs to be power-cycled to work again.
One thing I love about the Grizzl-E Classic is that it will repeatedly attempt a self-reset if it encounters an error -
a feature I first learned about from my old Clipper Creek install.
That's why those things are so bulletproof!
I consider this a must-have feature because, y’know, you need the car to charge!
But pretty much every other feature that EVSEs try to pack in I consider superfluous in a private setting.
Like, as cool as it is to be able to monitor how much energy your car is pulling from the wall…
there’s not really anything you can do with that information, is there?
Your car’s gonna need the same amount of energy no matter how smart the charging station is.
But that’s just me, feel free to disagree.
And complexity is gonna have to increase assuming vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technology really takes off.
But for now, keep it simple stupid is a decent principle to live by.
Oh and I should touch on charging connectors.
I’ve not brought up the transition to the NACS connector because, honestly, for Level 2 charging it hardly matters.
You can install a charging station with either a Tesla connector or a J1772 connector and use an inexpensive adapter if your car has the wrong one.
The transition does seem to be full-steam-ahead so I would probably lean towards installing a NACS charging station at this point,
but they’re not as widely available yet so if you see a good deal on a J1772 unit, I would probably go for that and just pop on an adapter.
Oh, and remember that thing I said earlier about
hardwiring the charging station and eliminating the weak point that is the receptacle and plug?
Yeah, well by now you’ve probably seen photos of an electric car charging station making its plug all melty-like.
This can happen for several reasons, but the most commonly cited one is a poor-quality receptacle.
In fact that is such a widely known issue that my Clipper Creek HCS-40 at home came with a new Hubbell brand 14-50 receptacle
and documentation which all but demanded I replace the one which was already in the wall with the one they gave me.
Which I did.
Honestly I had no idea they came in white.
However, there’s a lot which can go wrong besides quality control.
For a start, none of these receptacles are designed for frequent plug insertion and removal
and they’ll wear out quickly if you, say, use a portable charging cable and take it with you regularly.
Prior to electric cars, these things were mainly known for hooking up a kitchen range which would be plugged in once during installation and then…
left plugged in for years.
This means that essentially no wear happens and so the design never needed to account for that.
The most common high-wear application of the NEMA 14-50 is at campsites, as it’s a common connector for hooking up travel trailers and RVs.
But even if they start getting worn out and can’t safely carry as much current as they used to,
your typical RV isn’t pulling trying to pull 40 amps through it nonstop.
This is a long way of saying if you have one of these and use a car charger with it, leave it plugged in.
And to be safe, I would periodically feel how warm the plug is after your car’s been charging for an hour or so.
If it’s hot, there’s a problem.
But the other thing which can go wrong, which to be honest I think is far more common, is simply improper installation of the receptacle.
A lot of the photos I’ve seen where they get burned up make it clear that they were installed with aluminum wiring.
Which is not quite a big no-no but it is a big yikes.
Aluminum electrical wiring requires very careful handling and it needs anti-corrosion treatment.
If that’s not done, it can become a big problem and maxing it out as charging a car will do will quickly reveal the problem.
Aluminum loves to oxidize which increases electrical resistance at the points of contact.
And that leads to overheating which leads to melting and possibly worse!
Even with copper wiring, though, if the lugs on the receptacle which clamp onto that wire aren’t torqued to spec,
a poor connection can result and the same problems will happen.
If a professional electrician installs a 14-50, I don’t think you’re likely to find improperly torqued lugs.
But do-it-yourselfers or fly-by-night handymen might not have done such a bang-up job.
I’m bringing this up because a common refrain is that the 14-50 was never designed to have its full current rating drawn through it nonstop.
Which is absolutely correct!
But the thing is - a properly installed and commissioned electric car charging station will never ever do that.
These are rated for 50 amps, that's why they're called a 14-50, but a continuous load should be limited to 80% or 40 amps.
To be honest, I suspect some folks discover that their chosen EVSE can be commissioned as a 48 amp charger meant for installation on a 60 amp circuit -
Tesla’s wall connectors are a great example.
And since 48 is less than 50, people who know enough to be dangerous might change it to send a 48 amp output signal
not knowing about the importance of the 80% rule.
And then they truly will be pushing this beyond its design limits.
But anyway, this is largely just speculation on my part, and if you’re worried about this, well here's an idea:
do what I did and install a 32 amp charger on your NEMA 14-50.
I’m following the extra safe 64% rule!
To be honest, though, that’s just because I wanted something a little more trustworthy than this Amazon special
and the HCS-40 was on sale.
And now Clipper Creek was gobbled up by Enphase which makes me sad.
OK, well I think that’s everything.
As usual scope creep got the best of me and this video became a lot longer than it probably needed to be.
But, uh, well I got a question for ya:
given how much has changed about the charging landscape and how wrong I was about CCS winning out over the Tesla connector,
I’ve been considering a remake on my older EV charging guides.
Do you think that’s a good idea? Would you like to see that?
It would be fairly easy to do.
But I wanted this video out there specifically because
a lot more EV nerds need to make friends with Midwesterners.
Do you know how much easier life gets when you reject FOMO and decide to be happy with good enough?
It's pretty awesome, you might wanna try it sometime.
And bring a hotdish!
♫ modestly smooth jazz ♫
First take worked without a problem?
Today is goin’ GOOD.
Especially when more modesht -
Well, now we’re havin’ a problem…
This is a long way of saying if you have one of these and you use a char carger wi -
I said char carger.
[exasperated sigh]
My folks moved last year and this house didn't have a charging station,
but they did have…
a U-Haul driving by.
Though I will say I have privacy andk security concerns…
ugh,
consonant jam.
But that’s just me. Feel free to disagree. [joint crack]
And complexity will have to incre - yea, how bad was that elbow click?
We’ll find out in the edit!
There's no need to get all charged up about this.
Oh wait, yes there is.
But there's no need to get charged up as fast as your car can possibly do it... unless you genuinely need that.
Just think of what it would be like if the gas fairy visited overnight and put a few gallons in the tank whenever you wanted.
And you don't even have to give up your teeth!