Leaving Your EVSE Plugged In?

C

CapeCodI5

Member
I’ve read a number of posts here and elsewhere that recommend unplugging the EVSE when it’s not in use. However, the Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV 6 have an option to schedule charging and temperature preconditioning. And I’m guessing that other Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles share this feature.

For this to work it requires the EVSE to be plugged in, which seems to conflict with the recommendation to unplug when not in use. Anyone have any comments?
 
CapeCodI5 said:
I’ve read a number of posts here and elsewhere that recommend unplugging the EVSE when it’s not in use. However, the Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV 6 have an option to schedule charging and temperature preconditioning. And I’m guessing that other Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles share this feature.

For this to work it requires the EVSE to be plugged in, which seems to conflict with the recommendation to unplug when not in use. Anyone have any comments?
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I assume the advice is not to leave it plugged in when charging is not immediate or planned to protect from possible power-line surges or lightning strikes.
 
I’ve read that it is quite safe to leave your EVSE plugged in even though charging has finished, as it just automatically drops to a trickle charge, assuring that everything stays fully charged until you are ready to drive the car again. It really doesn’t do any harm to the battery, the electronics inside the car make sure of that.

That said, if there is a threat of a lightning storm, it probably would not hurt to unplug until the threat has passed.


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If you leave it plugged in you can take advantage of scheduled departure time and have the car conditioned and ready for you.
 
I can't think of any reason why you can't leave an EV plugged in all the time. As far as lightning/power surge, the charger unit has some internal wizardry which might get taken it out, and kill it, but if it's just a ~50KV sub-second surge I doubt it. Back to the future not withstanding, ... Lightning is odd and lasts a fraction of a second. It gives you extreme voltage/current all at once, and because of the extreme voltage wants to get to ground as quickly as possible and will use pretty much anything it can find as a conductor to get there. If it comes in on your electric, the vast majority of the energy bleeds off to ground because of the extremely high voltage (or your entire house would explode and take your car with it). If you get a "direct" hit to your ac power it's likely the overload would cause it to trip breakers, and not pass the vast majority of the energy that happens to have not already jumped out of the wire to earth. Some energy may arc across to your grounds and neutrals. This tripping of course takes time, and could blow some components, like your charging station. Most charging systems would not be affected by anything but a very direct strike, and I doubt even that would take out the in-car, ... But it could if conditions were near perfect, and I'm not sure I'd want to be in your house when it started blowing up all your appliances
 
Two years ago a lightning strike hit a tree about a block away from us. The bolt burnt the tree, blew up 20 feet of ground between it and a garage, totally blew out the electric panel in the garage, cracked the garage floor and the force of the explosion in the garage, bulged the garage door out. Being a block away, it felt and sounded like it hit beside us, damaged the circuits in our TV, DVD player and satellite box. It damaged the circuits in our neighbour’s fridge and blew out a wall plug. Other neighbour’s either side of the strike also had damage. Another neighbour across the lake from us, let’s say four football fields further away from us and the lighting strike, had all of their security sensors triggered.

To be honest this is one the things I had wondered about, could a surge go through the EVSE and into the Ioniq 5 and damage the car?

My brother in law who has a Tesla, has a home surge protector installed just outside his panel. Having worked for the Railroad, I know that even if you have a good surge protector, oif the strike is strong enough, your circuits could still get fried.

Admittedly this is a rare event, but not that rare.
 
Swingpure said:
a home surge protector installed just outside his panel.
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I also installed a surge protector first breaker position below the mains when I upgraded to 200A. My expectations are this will help avoid any small surges and spikes due to brown outs or transformer switching etc, but if lightning strikes or (more common in this area) heavy winds down the HV lines to the secondary lines, the surge protector will have little benefit. I do not leave my EVSE plugged any more than necessary for this very reason.;)
 
Charging aside, double check all your grounds. Make sure you have a solid, solid, ground. Old houses used to ground to the copper pipe under the house. I worked with a client once that had replaced her water feed plumbing with PVC, but the panel and phones were still grounded to a copper stub near a hose bib... Connected with a PVC-Copper threaded fitting. My sister had a similar issue when they cut a water softener into the main copper water feed. The water heater was grounded to 4 feet of copper pipe (cold side), connected to a plastic T fitting. When in doubt drive a 6 Ft rod (or two 4 ft apart) and tie it into your panel. People really don't pay attention when they do maintenance and "fix-ups" on their homes.

Grounds should be as short as possible, and as close to the feed point you want to protect as possible. I lived in the Carolina sand hills a ways back, hard to get a good ground there. Lightning got the pine tree in the front, tripped some breakers, took out the phones. If it "blew out" an electric panel 20ft away, the panel was poorly/incorrectly grounded. Ground and Neutral are not actually the same thing, but should have the same potential.
 
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