Noob question about charging

D

David12231990

New Member
Hi everyone!

I had my electrician install 240v outlet on a dedicated circuit in my garage that handles 50amp. I bought Emporia 48amp charger. When I plug it in, it sets its only sending my car 30 amps and so my car says it will be charged (from 30%) in 6.5 hours which is much longer than I was anticipating.

I thought I saw that this charger would do 40amps when plugged but it only says it's doing 30.

So what gives? Is this a kona limitation? Do I need to call my electrician?

Thanks! Still learning all this stuff.
 
All the charger does is (continuously) offer a current to the EV. It doesn't care what portion of that the car takes. In a simple wall charger that current setting is fixed internally and should not be higher than 80% of the circuit capacity.

If you remove the large plastic cover over the "motor" you can read the specifications of the on-board charger (OBC) electronics, which is usually around 35 amps for a single phase OBC, or 50 if you live in a Type 2 country and have a 3-phase OBC that can handle that, see second image.

It doesn't sound like anything is wrong if you live in a J1772 country like N. America and the dash reads 7.4 to 7.6 kW.

OBC nameplate.webp

2020 3-ph OBC label.webp
 
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The Kona EV will only do 7.5kw on Level 2, aka 30 amps at 240v.

This is a limit of the vehicle and there is nothing wrong with your EVSE or your installation.
 
KiwiME said:
All the charger does is (continuously) offer a current to the EV. It doesn't care what portion of that the car takes. In a simple wall charger that current setting is fixed internally and should not be higher than 80% of the circuit capacity.

If you remove the large plastic cover over the "motor" you can read the specifications of the on-board charger (OBC) electronics, which is usually around 35 amps for a single phase OBC, or 50 if you live in a Type 2 country and have a 3-phase OBC that can handle that, see second image.

It doesn't sound like anything is wrong if you live in a J1772 country like N. America and the dash reads 7.4 to 7.6 kW.

View attachment 21052

View attachment 21054
Click to expand...

Well I never heard it from anyone. I just assumed (incorrectly) the car would take 40 since that's what I set up the charger to do. But I'm glad to see that it's the battery's limitation
 
It was a wise decision to install a 48A EVSE.
The cost difference is minimal upon installation (just larger conductors), which guarantees you compatibility with what most BEVs are capable of today (~11.5 kW on board chargers).
Should you decide to upgrade vehicles in the future, you will be glad you did so ;)
 
As an aside, it's good to know that the OBC can handle up to 285 volts. There's been mention on some
other forum that some commercial installations might have EVSEs on one phase of 277/408 power, and
especially around NACS / J1772 adaptation there was concern that an OBC might receive too high a
voltage. Using the same pins for both DC and AC needs a bit more switching complexity in Teslas, too...

_H*
 
I was waiting for our resident electrician to show up but one point to add is that the voltage of a 3-phase supply is usually specified as phase-to-phase while the rating on the OBC is phase to neutral. The OBC's 285 VAC rating allows an approximate 20% headroom over the Level 2 200-240 VAC single-phase supplies found worldwide in order to stay safely outside normal line voltage tolerances. The same with the 70 VAC at the lower end of the range where 70 VAC is under the worse case tolerance on a 100 VAC supply, only Japan from what I understand.
 
Much greater knowledge above than I possess but the sparky did have to change the 40amp breaker to 50 amps because it was tripping even though it was only drawing 32amps. My charge rate went up slightly after that from 6. 2 to 7.4kW. We have CCS2 here and single phase 240v. Might have been a dud 40 amp breaker.
 
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