Well when the frustration reaches peak, there is always the last resort. Traipse in with a box full of packed file folders. Drop the box on a table and bitch that you got assigned. Wait for the question, what. "They want me to do annual performance reviews because they are going to fire a bunch of under-performing employees PDQ so they can bring in cheap young replacements. " Bitch that you have to do this and you think it is crap, but ... bosses ... . Then disappear with the box into some hiding place for a while. Then make like a mangler stupidviser and check some people doing tasks and make "notes" in a shirt pocket notebook. Ask why whenever you see anything that isn't per the book. It is amazing how this can inspire people to start doing things the right way. Of course when you leave for the day, take the box with you. Repeat for a couple of days. On the day you decide to not come in with the box you can say you have finished but you are sure they are going to send it back, because they are going to want to cut more.

Be careful what you ask for. A friend of my dads was asked about his opinion of a coworker. He said something negative and the coworker was later fired.

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I would like to thank zoom3+1=4 for his sporadic insights into the everyday operation of a cheap, used electric car. Owning an old ICE car, I knew few of these facts. Especially about specific problems (e.g. power supply, max amps) or about costs (I even don't have an ICE or EV car mechanic in my wider family).

Well, it looks like summer is coming. We are expecting a change in wind patterns. Santa Ana's starting tomorrow and no more rain or snow. Highs of 65f for the next few days then the weather is predicted to warm and dry up.

Vic's posts certainly make interesting reading, but they are based on a few things that are way beyond his control.
First - The currents he talks about are based on the US mains "120/240" domestic distribution system, not the European 230/415 system (most of us don't have the 415 to house, but can have it if we pay enough to the grid company as it runs down our streets.
Second - The "official" figures are optimistic being based on perfect laboratory conditions, with the car and battery in perfect condition. Generally these figures are between 10 and 30 percent optimistic.
Third - The age of the battery. Older batteries degrade faster than new ones, and this degradation is somewhere between 2 and 4 percent per year - depending on how the vehicle has been used, how the battery has been managed (run down to 20% then recharged to 80%; discharged by 5%, then recharged, "drained dry" then panic charged to 100%, etc.). Each battery type (generally vehicle manufacturer and model) will have an optimum use cycle, operate with the wrong use cycle and the battery life will be hammered.
Forth - Vehicle loading - small EVs are more affected by load than one would expect.
Fifth - Type of driving - best (for most) is an extended urban cycle, worst is a fast run along a flat highway at moderate to high speed. This can affect range quite dramatically, with a 50 percent or more difference between the two.
Sixth - Tyre pressure, too low for the loading and the range will be hammered.
Seventh - Tyre type. In comparison to the others, in the real world tyre choice at your chosen price and performance point is actually quite small. Obviously truly ridiculous off-road or ultra high grip tyres are going to be far worse than a normal summer tyre.
Eighth - Use of heating and air-conditioning, remember all the power for these services comes from the battery one way or the other. Thus cold weather when the heater is in use and hot weather where the air-conditioning is running will both hit the range quite badly.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

First - The currents he talks about are based on the US mains "120/240" domestic distribution system, not the European 230/415 system (most of us don't have the 415 to house, but can have it if we pay enough to the grid company as it runs down our streets.

Agreed to all of your points, except the first one.

I don't know about the UK but most of us can't have three-phased 415 V CEE sockets or a comparably powerful wallbox connected to 3 phases AC 415 volts at home. That's possible for people living in row homes (typical British) or detached houses (typical German suburbs or villages). The millions of urban dwellers living in multi-storey appartment homes in all larger towns or cities can't have such a power supply. They are limited to 1 phase 230 Volts / 16 amps CEE7/3 sockets whose contacts aren't capable to deliver more than 12 amps continuously (choosen as max power rating for plugin 230 volts AC chargers for EV), so: 230 V * 12 A = 2,760 watts.

The second, critical point is the distance from the car's parking lot to your power outlet. I have a rented parking lot (20€ each month) "close" to my apartment building. The distance is ~50 meters. House and parking space were newly built about five years ago, without any charging infrastructure for EVs near the house or parking lots. You can't hang a 70 meters long power cord out of the 5th floor kitchen window, down to the entrance, across the playground to your car. Then there's the voltage drop of a 60..70 meters long cable. So, you better have an additional 16 amp fuse at the end of the long extension (thus a large, expensive professional cable spool with fuse box). You better wind up your cable every day and lock it at a safe place, otherwise you will own two cable spools the next morning... errr... none at all... cut off... and stolen. Our national border is close (without border controls thanks to Schengen Treaty). So every accessible stuff outside is stolen.

The third, even more critical point is rural village structures whose distribution grid was dimensioned decades ago to accommodate expected typical loads. There grid companies often refuse to install further 415 V CEE sockets or wall boxes (or e.g. heat pumps) until the grid, its cables and medium voltage transformers, etc. have been modernized to today's expected loads. Worse still, our distribution grid (415 volts as well as 25 kilovolts) is burried underground (stormproofed) almost everywhere, also in rural areas. There are no overhead pylons like in the U.S. or Australia. Our advantage of stormproofed construction becomes a major headache. Strenghtening our distribution grids will be extremely complex, expensive (and supposedly taking decades).

Winning on a cool Thorsday morning before the heat gets here.

Cheers.

400v is technically available around here and is used at EA DCFC sites and EVgo and Charge Point and ad infinitum, but the charging devices are very expensive. and bulky too.

My main problem might be the tires are cheap sport tires which look like about $66 a tire, a Chevy Bolt EV in snow and ice was getting 2.9kw per mile with 17" EV tires, no snow and ice and warmer temps and I get 2.9kw a mile, others with proper tires on an EV like mine received 6.2kw a mile using Firestone Champion fuel fighter tires which is discontinued in my tire sizes, with Kumho Solus TA31 tires range was reported as 5.0kw-5.3kw a mile, the Kumho Solus TA31 and the General Altimax RT45 are available for my car, I should know more by May when summer temps get here, current range is in sport mode using cruise control(2.7kw w/o sport mode, the motor is 140hp with 327ftlbs of torque) is 58 miles on the GOM and this has been rising as night temps have been warming up.

58 miles and 2.9kw.

240v here is actually two bonded 120v hot wires, not true 240v ac, even weirder there is a voltage in the US called 277v which is three 120v hot wires, which uses black, red, blue for hot, white is neutral, and green or bare copper is ground.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

No, we can't normally have 415v outlets, you have to have them installed. Most UK streets are cabled using a 3-phase system, but each house only has a single phase feed to it.
While the "normal" domestic European outlet is limited to 12A (compared to the UK 13A) it is quite possible to have much higher power outlets installed.

Local grid capacity is an ever growing problem at both the street and community level - we are all suffering from the age of the infrastructure much of which dates back a good few decades

Parking for charging is something that many countries have overlooked, particularly in towns and cities, where parking is frequently remote from the dwelling, or kerbside - neither of which is very convenient for the user. And that is ignoring those living in multi-story, multi-occupancy buildings all over the world. Theft of equipment is a common problem, even without being very close to a national boarder - I've seen any number of EV charge cables chopped off where they have been used in public areas in the UK - scrap copper is quite valuable just now....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

On 120v there is 15A, 20A, and 30A, though only 15 and 20 are compatible, 30 could be a twist lock or what is used with RV's.
With 240v there is 15A, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, above 80 would be panel breakers like 100, 125, 150, and 200.
Outlets that look like 120v but are actually 240v are available up to 20, above 20 should be hardwired or use either a 14-30 or a 14-50 outlet, my cable is a 14-50 so that's what I use.
I'll be using a 25A breaker that I have and the 14-50 outlet that came with my EV charging cable, some like Leviton have been known to melt and/or catch fire.
As to infrastructure, yeah what is buried here really needs updating as the state of California considers it an antique system and of course there are no new parts made for it now and has said no new hookups until the infrastructure is updated.
EV's today come with chargers under the hood or in some cases in the trunk, mine is a 3.3kw AC unit, the Bolt EV has either a 6.6kw or a 7.7kw and is dependent on the year as to which the car has installed, the Bolt EUV has a 11.5kw charger built in and has room for it, the older version can't be upgraded, both Bolts and the Spark can charge on DC at a max rate of about 50-55kw. In 2024 the Bolt EUV is back with an Ultium LFP battery and in 2025 all new GM EV's are supposed to get the NACS upgrade from CCS1.

What I'd like to do is take out the LG Chem 27ah pouches in the Spark and replace them with 55ah pouches from a 2020 Bolt, in theory I'd then have about 167 miles of range. I could buy 26.4kw of used pouches off ebay, each is priced at $999.00 currently, each pouch is 138lbs in weight, the seller has more than 10.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

I think that I'll wait a little longer before I go outside just yet as after a 12C (felt like 10C) start here it's only just hit 15C with 29C being expected today.

My plan for this morning, after watering the veggies, is to rediscover some concrete edges around the backyard, seeing as the ground should be dry enough now for the edger to work properly, as I don't really feel up to swinging a line trimmer or pushing a mower around just yet, though my spine is working a lot better today.

Anyhow I'll get another coffee in before heading out.

Cheers.

We have a winner!!!
The magic number was 330.
Vic the honor of the next thread is yours. You have the power now is the time to charge forward and create a new thread.

400v is technically available around here and is used at EA DCFC sites and EVgo and Charge Point and ad infinitum, but the charging devices are very expensive. and bulky too.

Admittedly, DC fast chargers are way too expensive (ours are ~30,000€) to have your own and the grid companies prefer to place them close to their transformers or they build a new 25kV/400V transformer, just for one or two 100 kW DC chargers. Costs for such additional transformers are simply added to grid usage fees, thus paid by all customers. We have 3-phase 415 V AC everywhere down the road to each house, as rob smith explained. So, my appartment flat has such 3P, 415V, 3 x 32A power connection. But I can't even have the weakest type of (industrial) 3P, 415V, 16A CEE socket here (not within my flat, not in my basement room belonging to my flat, nowhere outside the building). The flat's powerful connection (3 x 32A x 230V = 22 kilowatts) is only used to supply two dozen independent circuits, each 230V, 16A including an (3x16A=11kW) electric cooker and a dozen separate 16A socket circuits. Almost impossible to trip a fuse here. The whole building has a 415V, 3 x 200 320amps connection shared by 20 appartments.

[...] cruise control(2.7kw w/o sport mode, the motor is 140hp with 327ftlbs of torque) is 58 miles [...]

I thought that this strange non-standard, non-metric, non-SI unit of horsepower (hp) would be forgotten as soon as we have electric vehicles... Nope.

240v here is actually two bonded 120v hot wires, not true 240v ac, even weirder there is a voltage in the US called 277v which is three 120v hot wires, which uses black, red, blue for hot, white is neutral, and green or bare copper is ground.

Understood. We have 400V, 3 AC phases offset by 120 degrees. That means up to 415v between each two of three phases and ~230 volts between each phase and ground. So you can easily splitup a 415V socket (3 hot wires) to three 230 V (one hot) circuits with a simple adaptor you can buy in DIY markets.

Now, I have an idea... I can get some 2.5mm² (~AWG13) cables (3 cores: brown for hot, blue is neutral, yellow/green to ground), three 230V CEE7/4 plugs and one red 415V, 16A (industrial) CEE17 socket. Then I could manufacture my own "special" adaptor connecting the three 230V plugs to separate cables, all feeding the needed 415 V, 16A CEE socket for my EV. The difficult part would be to identify three separate sockets in my flat which are fed by three distinct 230V circuits, each attached to a distinct phase to truely balance the load from the 415 V socket across all available phases. From an electrical point of view this should be safe, if properly connected. But I fear that's outside the agreed terms and conditions of my grid company. What a pity.

What did I learned as a child in TV movies? "Remember, don't try this at home, kids. I am a professional." ....which I am clearly not.

So I'll stick with my old, paid-off bicycle for the time being.... that is until grid improvements.

Congrats Vic.

Cheers.

At one time I could wire up a garage or a room, today I call a pro with a license, too much pain in this 63yr old body which kinda discourages almost any activity.

3 500mg acetaminophen pills twice a day & 1 15mg Meloxicam a day prescribed to me by my Doctor.

Thanks Wiggo, yes the NEXT thread is up and everyone can migrate over there. Stick a fork in this one, as it's done.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Thanks Wiggo, yes the NEXT thread is up and everyone can migrate over there. Stick a fork in this one, as it's done.

Not yet, Kameraden... not yet... (05m05s)

Congratz Vic!

Well this thread is done, the 332nd thread is open.

If a Mod will please close this thread.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's