<--------------The scrubbed HTML attachment from another poster follows------------------> Has anyone tried to charge a LEAF at greater than 12 amps at 120V?
When I was testing my home built EVSE, I did a preliminary test on 120V, but didn't bother changing the pilot to something less than 50A. When I plugged the car in, the contactor in the EVSE closed and, within seconds, the 15A breaker on the 120V circuit tripped. The line cord that I had temporarily wired in was warm! So, it seems clear that the car was drawing considerably more than the claimed 12A limit on 120V, but I didn't repeat the experiment and measure the current. BTW, this was a 2013 leaf with the 6kW charger. <----End of HTML attachment --------> It sounds like some of these OEMs are either not wanting people to charge at higher rates than 12A on 120V or can't wrap their minds around why anyone would want to. They don't seem to realize that there are at least a couple of situations where higher rate charging on 120V is desirable. One is if you don't have room in your house electrical panel for a 240V circuit but do have room for another 120V circuit to dedicate to EV charging (by room i mean either physically or electrically). The other situation which is what I'm interested in is for the times I need to stop at an RV park or similar and there are no 240V outlets available but there is a 120V 30A available. When one considers the fact that the overhead for cooling and such stays relatively similar for all the charging rates the OBC can do, every amp over the default of 12A is going to battery charging. On my Kia this is on the order of 300W. This means that charging at 20A on 120V is double the rate at 12A. The current draws I measured were 10.4A on 12A setting, 14.3A on 16A setting, and 18.4A on 20A setting. The time the car reported to 100% charge at 20A setting was half the time reported at the 12A setting. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
