this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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Volvo EX30 compact EV SUV comes out this year with a base price of 35k. I consider that exceptionally reasonable (esp. for a Volvo). I'd buy one myself, but getting my house setup for EVs is a huge can of worms. My electric main is buried, I only have 100a service and my panel is full to the brim.
100A*240V is 24kW. I don't know what else you're doing, but a 7.2kW car on board charger is well within that.
Isn't 100A considered inside for an all electric home?
Most homes nowadays are 200A. I could probably make it work, or get a smart panel to not have to worry about it...but upgrading service is practically impossible unless I can get someone else to pay for it. We'd have to remove a bunch of trees to trench to where the junction box is, and then trench across our driveway, too. Unless I lucked out and there oversized conduit there already, but I highly doubt it. As much as I've been told, the neighborhood was built with direct-bury service entrances.
16amp 240 is quite acceptable for overnight charging
Dunno. I've got 3 phase, 400V, 100A service which results in 68kW useable. However, because one of sub junction boxes which, unfortunately the wall boxes are connected to is wired internally with 10mm², I've enabled peer to peer load management across my wallboxes for now so they never pull more than 28A per phase. Most cars here support three phase charging so that's still fine even for two cars. I'll get to rewiring that, for now it works.
The go-e wallboxes I have support a central controller which in turn can measure current on all three phases into the home, e.g. to use a solar system to its maximum, but also to limit absolute load on the house connection. They just use three hall sensors for power measurement as far as I know, so installation is relatively unintrusive.
I went without that and solved the whole solar optimization using EVCC and regarding absolute load I'm just yoloing it, but then again, I do have a neat safety margin.
That makes sense...if the charger is aware of its own load and the load of the whole house, it can slow down or stop charging to let the other stuff catch up.
I don't know where you are but 3-Phase is rather uncommon in US Residential. We use split-phase, where we have two 120v lines that use a common neutral, and we get 240v across the two 120v hots (with no neutral...but some 240V outlets do have a neutral leg for parts of the appliance needing 120V.
A while ago, the YouTuber Technology Connections did a segment on the Span smart panel...and I think there's a handful of others...that measures the load of each circuit and can triage circuits if there's too much demand. This is really where smart appliances should be heading. It's cool that my dryer can tell me how many KWh are consumed by a load, but I'd much rather it be able to cooperate with all my other loads and maybe turn off the heating element for a bit.
Germany, 3-phase, 400V to the home is pretty much the standard here.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It was frustrating in the beginning of electric cars - all the manufacturers put those single phase chargers into their cars because US and Asia just didn't need anything else and we were left bumbling along at 4.2kW charging to avoid too much asymmetric load (most providers here limit you to 20A asymmetry although I've been known not to give a fuck) while two wonderfully capable phases sat around doing nothing and the third was only used half the way at most.
Yeah, that looks interesting, although it's unusual to see any "intelligence" delegated to the panel housing. Usually here, the panel cabinet is something like this:
https://files.catbox.moe/qjmpal.png
...which is a mechanical housing and some very basic distribution on the lower left. Everything else is built while the distributor is fitted. Look like this in the end:
https://files.catbox.moe/7u8yzm.jpg
Anyway, you can get this functionality right now, for example with a go-e wallbox and the go-e controller and retrofit it without touching the rest. That's not really a reason not to get an electric car.