I’m looking for a second opinion on a residential service calculation, particularly the CEC demand factors and whether an EV charger can be added to an existing 100A service.

Existing service and house:
100A, 120/240V single-phase service

Approximately 180 m² living area

One electric range (nameplate lists 7.50 kW and
10.10 kW)

Electric dryer (nameplate: 115/230V, 24A)

Central AC (208/230V, compressor RLA 11.7A, fan FLA 0.7A)

Natural gas furnace

Natural gas water heater

Proposed EV charger:
Grizzl-E Classic Connect
Configured for 32A charging at 240V
32A × 240V = 7,680W

Preliminary calculation:
Basic living-area load: 6,000W
One electric range: 6,000W demand allowance
AC: approximately 2,852VA using (11.7A + 0.7A) × 230V
Dryer: 5,520VA based on 230V × 24A; using a 25% demand factor gives 1,380VA
EV charger: 7,680W

Furnace and water heater are gas-fired
This gives a preliminary subtotal of approximately 23,912VA. My understanding is that the applicable dwelling calculation may require a minimum calculated load of 24,000W for a dwelling of this size, which would put it right at 100A… Should I worry how close this calculation ends up?

Optional method from 220.82 gives me 94A out of my 100A service is used. Basically no room for anything.
Actual Maximum Demand Method gives me 25A of my 100A service is used.

For actual maximum demand I downloaded hourly (yea, still not 15 minutes resolution as NEC mandates) usage data for a year from electric company website, found absolutely highest usage hour and multiplied by 1.25

Anyone has same experience?

Holy shit. With all the news about gas prices and whatnot, I was already paying a fraction for charging my car, but my local public charger recently upgraded their chargers and installed brand new ones. They're a bit nicer, but the REALLY nice part is that they went from 22 cents a KwH to completely free! I know free chargers are becoming increasingly rare especially after Shell recharge went out of business, so I feel so lucky.

I will never get a gas car ever again, even after the strait reopens.

And the best part? I'm in California, where everything is expensive af, so.....yeah. It feels nice.

I have previously posted here about getting an EV charger installed in our condominium and the challenges with City of Palo Alto fire department required EPO.
Since a commercial EPO system for this environment is not available, the City officials are now open to allow us to install a 120V outlet for charging without an EPO for all EV chargers. Hoping that eventually we will find a way to install Level 2 charger, I’m requesting your advice about a future ready installation.

We could have an electrical contractor submit a permit application for a 120V 20A outlet in a locked box (to discourage theft), running two #8 HTTN and a #10 HTTN for ground through a 3/4” EMT conduit from the meter bank to our parking spot. It would go through some off the shelf small enclosure using pass through lugs/tap downstream of our dual pole main breaker. Not sure which would be the best breaker to install in that enclosure and if it is required, which durable 120V 20A outlet to install and how to connect our Tesla Mobile Connector to charge our car. Not sure what else is required by code.
We would leave it plugged in there all the time and plug in the car when we’re at home. It will hopefully get us 4-5 miles of driving range per hour for our 2024 Tesla model 4.

I hope most of it can be salvaged when it comes time for transition to a 208V 24A continuous level 2 charger with EPO control and whatever else is required by code.

Thoughts, ideas?

We’ve had the EV chargers at our office building vandalized, with the charging cords cut off—presumably for a minimal amount of scrap metal. Is there a way to design or protect the cords so they can’t be easily cut off?

Hypervolt or Ohme?

So I have a home setup of a Giv Energy all in one battery as well as a range of solar panels. Currently with Octopus Enegry.

I have a BMW IX1 arriving next month and am trying to decide which home charger to get.

I am leaning toward the Hypervolt Home 3 Pro but my installer has also suggested the Ohme epod.

What are peoples thoughts?

I got my level 2 charger installed this past week. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

[Edit: The install was performed by a licensed electrician, not by me]

Like most of you I had a Grizzl-e charger and was working on the $0.03 rebate until the next tier

When switch announced their $0.11 after $1,500 KW I was disappointed that Grizzl-e wouldn't match it or do anything to help out current owners.

So I ordered a swtch charger but the installation wouldn't be one for one because swtch has a pigtail coming out of it and the Grizzl-e you wire your incoming feed directly inside the box

So I bought a 60 amp disconnect and managed to fit it in where the Grizzl-e was and it turned out pretty good

Getting those pigtail wires into the breaker of the disconnect was definitely tricky because it's such a short distance from the base of a disconnect to the breaker.

But after wrestling it with it for a little while I managed to get it in.

I've attached some photos

How’s your experience? Which charger are you using, and would you recommend it for everyday home charging? Thanks! 😊

I recently installed a 48A NACS charger, only to find it defective out of the box (Error Code 121 whenever plugging in to a vehicle). Initially (like, 2 weeks ago) email support was responsive, and I was told that a refund would be issued, as they have no stock to replace it (which was an odd, sort of deflective response, as it gave no indication how they were going to do this, and the charger was purchased through their Amazon storefront). As of now, there is virtually no stock of the NACS 48A anywhere online, and other models also appear to be sold out on the larger sales channels. Have been trying to work through the refund process through Amazon, through the Wallbox US's storefront... zero response to messages in spite of Amazon's supposedly mandatory 48 hr turnaround time. Additionally, as of this past week, their phone support seems to no longer exist.

I am considering replacing with a J1772 that is in stock at Best Buy, but am worried this company may totally cease to exist in a few weeks. I see that they did some financial restructuring and seem to be in a precarious cash position... all seem to be bad signals. Pretty unfortunate as it seems to be the only charger that had all of the features needed for my landlord to approve an install at our multifamily.

It's probably pretty rare that someone would want to use a hybrid dynamic/load-cut load management system, but they are interesting and unusual, and one of them is new to me, so I thought they would be worth discussing.

The concept is to use some communication, probably ocpp, between a 3rd party control unit and the EVSE or the car to adjust the charging rate dynamically to avoid overloading the service or feeder capacity, but to also have relays in the control unit to allow cutting the power if the dynamic control isn't available or if it fails. That way, it can be safety certified even if software control of charging rate can't be guaranteed to be fail safe, which is hard when you have multiple manufacturers involved. The two units like that I know of on the market are:

• Stepwise, https://www.getstepwise.com/, $780. Dynamic control is supported via the Tesla API for Tesla vehicles, or OCPP for Walbox Pulsar Plus. Supports one or two sets of CTs, or monitoring the feeders to one panel, or to a main panel and a sub panel.

• EV Powershare, https://www.ev-powershare.com/, $680 + ~$100 for a UL listed enclosure = $780. This one also offers support for the Tesla API, but the main idea is that it has an open interface protocol to allow a tech-savvy user to program it to work with any hardware. It supports OCPP 1.6 J and also had available interfacing for Home Assistant. It also supports solar capture.

Every once in a while we get people coming here wanting to program their own dynamic load management using Home Assistant or something like that. We typically warn that it's unlikely that you will achieve an appropriate level of fail-safe capability, and that it won't be code compliant. EV Powershare allows people who really want to do their own software to do that while having an excellent fail-safe capability and being fully code compliant. It will be great for those people if what they really wanted was the opportunity to write their own software. If what they really wanted was to save money, it won't do that.

To compare to that $780 cost, upgrading from an Emporia Classic to a Pro with load management included costs $150. With Wallbox, it's $332 extra with an enclosure; for Tesla $210. And with Schneider there's no extra cost--it's built into the $695 EVSE. But that's about $150 more than a Chargepoint, for example, so let's call it $150 extra. All much less than $780.

$780 is similar to the cost of load-cut boxes from DCC (the best known), but a little more than boxes from Black Box ($646) or PSP, which is available for $503.

So it remains the case that dynamic load management built built into an EVSE offers the best performance and the lowest cost. For people who want to roll their own software for fun and to avoid being locked in to one ecosystem, EV PowerShare is a good option. For people who just want a load-cut system for whatever reason, you might argue that one of these hybrid units isn't that much more expensive and that you might as well get the extra capability in case it's useful in the future, but for $280 less, I think I would go with the PSP unit In that case.

One case in which stepwise might be worth considering is where there is a main panel and a sub panel, and just managing the load on one of those without also managing it on the other could lead to an overload of the unmanaged one without overloading the managed one. The stepwise system has terminals for connecting an extra set of CTs, for just $100 extra.

I figured I would try to post this story here, because it's really frustrating. I was hopeful maybe it could somehow be seen enough to get some help.

I have a chargepoint home flex model mounted to the outside of my house. I bought it secondhand, but it was fully functional. I discovered today it's out of warranty (4 years old) but that's only part of the issue here. I connected it to my account, and wifi, without any real issues. The wifi didn't seem super strong or reliable, but our house is cinderblock, so I wasn't really surprised.

Anyway, I decided I would try to upgrade our network from one AP to a mesh system to make it work better in general. Our AP was old anyway, so it was needed, but part of the reasoning behind it was to get it to connect more reliably. I set up all my devices on the new network, which has a different name and password. I went outside to reconfigure wifi via the chargepoint app and.. it said it couldn't find the charger. I tried multiple times. I flipped breaker off, waited, tried again. Tried again. No luck.

I didn't expect it to be super helpful, but I contacted chargepoint support, who advised me to do... Exactly what I already was. But I did it with them on the phone anyway. Flip breaker, wait two minutes, flip it again, try to connect to no avail.

After a few tries the tech suggested that the only way forward was to remove the charger from my chargepoint account and then to try to reconfigure it that way. Not sure how that would be different, but ok. This was the critical failure point. I said "ok, sure." And the charger was removed. It still wouldn't connect to my phone. They then emailed me a generous 10% off coupon to buy.. another charger.

Frustrating, but what could you do? It's secondhand, I get it. Oh well. Right?

Well about a half hour later I had an idea which really irritated me. I spoofed the old wireless network on my phone as a hotspot and.. the charger connected to the network successfully. ONLY NOW IT IS NOT ASSOCIATED TO MY ACCOUNT. Uh oh! Trying to reconnect to the old network would have been a really good, albeit uncommon troubleshooting step.

I called chargepoint back. "I got it reconnected to the old network! You removed it from my account and you have all the details, surely you could re-associate it with my account!" No. Can I talk to a supervisor? Surely someone has that power. I know this is all database related on the backend from other horror stories about account associations with chargers.

They said yes I could talk to a supervisor, and then never contacted me again via email or phone. Now I have a dumb charger.

The cable is nice, but I wouldn't recommend buying from chargepoint. I found out today that this is a really common, often dreaded failure and that chargepoint has no plans in place to remedy it. I definitely wouldn't buy secondhand at least.

I'm planning a road trip for tomorrow and picked an EA location along my route. So I opened up the EA app on my phone and attempted to login to my EA account for the first time in a few years. I had my password stored in a password manager so I got through the password entry on the first try. But that isn't enough. First they sent a passcode to my email address and I swapped apps to get that passcode from email. I swap back to the EA app and it had reset to the initial password entry screen. I tried that a couple more times then pulled out my laptop so I could read the passcode off the laptop and copy it into the phone app. I got past that step in the process and the app asked for my phone number, and then texted another passcode to me. So I swapped to my messaging app to read that and guess what? Back to the beginning. I went in circles a couple more times and finally found out that I could preview that code from my text messaging notifications without swapping apps and log in.

But I wonder how I would have managed this process at a charger with just a phone? Or how would someone a bit less tech savvy have managed it. It seems impossible to get through without two devices. One to perform the login and one to read codes. They're really taking the security of their account logins way too far. Even my banking apps don't go that far.

In the market for a hardwired EVSE to replace the 50-amp outlet. I usually see the plug in kind but occasionally I’ll see a used juice box or similar hardwired charger. Those seem to sit since they aren’t as popular?

Just curious if there’s anything to look out for regarding a used hardwired charger?

Grizzl-e classic connect charger
Cadillac Optiq

The only schedule is on the charger. It’s set to kick on at 7pm, but way more often than I’d like, if I plug it in when I get home from work, it won’t start charging at 7.

The charger app will say suspended by EV and the EV app will say waiting for charger to send power.

Anyone else come across an issue like this?

Seeing mixed stuff online. For people here who drive one daily, what’s the most annoying thing about charging that nobody warns you about?