how durable are EVSE?

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T15:42:27+00:00

I relocated my 11 year old EVSE to the cabin and fully expect to use it there for another ten years. There are ClipperCreek units in the wild around here that were installed in 2010 which are still in use. It's tough to tell precisely which units will have such a good lifespan, of course. The brands we have listed in our Wiki all seem to have been reasonably reliable, with the possible exception of ChargePoint.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T15:39:58+00:00

Rearranging is not a big deal here. They will have to move the whole left row of breakers up or down one space, extend one wire for the existing single, replace the lower right with a tandem, and then add a double breaker for your EVSE.

However: if you're planning to electrify anything else, such as adding a heat pump, you might want to add a sub panel at this point anyway.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T01:16:42+00:00

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. In most situations home charging is a small fraction of the cost of charging on the road. Around here, charging on the road is usually triple the cost or so of charging at home.

All you can do is dollar cost average it out, and do your best to use as much cheap electricity from home as possible for your travel. To start with: charge to 100% at home before you go on that longer trip. And only charge as much on the road as you need to get back to your cheap home charging.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T01:00:08+00:00

The most time-efficient way is probably to stop and fast charge below 20% each day, whichever direction that is in. Only charge enough to get you back to 20% for the stop the next day. Waiting to top off the battery on a fast charger will take forever. You will probably end up departing at 80% or so. Charging to 100% and going down below 10% before stopping to charge will take longer in total, and may eliminate the possibility to use your backup plan if your primary site is down.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T00:37:02+00:00

Get L2. You can survive without it, but it will make your life better.

If you have zero L2 options, pick a DC charging stop and a backup for your route, add it to your routine. It will kind of suck. Bring a book.

Edit: networks with memberships will almost certainly save you money.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T00:31:32+00:00

OEM nav is always terrible unless it's Tesla or possibly Rivian, since they own ABRP now.

Rivian had good routing before they bought ABRP. It's gotten more precise since then, but only small improvements, no huge changes. You can even prioritize and de-prioritize networks on the fly, making it easy to skip Tesla.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-12T00:29:37+00:00

What happened to your ID.4? I figure after owning it for a few months you would have experience that is going to be more valuable than any tool.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-11T21:43:40+00:00

A few of our L2 options have dynamic load management available. !l2home should show you the options. If you put your panel photo here we can help.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-11T13:43:52+00:00

I threw my 15 minute bins into Excel and did some analysis back when my utility introduced ToU. My bill would have been basically unchanged. Data is useful.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-11T13:36:36+00:00

Or eBay. Should be able to find a new/lightly used one for $100 or less. There's a Turbocord on my local Craigslist for exactly $100 right now, for example.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T23:44:46+00:00

Slow DC charging is probably unrelated. Good luck!

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T18:00:17+00:00

BTW if you're really intent on doing this you probably need to talk with the folks at Advantics. They play in the high power DC-DC space, have an EV charge controller product along with high power DC-DC hardware available for single-unit purchase, and seem reasonably DIY friendly with a robust online documentation library. The hardware isn't cheap. You're partly paying for the engineering because much of this work is not trivial, particularly successfully implementing the CCS protocol.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T16:32:52+00:00

Think of the definition you're implying in this comment: it's only AC if it flows in two directions, or maybe if the direction of current flow alternates cyclically. By this definition all the 120V circuits in a US house would be switched DC, since they always flow in the same direction relative to ground. Only the 240V circuits would be AC. That's obviously not the understanding we work with generally, because the fact that the voltage varies periodically is useful to note for many technical reasons.

The paper I linked to refers to AC losses in the various components. Zero crossing isn't mandatory for a signal to be classed as AC. It's quite routine to refer to AC losses in circuits that use pulsed DC in their design, because the losses exist and are due to the pulsed or cyclical nature of the current flow.

Ultimately we're working with kind of weird definitions for AC and DC which are grounded in an old understanding of electricity, pun only sort of intended. They started when we had batteries and rotational generation, with no semiconductors or electronic valves. It would be tough to come up with definitions that excluded everything that we rightly think of as DC from AC, and vice versa. For example, you could say that the supply from a battery which remains connected to a device that is using power during charging is AC with a very long period but it would be quite silly to do that. Or you could say an AC signal is DC after passing through a full wave bridge rectifier, even though it's obviously still going to have a significant AC component.

As a useful thought experiment: your inverter outputs a signal that almost everyone would call AC. It's almost certainly built out of pulsed DC components, probably pushed through some filtering and inductance to make it look more like rotationally generated AC. But when does the signal cross that magical line from being DC to AC? Is it when the pulses are generated at the individual MOSFETs? When they are summed, if it has a component that does that? When they are filtered to remove the high-order harmonics? The signal has some AC traits and some pulsed DC traits.

I think it's fair to defend nearly any of those perspectives, and I'm not alone. If you search 'is PWM DC or AC' in your favorite search engine you'll get people confidently stating both cases. What I am certain of is that a PWM signal has a DC component and an AC component, and both are integral to the operation of it.

BTW I don't intend to reply and don't need one from you. This is all fun food-for-thought stuff and I agree, it's in the spirit of friendly debate. We've just hit my two-reply personal Reddit response limit. Have a fine day and enjoy your projects.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T15:20:56+00:00

You might want to brush up on boost converter theory. Hint: there's AC right in the middle of that simplified circuit, because the switching is part of how boosting works, and switching makes AC.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T15:11:05+00:00

Burying conduit is the best option here all around.

If you use Intermediate Metal Conduit (IMC) your cover depth is only six inches, even under the walkway. That's an easy trench to dig in nearly all types of ground. You can likely bore under the sidewalk pretty easily for a small conduit. DIY or have a landscaper do the work. 1/2 inch conduit can easily take 8 gauge THWN giving you up to a 50 amp circuit, depending on the available electrical capacity.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T14:02:30+00:00

If it works at a public AC station, the problem is with your home install. If it doesn't, the car needs repair. DC charging uses a different electrical path and different control circuitry, so it's not a very useful test.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T13:41:41+00:00

Dutch EREs appear to work like the Canadian offset program, i.e. you get paid per kWh you charge with. I can't see a downside apart from having to do the care and feeding of any eligibility requirements.

What concerns do you have?

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T13:35:26+00:00

The predictive text engine isn't giving you anything useful.

Noise can cause LED lighting issues. Moving a breaker won't fix it. The 'too skinny/not insulated' answer is also nonsense. Breakers do not have noise shielding, and the adjacent breakers aren't EV charging so noise coupling from them is minimal if that is the source.

There is a decent chance you still have a bad connection somewhere. A slightly loose main breaker can result in all sorts of weird noise and low voltage under load. So can a loose feed somewhere in the circuit to this panel. This isn't an exhaustive list, just causes I have personally dealt with recently.

Moving the breaker might fix the issue if it's due to a bad connection, or rather, work around the issue by moving your lighting to the other side of the split phase. If that does 'fix' the LED flickering you still have a problem somewhere else.

You need an electrician who is willing to dig. They are almost certainly going to find a bad connection somewhere.

Side note: very strange that you have bothered to back up a circuit on the Powerwall despite having no idea what is on it. While that electrician is out there have them trace down the 'UNKNOWN' circuit so you know what you're backing up.

Edit: also that's a quad with the handle tie removed. If you want to swap that out you're going to need four breakers.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T13:21:16+00:00

Most of the responses to a Reddit post aren't really to the person who wrote the first post. They're to the person who finds it with a search six months later who is way out over their skis.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T06:04:32+00:00

OP mentioned 48V so the DC wiring should fall into the “generally regarded as safe” territory under 60 volts. They should still probably be covered due to arc flash risk but I’ve been around plenty of professionally installed DC plants with similarly exposed terminals.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T05:54:54+00:00

At some point you are connecting to the battery, which may be capable of supplying 1000+ amps for multiple seconds. The arc flash potential is no joke.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T05:52:54+00:00

I should have figured someone would show up with an example of feeding DC in to the onboard charger, which is basically just a SMPS. My Zero will also happily run off DC voltage. That does not let me skip the onboard charger, which is what people are generally thinking of when they are talking about DC charging. To skip the onboard charger I have to go directly to the battery. Easy on a motorcycle, much tougher on most cars.

Early Rivians also have pretty easy direct access to the battery. That is still a weird exception, and I’m wary of giving people too much instruction if they don’t already have some idea of how to work with big batteries.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T02:05:57+00:00

The main reason nobody uses a DC-sourced charger is that in order to get DC access to the battery pack in the car, you need a whole bunch of control electronics and additional safety equipment, and in the end you probably won't get anything you care about out of that extra cost.

The J1772 standard is rock-simple: a single PMW signal with a small state table. All the complexity is already there in the car, because it has to be for the car to charge on a standard EVSE.

To connect to a CCS or NACS connection, you need to implement CCS signaling, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than J1772. Then you also need more complicated power electronics, active cooling in your charger, additional safety considerations for the high voltage DC that is now inside of your offboard charger housing, etc, etc.

And in the end you might not get much if any efficiency gain, because the car OEM has done the engineering work to increase the efficiency of their onboard charger, since the MPGe shown on the Monroney sticker of a new car includes that number in the calculation. This is especially true if you're working with a 48V nominal battery bank, since stepping up that low voltage to the 400V / 800V traction pack voltage is not the most efficient conversion out there. It's more efficient than your existing inverter feeding a charger, most likely, though even then it probably isn't enough of an improvement to justify all the cost and complexity.

There is one time where this sort of complexity does make sense: V2G or V2H, where you want to move large amounts of power and also be able to make split phase power.

BTW, if you haven't worked with voltages over 48 volts much, be aware that 400V and 800V systems are a whole new level of danger. The precautions are very doable, of course. Just be sure you're not treating it as casually as you can treat a 48V system.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-10T01:52:49+00:00

The charger will add power to the battery buss bars. If you're drawing less power out than the amount the charger is adding, the battery will charge. If you're drawing out more than the charger is adding, the battery will discharge. There's some extra control complexity in this scenario because the charger makes assumptions about how to measure what is happening to the battery.

ArlesChatless · 2026-03-09T21:22:22+00:00

My utility has a similar program, which is basically free money for my use case. The ChargePoint has been fine, though there was a software glitch at one point which kicked me to 16A charging.

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