Why is an EV's backup power less than it's driving power?

Commander Kinsey is a British equivalent of Sewage Sweeper, the kind of poster that responsible respondents are obliged to insult, so that the pathetic idiot don't feel good about being noticed while they fail to noticed that they are being called idiots.

Cables don't cost much, especially if they're short.

It's a pest, you have to switch stuff off.

Not if it's bursts, like cooking a meal or having a hot shower.

They usually are. If it was plugged in when the powercut started, it would have just been charging.

A Nissan Leaf would power the average house for 3 days. And decent electric cars have a battery 3 times bigger.

That's only for convenience.

$13.

Then fit it yourself.

Rules are for the obedience of fools.

If you have 24kW in the house, you might aswell fit a charger as such.

Park the car nearer the house.

This is a newsgroup, so I'm talking to whoever reads the post.

You need to shop around. I can get one for half the price that does 8kW. Anyway they have electronics to communicate with the car.

A grand actually.

Why would you do that knowing you can only get 10kW at a time? You'd spread the usage out.

His English is so good that you are not making any allowances for the fact that as a Spanish national English will be his second language. It is quite easy to make somewhat ambiguous phrases in a crazy irregular language like English even for a native speaker.

He is pretty much describing the reality in much of southern Europe. They don't have anything like such high current mains supplies as UK or US consumers are used to. Heating is generally oil or gas.

Interesting question is how much current can you actually draw from a nominal 10A supply before it trips? We don't actually run the electric hot water immersion unless we have to

- oil or solid fuel fired CH normally supplies it as a side effect.

I don't actually know how Spain works it but I'd guess you could draw

That is one way of looking at it. They certainly don't have anything like the generating capacity of UK, France or Germany.

In Japan our supply couldn't support three high consumption devices on at once and they are most definitely not a third world country.

Baseload+ Aircon + Immersion heater + Washing machine == 10kW overload trip.

Cooking was all by gas. No provision at all for an oven.

He isn't a native English speaker so cut him a little slack on what you perceive as him being ambiguous. I can assure you that his description of Spanish mains supply rules pretty much describes how it is on the ground. A UK domestic kettle would almost certainly fry their wiring!

I hadn't realised that you could opt for different current levels. I had only ever encountered that it was highly restricted power available.

Yes, that is so.

Correct.

Obviously I don't have any say in how the electrical companies charge us, and AFAIK they all work the same way. Yes, apparently they do not want us to have high current capacity at home, unless one is rich and doesn't care.

Long ago they said that they could guarantee us to draw the full contracted power, all houses at the same time. It is in the contract: if I contract 20A, I can draw 20A constantly. And so can everybody in the block. If the cables or the transformer blows up, the company has hell to pay.

So, I just wanted to say that it is possible to live fine with much less current. We see that as luxury :-p

I suspect that my 10A smart meter triggers at 15A, but I also suspect it is a bug in the firmware. A fortunate bug for me. But people that have a

I have not seen actual figures, except some other people (and electricians) saying that the 10A limit actually triggers at 15.

Obviously I want a 15A limit, but there are hurdles in my personal case.

I don't know about that, the industry has all the electricity they want and more. I read somewhere that we have triple the generating capacity than our actual needs.

We bitch about the price, not the capacity.

In my personal case, I only have A/C on the computer room. Doing the entire house would mean a significantly higher contract, obviously, plus a high current usage because this is a large old house with no insulation. I would be ruined.

Many people only cool down the dormitories. Others do also the sitting room. And others do the entire house. I mean a flat, which typically means 90 m², and can be done easily with a 4.8 KW contract. A friend of mine does with 3.6 KW contract.

This works with modern A/C which use inverters. Initially they work full blast, but when the temperature is reached my 1KW unit goes down to

Indeed.

Things are as they are. One can rant all one wants, but still things are as they are, so one learns to live that way.

Thanks.

Certainly.

I can only respond to what he writes. I can't write it for him. I've asked clearly several times and he continues to be ambiguous. It's not important. The facts are the facts. He (and some part of the population around him) live like they are in a third world country with limited resources, simply to save a couple of bucks a month. That's ok, he's free to live as he chooses. Maybe his funds are severely limited.

If electricity is so limited, they will never be able to adopt BEVs. I charge on a 1.44 kW connection, because my use pattern is very unusual, driving 250 miles round trip in a week, then mostly sitting for a week. The way he talks, he would never be able to charge the car while running much else.

Or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Even people in Puerto Rico do better.

Uh, by definition, if this is how the country is run, it *is* a third world country. A friend used to travel to the UK for work. I don't recall what it was, but he had to put coins in to get hot water, or room heat or something like that. Sorry, that's third world. I don't care how many nukes they have.

He can have all the slack he wants. I just can't have a discussion with someone who doesn't know what he's saying, and doubles down on it when asked to clarify. Maybe he doesn't know he's writing English? Someone should tell him, perhaps?

Sorry, that seems to be out of context. Who can opt for different current levels?

I would have avoided this post, but you seem to be replying to me. Maybe I've made a mistake in that assumption and you are just airing out your fingers.

One what? The point is the EVSE doesn't "handle" the power, it just connects the car to the power. An inverter is much more expensive because it has to actually convert the power. So no, $500 is not realistic for 10kW.

LOL!!! Anyone who would wire that Chinese junk to their car OR their house is an idiot! Maybe Ed Lee is up for the job?

Why do you make such posts?

I use the stove when I want to cook. The heat pump and water heater run when they need to run. Do I need to not eat until the heat pump and water heater both have just turned off at the same time?

Why are you mixing kW and kWh?

You can't blame this on the utility. Now that you've shared the numbers, this is about you pinching pennies.

There's more than one level of insanity in that. In a neighborhood, it is virtually impossible for everyone to max out their usage. It's a statistical thing and the larger the group, the less likely, to the point of growing an extra arm is more likely.

That's why I see Spain as a third world country, based on your description. I don't see the numbers, but it's only a very few dollars a month to get 10kW service. This is just your mindset. You are paying much more than this for the actual electricity. It makes no sense to worry about a couple of euros when you are paying a lot more for the overall bill.

You've provided the prices and we are talking the price of a hamburger or two.

LOL. This is just how many in Puerto Rico talk, yet they have enough money to own a house that they rent out at a great profit. Then they tell their customers to mind the electrical usage.

LOL That's also the way they talk in Puerto Rico, while accepting things they could change if they set their minds to. I don't have much patience with people who give up easily.

Yet we managed. There is no need to to the absolute max, but close. Everybody using the AC because it is too hot, and the transformers exploding. They had to bring diesel generators to the block, gratis.

On a house with a contract of 3.6KW, paying invoices of 50 and 90€ a month.

...

I don't have the patience to reply to the rest.

I don't know what you are talking about. The numbers you gave previously would get you 5.8 kW for $14 a month, a huge difference from being able to plug in two large items at once. If $14 a month is a lot to you, then we are living in very different worlds. I just bought a uncooked pizza at the supermarket, with a broccoli crown and a bag of small candy bars for $14. That's dinner and dessert. Are you actually so poor that you would miss this little bit? Oh, the $14 is before subtracting what you are paying now. I have no idea what you are talking about with 50 and 90 euro a month. That's usage, not the fee for service.

Indeed.

Given the low capacity supply he has that would be the case. In the UK the same problem for charging electric vehicles applies in a different way in that so many cars in cities are parked on the street some distance from the owners house. There is no guarantee here that you can park in front of your own house (like there is in Belgium for example).

Typically getting an electric car here involves fitting a 7kW fixed charger in the garage or outside the house and upgrading the mains supply fuse from 60A to 100A at the same time.

Spanish customers have that option to select their maximum supply current to be at a lower limit than the physical cables can carry.

I hadn't appreciated that until these exchanges - I had always thought it was fixed by the hardware constraints in their distribution system and not by the supply contract with the home owner. I suspect many rental properties are on the lowest possible supply contract too.

UK you either have supply or not and the main isolation fuse is more or less determined by the date the building was finished and wired up. It can be changed (or replaced if blown) on payment of a fee to your supplier but that doesn't alter the fixed daily charges you pay.

UK lighting circuits can be 10A, 16A or increasingly now that high efficiency LED lights are so common 6A MCBs. The change to LED lighting has cut power consumption for lighting by a factor of ~8x.

Pre 1950's build you can get some very oddball stuff buried underground that is a bit like armoured mains coax where the steel wire outer sheath is neutral or earth and live supply conductor is the centre core.

Very annoying if you want to use a clip on meter!

Is your heating by hot water from a neighbourhood combined heat and power plant or bore hole?

Neighbourhood CHP schemes in the UK have been disastrous for their customers during the recent energy price hikes. They are treated as business customers and the price rises they get are not capped at all. (domestic consumers electricity price cap is presently 33p / kWh)

My cooker circuit is fused at 32A on its own. In practice even doing Christmas dinner with everything in use it seldom pulls more than half that on average but it could do if you switched every ring and oven on at once from cold.

There several other concepts. The actual final invoice for a flat limited to 3.6KW can easily be above 50. I simply looked up invoices from somebody else and 50, even 90, is quite normal.

A burger here is less than 3 euros, by the way.

On Thursday, November 17, 2022 at 10:12:48 AM UTC-6, Ricky wrote: the typical 15-20 kW a car uses. Even on steep upgrades or when passing it's seldom my car uses over 150 kW.

I built an electric gokart the used 14kW on initial acceleration! About 300amps at 48V.

Yes, I have no idea how they are pricing it here.

It is an interesting situation in a building of flats here. There is a parking space underground for all the flats. So, do you bring a thick cable from the 7th floor down the -2 floor where your car is parked? Or do you get a new auxiliary contract in the basement for the car?

I have seen chargers in the basements, but I didn't ask how it goes.

If they put chargers on the streets, they may be well tempted to make a large profit, killing the advantage of an EV.

And now we can have a different lower limit on peak hours if we choose. Or higher on valley hours.

Yes, I also have a large fuse on the wall outside my house. Expensive to replace. The limit tied to the contract is nowdays done on the meter, and the company can change it remotely. Years before, it was an electromechanical limiter installed with a lead seal (to impede tampering). But it was tampered with, so they switched us to smart meters fast.

It is just a different system. Each country has their own, and I think it is interesting to chat and learn about them. Not to despise other people because one thinks they are less fortunate.