Tesla Sending New Wall-Charger Adapters After Garage Fire 195
JoeyRox writes "Tesla is sending its customers new home charging connectors after recent reports of chargers overheating in garages and one instance of a fire inside a wall socket that held one of the chargers. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the new charging adapter will contain a thermal fuse capable of terminating the charging process if it gets too hot. 'These are very rare events, but occasionally the wiring isn't done right. We want people to have absolute comfort, so we're going to be providing them with an upgraded adapter.' The company also issued a software update in December to address the overheating issue."
Bravo, Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll get in before the nutjob Tesla detractors.
This is a very responsible move by Tesla which takes guts. They are changing the charger design to ameliorate a problem that has nothing to do with the car and nothing to do with the charger and everything to do with the house wiring. Obviously the nutjobs will point their skinny little fingers and accuse Tesla of papering over their own flaw, which is a lie.
Re:Bravo, Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the upside of new technologies being marketed first to the wealthy. Low-end products don't do fixes or recalls unless the lawsuits are expected to exceed the cost of the fix, which makes progress slow. High-end products must care more about reputation than that, so things get improved even when the company's not at fault, because sales are so tied to "good overall experience". That makes progress fast.
If Tesla does start selling a 30-40k car, it will benefit from all these "lessons learned", which might well have been ignored for years if they had started with a low-end product.
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Im sort of at a loss for why theres so much media hate for Tesla. Musk is a VERY successful businessman (which appeals to people who tend to be on the right), but his business is also a huge "cause" for people who tend to be on the left; he makes a car thats environmentally friendly, but its also sporty.
Im really not clear what the angle is that makes Tesla such a problem.
Indentity psychology (Score:3)
Tribalism applied; it's actually basic Freud the same kind of stuff that gave birth to modern propaganda.
The tribal appeals work extremely well on primitive tribal minded people and is still somewhat effective on normal people. I would think the more extreme ones are the haters in these edge cases. It is not all that well hidden that there was an intentional strategy to attach traits to the tribal identity; denying global warming for example was actually planned. It is quite a brilliant way to control peo
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Actually, it's psychology - the old base emotion stuff but I'm taking newer stuff I've read and claiming tribalism is an evolved base emotion and applying basic propaganda to it as they did with the other base emotions. We know humans evolved in tribes and I'm with the theory our brain power came from competition at the top of the food chain (it's rather obvious if you think about it.) In many ways propaganda is ahead of psychology because they do what works and proof or deeper understanding is not necessa
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If this thing were hooked up to my house, it'd probably be in cinders (the house, not necessarily the charger).
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If Tesla's design doesn't account for this then personally I'd count that as a flaw, but go ahead, keep thinking it's not Tesla's problem to fix... If Tesla's design doesn't account for this then personally I'd count that as a flaw, but go ahead, keep thinking it's not Tesla's problem to fix...
So the price of every new Tesla should include a certified electrician auditing and correcting the wiring in the owners house?
Maybe all car companies should also bundle mandatory driving lessons. A large number of drivers are morons, and the designs should account for that.
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Would you say the same thing about computers and operating systems?
I'm not challenging you, I'm just asking because I wonder if there's a place in the market for products that are for early adopters who are not morons.
I don't mind products that expect me to learn a little something, and I doubt I'm really that exceptional. I wonder if "It has to be made idiot-proof" is just an excuse to keep certain products and tools out of the
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Re:Bravo, Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a friend who's an electrician and from the stories he tells many/most places he visits have something wrong with them. Even calls he gets to go out and install something new and there's no reported issues seem to have at least 1 thing he can point to that doesn't meet "code". If Tesla's design doesn't account for this then personally I'd count that as a flaw, but go ahead, keep thinking it's not Tesla's problem to fix...
Tesla could just modify their charger so that if the wiring isn't done right, your garage won't burn down due to your electrician's negligence. Which is what they've done. So...?
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They actually did this. The software in the car tries to detect if there are voltage fluctuations caused by home wiring and to reduce the current if they're detected. They rolled out these changes within 48 hours of the house fire, presumably after going through the extensive logs that the car keeps.
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Tesla could just modify their charger so that if the wiring isn't done right, your garage won't burn down due to your electrician's negligence.
No they can modify it so a subset of things that could be wrong with your wiring will be less hazardous.
Not saying that is a bad thing but there are many things they can't do anything about. Fundamentally it's impossible to reliablly detect undersized cables. You can look for heat at the outlet but the situation at the outlet may be ok either because it's in a better thermal situation than other wiring in the circuit (required cable sizes go up massively for cables burried in thick thermal insulation) or th
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I found a number of issues in my own house. Splices with no box, boxes buried inside the wall, missing boxes, romex run outside the wall, 20A breakers used for 15A circuits (14 gauge wire), shared neutral circuits without tying the breakers together, etc. I have gone back and fixed all the issues. I have basically gone back and had to fix just about everything that the previous owners of my house had done electrically.
Re:Bravo, Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually as the owner of a Tesla, Tesla has been very proactive at fixing problems and treating their customers well. Unlike a lot of car manufacturers, Tesla tends to be proactive about things. I had a number of minor issues due to my car being one of the earlier VINs and they have always fixed the issues without giving me the run-around like I've gotten at other dealerships.
The fact that Elon talks before consulting his lawyers is a breath of fresh air.
Expensive but they take care of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla cars are really expensive, but they keep doing things like this. "Worried about the battery catching on fire? Okay, we will insure you against that for no additional charge. Worried about your garage charger catching on fire? Okay, we will give you an upgraded charger for free."
Anyone with a Tesla car is an early adopter, and paying a lot for the privilege. But Tesla really is doing their part to take care of the early adopter customers.
And this is why their overall strategy is brilliant. Start at the high end of the market, make money while building technology and infrastructure, and then come out with a new-gen car that costs less. Meanwhile they have fewer customers to take care of when issues like this pop up, and they have the money to just deal with it.
I can't wait until Tesla hits the Ford/Honda price level.
Re:Expensive but they take care of you (Score:5, Interesting)
Will that be anytime soon though?
My impression is that the most expensive part of the car are the batteries (probably costing more alone than a low end Honda) and from the charts I've seen, we've barely double energy density since 1990, despite all the rage portable computing and phones and other devices that have undoubtedly poured money into this market.
http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png [akbars.net]
I think a series hybrid built off of the same concepts as a diesel electric train is feasible and worthwhile, bringing to the table the ability to have a small battery and small generator ICE to overcome all the limitations of a low battery energy density, ability to fuel fast, and the need to size an ICE to maximum acceleration load rather than average load.
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My impression is that the most expensive part of the car are the batteries (probably costing more alone than a low end Honda)
As I understand it, yeah, the most expensive part is the battery. Electric motors are not that expensive.
I'm pretty confident that battery costs will come down significantly. Even if no significant technology advances come along to help, battery costs should come down as demand picks up and production scales up.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/04/electric-car-batteries/ [cnn.com]
An electri
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It doesn't have to be soon. Because other companies will start offering electric cars at lower prices until they are on parity with internal combustion cars.
Already, hybrids have become barely more expensive than old-fashioned cars.
And there are some bad-ass hybrids out there, including offerings from Ferrari, McLaren, BMW (the i8...WOW!) and Porsche (918).
Whether you go low-end or high, there are hybrids and plug-in hybrids all across the spectrum. They're not doing this
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correction: "They're not doing this because people don't want them."
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Currently the highest cost of the car is the design and the people behind it. There have only been maybe 5000 of them made and the development is at what now over 5 years? Paying 10 executives and 100's of designers and engineers (these aren't minimum wage line jobs) in one of the most expensive parts of the country for 5 years. Plus they have a bunch of things that they have invested in way in the beginning that didn't work on. I can remember them licensing Honda for the batteries and Lotus for their Elise
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There have only been maybe 5000 of them made and the development is at what now over 5 years?
25k as of December [wikipedia.org], actually.
25k@$100k per gives you $2.5B in sales. Plus I just read an article about Tesla selling ZEV credits [greencarreports.com] to the other manufacturers...
I can remember them licensing Honda for the batteries and Lotus for their Elise design both of which basically weren't good enough for their requirements.
The Elise frame was a deliberate design decision - it allowed them to release a car without having to design a body, allowing them to concentrate on the drive train, battery packs, etc... Also, I thought it was the opposite way round [dailytech.com] on the batteries?
Step 1: motor, battery pack, controller, interior (Roadster)
Step 2: As step 1 but the frame too, s
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The key to selling cheaper cars is more charging stations, due to some extremely strong tax incentives here in Norway last year electric cars had a 5.5% market share, 1.3% of that is Tesla though they only delivered from September to December but the really big winner around here is Nissan Leaf. They're half the price of the base model Tesla and a third of the top model, they have much shorter range but because there's so many and so many chargers they can do commutes and the occasional longer trips even th
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They've been pretty good about fixing the early problems. They've gone back and fixed all of the issues I've had with my 5K VIN number with their current cars and now offer a few features that were not available when I got mine (i.e. parking sensors). They've also raised their prices and a lot of options on my car now cost extra (i.e. $500 for fog lights).
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Compare and contrast with Ford and their defective cruise control switches which WERE their fault and to which design they clung to for many years despite losing many vehicles to fire.
Good for Tesla. This response is to their credit. A 50-amp outlet is sufficient to run high-draw items such as welders, let alone a car charger, but bad shit can happen if they aren't done properly. Tesla are going over the top to protect their customers from the consequence of improper wiring by third parties.
Tsk, tsk... (Score:2)
Connectors? (Score:2)
The charger itself resides in the car. The connector is simply a 240V, high current (30 Amp or more) special purpose plug.
Plugs overheat due to bad (high resistance) connections. And when they do so, they tend to draw less current, not more (like a short circuit would). A standard fuse is not what you want. A thermal sensor that would drop the charger load would seem to be more appropriate here. Possibly with arc fault sensing as well. If the fault was in the wall receptacle, it sounds like the electrician
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I'm not surprised they're replacing the UMC (Score:5, Interesting)
I own a Tesla model S and was never very fond of how the adapters connect to the UMC cable. The UMC cable has a 5-pin connector on the end that plugs into the wall where it plugs into one of numerous adapters. The adapters contain pins for ground and the two 240V legs (not neutral) or the hot, neutral and ground for the 115V adapters. There's also a resistor in it that signals the amount of current that can be drawn between one of the pins and ground. I don't recall what the last pin is for.
The connector between the adapter and the cable is a weak link. I myself have had intermittent issues with my NEMA 14-30 adapter and the cable where just wiggling it causes a fault to show up. The adapter connector is not all that tight nor is it particularly secure. The pins are also rather small considering how much current they can be carrying (up to 40A).
A number of owners have reported that this connection between the UMC cable and the plug adapter has overheated or melted. While it sounds like in the case of the garage fire it was likely the fault of substandard wiring of the NEMA 14-50 outlet the UMC cables have been a known problem.
About a foot from this adapter cable is a small box that has a relay, GFI and some signalling circuitry to interface with the Model S.
I've only used the NEMA 14-50 adapter a couple of times since I have a separate high power wall connector that's hard-wired into my home (100A feed). I'm a lot more comfortable using that over the UMC cable but Tesla has to fix the early HPWCs as well. The resettable fuses are too sensitive so they recommend not charging at the full 80A. I myself have not had any problems at 80A but normally they reduce it to 60 until they send someone out to replace the fuses.
I don't think this will be a major setback for Tesla. The retail price of the UMC is $600 which means it probably costs a lot less to manufacture. I just hope that if they change that connector that they replace all of my adapters since I bought a number of additional ones (at $45 each) to handle NEMA 14-30, 10-30, 6-50 and 120v/20A.
The UMC is basically the equivalent of a normal J1772 EV charger but with a switchable plug and in a much smaller form factor. Hell, my HPWC charger is a fraction the size of most J1772 EV chargers yet it handles a lot more power than most J1772 adapters (and it doesn't even get warm when pumping 80A through it).
The UMC is nice since it means I can charge my car at any RV park that has a 240V hookup or that an owner just needs to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet which is a lot less expensive than either a high-power wall connector ($1200) or a standard EV charger.
Re:Is Tesla making cars... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a 100% serious reply - Once upon a time, software developers selected beta testers, who used the software with the understanding that it was still in a beta version and bugs should be expected and documented.
Now, no such "testing" occurs in both the software and hardware realms. The developers or manufacturers simply develop something that compiles or doesn't collapse under its own weight and sells it as the release version to customers that expect all that testing to have been done already, so it works. Customers pay full price, the shit crashes or falls apart(or catches fire), they complain to the company describing what happened, and then the company documents what happened and gives the customer a "new" but equally faulty piece in exchange.
There is no more "beta" testing - the beta testers are now referred to as "early adopters."
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re: Is Tesla making cars... (Score:5, Interesting)
People haven't stopped beta testing. Either in hardware or software. They have been quicker to release because the vast majority of software nowadays are done inside a sandbox (mobile apps, cloud servers, etc) rather than from scratch.
It's not like software or hardware back then was any more reliable. Office, OS9, Windows (all versions) have always been plagued with problems and one can argue they have fewer obvious bugs now than they did before - When's the last time you got a BSOD?
The counterbalance is that the consumer base is far far far larger now. Some of us who were at Intel at the height of the Pentium 4 were happy to have sold 40M units in a year. Mobile phone processors at qualcomm nowadays clear 400M/quarter.
If it seems like hardware and software bugs show up faster, it is because the userbase that uses and report such bugs (easy to do now via social media) is much much much larger.
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If it seems like hardware and software bugs show up faster, it is because the userbase that uses and report such bugs (easy to do now via social media) is much much much larger.
This. Let's say that Problem X is generally only going to be encountered by 1 out of 1k users per year. If you have a beta group of 1k users and have them test it for 1 year(incredibly large and long in today's environments) you may or may not have it pop up, I believe the odds are around 50-50 in this case of you getting at least 1 instance.
Now you release it to the public where it's sold to 100M users who proceed to use it for a decade. You're near certain to get a number of cases that rounds to 1M, wh
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This is a 100% serious reply - Once upon a time, software developers selected beta testers, who used the software with the understanding that it was still in a beta version and bugs should be expected and documented.
Now, no such "testing" occurs in both the software and hardware realms. The developers or manufacturers simply develop something that compiles or doesn't collapse under its own weight and sells it as the release version to customers that expect all that testing to have been done already, so it works. Customers pay full price, the shit crashes or falls apart(or catches fire), they complain to the company describing what happened, and then the company documents what happened and gives the customer a "new" but equally faulty piece in exchange.
There is no more "beta" testing - the beta testers are now referred to as "early adopters."
-- Ethanol-fueled
That sounds like an adequate description of pretty much all software development these days, roll it out on schedule, we'll deal with bugs (or deny there are any) later on. That or just ignore customer complaints as long as the software continues to sell: Windows is the most notorious example, but they are far from alone in this practice.
Suffice to say, I get the constant feeling of denying elementary physics (let alone chemistry) whenever there's talk of selling electric cars. It takes a certain and lar
Re:Is Tesla making cars... (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been a number of problems with the UMC (cable in question). The cable has an adapter on the end to choose from a variety of plugs, i.e. NUMA 14-50, NUMA 14-30 standard 120v, NEMA 10-30, 6-50, etc.
I myself have seen issues where my NEMA 14-30 adapter would give a fault if the cable was bumped. The connection between the adapter and the cable is not all that solid and a number of owners have had issues with this.
About a foot away from this connector is a control box that contains a GFI and a relay and the circuitry to interface to the car.
The adapter has 5 pins on it. One for ground, one for each 240V leg (neutral is not used) and a pin that appears to go to a resistor to signal the amount of current supported by the adapter. I don't remember what the last pin does. Anyway, for the amount of current the NEMA 14-50 and 6-50 adapters carry the pins are rather small. The adapter also doesn't always securely latch to the cable which can lead to a bad connection causing the adapter and/or cable to melt.
I don't think this will be a big setback for Tesla. Tesla's retail price for this cable is $600.
Re:Is Tesla making cars... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the percentage of the vehicle fleet that is made of Teslas, this is not really relevant news.
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That sounds like an adequate description of pretty much all software development these days, roll it out on schedule, we'll deal with bugs (or deny there are any) later on.
The reason that companies can get away with this is because the Internet has made software distribution essentially free.
In the good/bad old days, releasing software meant pressing a few thousand (or a few hundred thousand) CDs and shipping them to stores. If there was a serious bug in the software, you'd probably have to do that process all over again, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
Now if you have a bug in your software, you just fix it and push the new version out to the customers via the software's
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Whats the incidence rate of this sort of thing again?
Can you point me to a specific hardware or software product from your "golden age" which had a 0% defect rate?
Re:Modus Operandi (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe nothing was really wrong. Maybe the wiring sucks, the charger draws too much RMS power due to a dirty wave (Fattened with harmonics), the excess current causes overheating, etc. So rather than putting in a current detector or whatever else to detect faults, he just ... stuck in a thermal fuse. If it gets too hot, it shuts off.
Most hardware doesn't constantly draw that much power. It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power. Thermal fuse--even a current fuse--is really a "this will never happen, but if anything does happen that creates any kind of bad situation, this will stop it. Whatever it is."
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It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power.
Well I guess that solves it. After all, all you need to do is slap in MOSFET's that are below quality, or capacitors that are filled with gunk(instead of electrolyte), instead of solid state and watch it melt and ooze all over itself. Pretty good chance of either one happening, and it's a fairly good possibility with either knock-off components or recycled components being marked as new and put back into the supply chain. This issue has been haunting PSU's for computers for years now, especially mid-rang
Re:Modus Operandi (Score:5, Informative)
This is one possible scenario which has happened in the past. Maybe it was aluminum wiring, which has a much lower thermal expansion rate than copper. Back in the 70's it was really common for developers to use aluminum wiring in houses because it was cheaper than copper. My house had aluminum wiring. The previous owners of my house were really underhanded. They ran copper off the electrical box up in behind some insulation and connected it to the aluminum from junction hidden junction boxes, and because home inspectors don't do "destructive" inspections, meaning they don't even move insulation, we didn't find out until years after we had bought the house. We had a wall socket stop working and when I opened it up to see what was wrong I found the aluminum wire had completely detached from the terminals. Luckily my father-in-law, who doesn't live near by, is an electrician because we had to have the whole house rewired. It's still not illegal to use aluminum wiring, copper is recommended, but it's not requried. The higher temperature of the adapter could cause the aluminum wire to expand and pop off the plug terminals in the wall box, which can lead to arcing and fires.
It really wouldn't be Tesla's fault if developers were using cheap materials when building the house, but it is nice of them to do something to try and mitigate future issues after it becomes a known possibility. We can't account for every scenario that will ever occur, but we can learn as we go along.
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There's another common denominator in the construction or remodeling process. Occasionally a competent electrician is used, one who understands load calcs, amp draw, and wire sizing. Many more times than you would want to know about, you get the other kind of electrician.
Apprentices training on the public, contractors who have perennial negative cash flow problems, and workers right in the middle of not giving a damn.
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Indeed.
There's another common denominator in the construction or remodeling process. Occasionally a competent electrician is used, one who understands load calcs, amp draw, and wire sizing. Many more times than you would want to know about, you get the other kind of electrician.
Apprentices training on the public, contractors who have perennial negative cash flow problems, and workers right in the middle of not giving a damn.
the issue Vanderhoth mentions is way beyond a matter of competency. It was extremely unethical and possibly criminal endangerment. The exposed junction boxes were rigged up with hidden junctions (which are not up to code) in an attempt to hide all traces of Aluminum wiring, while still having the entire house wired with Aluminum. The Aluminum wiring is not a problem per se, but any junction with copper wires (like in those hidden junction boxes) can cause galvanic corrosion. The fact that the copper wir
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The real issue is whether an electrician follows the building code or not. The building code specs out basic things like gauge of wire for circuit breaker size, number of outlets, types of connections, etc. If an electrician follows the code, they will never have to really do any calculations to ensure proper wiring is done.
Sure. But. Calculations are still required for amp draw per circuit (which determines wire size and breaker ampacity), particularly when a specialty appliance has the unique demands of an electric car charger.
With regard to new construction, codes are followed religiously precisely because city inspections are required.
Remodels are a horse of another color.
Re:Modus Operandi (Score:4, Informative)
Sure. But. Calculations are still required for amp draw per circuit (which determines wire size and breaker ampacity), particularly when a specialty appliance has the unique demands of an electric car charger.
Not really any math above addition, and possibly even that if they're running a dedicated circuit for the specialty appliance like they're supposed to. The electrician memorizes some figures/looks at a chart [cerrowire.com]. Heck, I've seen the figures printed on the boxes.
NEMA 5-15(standard outlet): 14 gauge minimum(copper), 15A* max, 12A design
NEMA 5-20(has the notch): 12 gauge minumum, 20A max, 16A design
NEMA 14-30(dryer, 240V): 10 gauge, 30A max, 24A design
NEMA 14-50(range, 240V): 6 gauge, 50A max, 40A design.
The 'formula' for simple installs is easy: Look at the amperage of the product you're using. round UP to the next breaker size. Use specified wire gauge. Manufacturers tend to make this even easier because they tend to not produce appliances that are close enough in amp ratings that you'd need to skip the next largest breaker - IE they don't make appliances that use 'exactly' 30A, they'll produce a <24A model then if you need heavier duty a 32-40A one.
Though I'll note that space heaters and hair dryers today tend to assume that you have a 20A circuit, but there's reasons why the heaters are limited to 1500 watts and dryers to 1875(but they're only this powerful if you feed them 125V, nice advertising guys! In reality they'll be closer to 1.6kw in homes with proper voltage).
*Though to meet code it has to be manufactured to be capable of safe operation at 20A+
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It really wouldn't be Tesla's fault if developers were using cheap materials when building the house, but it is nice of them to do something to try and mitigate future issues after it becomes a known possibility. We can't account for every scenario that will ever occur, but we can learn as we go along.
And that is exactly what happened in this case, the problem was inside the junction box. (Not saying aluminum was used).
That Tesla can detect it in their charge adapter is great. I hope it sounds the car horn rather than simply stops charging. After all who knows how many upstream junction boxes were also over-heating from bad connections? Who knows what size breaker they decided to put in the main panel when the original one tripped?
Would it have been better if this had been thought of ahead of time? P
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Of course putting overheat protection in the charger plug only reduces the problem it doesn't solve it. It's perfectly possible for the wiring at the outlet to be just fine while further back in the circuit there is a bad connection or undersized wire.
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As I understand it they put some logic in to detect power 'stutters' that are likely to come from an overheating, failing connection.
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One fire? Out of how many, 30k cars?
Re:Modus Operandi (Score:4, Interesting)
The math has been done in every previous thread. The fire rate for Teslas is something like 5x lower than normal cars -- but we'll see if that changes once they age.
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> Next step; posh neighborhoods with multiple Teslas discover that electric companies will eventually upgrade the grid to compensate for rising demand as there is money to be made from selling more power.
FTFY.
Re:Modus Operandi (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively... it could be exactly as he said, the car was not fire prone (as borne out by the stats showing it had lower fire rates than other cars, and better outcomes when they did happen), and that the fire department agree that it was not caused by the charger.
Instead, it could simply be that even though they're working fine, there's way to mitigate the risk of other faulty things causing problems, and it's nice to do something towards that.
Honestly, I hate this aspect of the modern world –no one is allowed to improve something without implying that something was broken before hand, or that it was their fault that something else was broken.
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There's nothing wrong with the car that makes it fire prone... but we'll raise the clearance just because.
There's nothing wrong with the charger that caught fire... but we'll fix it anyway.
Seriously does anybody believe one word Musk says?
Engineers: People who, when finding out that their system might fail in your horrifically substandard conditions, attempt to address the problem present in your conditions and incorporate that knowledge of those conditions into the system, both in your version and the future.
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Engineers: People who, when finding out that their system might fail in your horrifically substandard conditions, attempt to address the problem present in your conditions and incorporate that knowledge of those conditions into the system, both in your version and the future.
Thank you. The engineer bashing in the rest of the thread is disturbing.
I would probably be doing much of the same if I were in Musk's shoes. I'm a mechanical engineer and I design fire engines. Our products can literally be the difference between life and death and are used and abused for 20+ years. When something like this happens, we usually go overboard to address the problem, even if it was completely the user's fault and unlikely to happen ever again.
Why? Because this is what the customer
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My house had 14ga on 30A circuit breakers, the guy I bought it from bragged it never popped a breaker.
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The first thing I did was re-wire the place.
Re:Quality? (Score:5, Informative)
My 20A appliance loop in the kitchen has 15A receptacles because, heyyyyyyy, you're not really going to draw 20A out of these right? Those 2000 watt appliances don't go on a 20A loop that can pass 2200 watts... I use a Breville 1800W toaster oven drawing over 16A through one receptacle. One 15A receptacle on 20A wiring.
Most 15A receptacles are rated for 20A pass-through, so they should be perfectly fine to use on a 20A line. The only time you should need a 20A receptacle is if you have a single device with a 20A T-shape plug.
Re: Quality? (Score:2)
> Most 15A receptacles are rated for 20A pass-through, so they should be perfectly fine to use on a 20A line.
Really? Then why, pray tell, are they called 15A receptacles?
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An appliance that uses between 15A and 20A uses a different plug -- a 6-20P instead of a 6-15P. The neutral prong is rotated 90 degrees from what you're used to. It will only connect to a 20A outlet (a 6-20R).
Your vacuum, as another poster pointed out, does not draw between 15A and 20A. If it did, it would have a different plug than it does have.
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You see, the problem with putting a 15A outlet on a 20A circuit is that it violates the cardinal rule in electrical wiring: You put a fuse wherever you go from thicker wire to thinner wire.
In both europe and america portable appliances frequently have cords that are too thin to carry the full rated current of the plug that is attatched to them and yet very few countries used fused plugs.
you need to read your code book (Score:2)
1) 14ga wiring is allowed on 20A heating circuits. It's artificially derated for general purpose circuits for extra safety.
2) 20A circuits can have 15A receptacles as long as there is more than one receptacle (and a duplex outlet counts for this purpose).
3) Doesn't matter which way you wrap the wire around the screw, as long as it's tight. It shouldn't be loosening, period.
4) 1800W divided by 120V gives 15A, not "over 16A".
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14ga wiring is allowed on 20A heating circuits. It's artificially derated for general purpose circuits for extra safety.
Only because you're talking about a purely resistive load. "general purpose" spec allows for, among other things, inductive loads which can have startup and surge currents several times the nominal value. Some AC compressors draw 6x nominal at start. You shouldn't see much 14gauge, especially NM, in 20A residential circuits and you probably shouldn't be telling folks that it's OK.
Re:Quality? (Score:5, Informative)
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I found some steel wire in ours. The conductors were about three times the thickness that copper ones usually are.
I was changing a switch and it took two of us, a jemmy and a car jack to bend the sodding wires to the right shape,
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For us, a request for the force multiplier will get a hammer in your hand.
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Jemmy: [thefreedictionary.com] A short steel crowbar
Steel will conduct electricity fine; that's how your voltage returns in most cars - they use the frame.
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Yeah, Aluminum wiring really sucks, which is why all of the high voltage transmission lines in the US are made of it.
Like with anything "best" depends on what your criteria are.
For a given resistance an aluminium cable will be lighter and cheaper than a copper cable. IIRC witht he right alloys it also self-supports for longer distances. On the other hand aluminium (especially older alloys*) needs careful termination practices to avoid joints that fail over time.
For long overhead and underground cables which are maintained and altered by well trained jointers the advantages of aluminium outweigh the disadvantages. For hou
Re: Quality? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hi Keith!
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There is a man, lets call him Keith. Keith thinks that repair men and contractors are overpriced, and decides he can do it himself. He does this, and it works...for now.
Keith does good work. Sometimes he even has it inspected and passes. Mostly, it's not that hard.
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And none the less what Keith did is illegal in many other countries. It was made illegal because while Keith had his wiring inspected he was only a 1 in 1000 who did so.
Wiring is not hard at all. Knowing all the codes and having the patience to do something properly without cutting corners is quite hard. If you're not electrically minded then a "she'll be right" can quickly turn into burning your house down.
"Why does the wire going to the Tesla need to be twice the size of every other wire in the house? I c
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Which is why I like New Zealand's approach (presuming it hasn't changed in the years since I read about it): You can wire your own home so long as you get it inspected, AND the government provides the information you need to know to do it right. Only if you want to do it for a profit (e.g. by wiring other people's homes) do you have to be a licensed electrician.
This is different to the Australian model, which is literally "if you want to replace even a broken light socket, even in your own home, you need to
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I fully agree. It's one thing to wire a house and yet quite another to replace like for like something that is broken. It's not like it's complicated. Red wire goes to Red connector, Black goes to black, Green goes to green. Oh and god forbid you do that and then don't plug in a polarity checker to make sure you got it round correctly. But the laws in Australia go further. See it's not just a case of wiring a house. No, any LV work is effectively illegal. Build your own amplifier? Nope. Open a computer powe
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My problem is I've had more bad experiences with contractors than good. My first house (brand new) with a circuit in the kitchen where the GFI would constantly trip. I opened all of the outlets and switches to check the wires and everything was fine. I finally had enough and pulled off the fuse panel cover. Glad I did. The hot wire was just leaning against contacts. The set screw wasn't even close to being tight. Not only was this a professional but it also passed inspection. The wire had lots of arcing dam
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Clearly, you have never purchased or rented a house that was rewired by a doctor.
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My Dad did the wiring in our house. He also did wiring inspection for Boeing.
I don't fly.
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When I bought my house, the home inspector found a couple of wiring issues, which were fixed by the previous owner prior to closing. Since then I have found several more that I corrected. It's not uncommon to find miswired circuits, incorrectly sized circuits or poor connections. Because of the way circuit breakers work and the way circuits are typically loaded, a wiring problem can go unnoticed for decades. Then you plug in a load on a 120V 15A circuit that draws 12 or 15 amps continuously for several
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""Occasionally the wiring isn't done right" --- ?!?!?! Seriously?"
Residential wiring doesn't have rigorous quality control checks and is frequently as fucked up as a concrete bicycle.
Browse home inspector horror stories for pics of some of the worse examples, then remember very few homes are inspected by pros after construction.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Informative)
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Geez. Yeah. Now that should make the customer sleep easier. In his house with the shit wiring.
.
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I'm not certain what you're getting at or if you're trolling. Is it now Tesla's responsibility to make sure that the wiring in the home of ever Tesla owner is up to code? Frankly if the wiring is kludged any high-drain device runs the risk of sparking up a fire from a refridgerator to a massive Christmas light display.
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Frankly, those chargers should have ALREADY had these changes on revision one...
Who designs a car charger that is using 230V at 30+Amps for hours on end and leaves out a temp sensor and a mechanical mechanism that would shut it off if it overheats?
The temp sensor for statistics and monitoring (since these are still early generation) and the mechanism for safety.
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Because all aspects of this settlement may also be found "interesting" by local and national news organizations, we will also make a lot of noise about researching the health risks of all ingredients that will result in 2 point font warnings on our product labels.
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Because the new ones protect against faults in house wiring, as well as working correctly like the old ones did, and because that gives him great publicity, and return customers?
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No, I did RTFA, unlike you, who RTFS. The issue being pointed out here is with the house's wiring. The wiring that is custom installed for the car, but is not installed by Tesla. The charger is merely protecting against potential faults in that wiring.
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So please. Do tell. What in house wiring issue makes the connector, not the in-house wires, overheat?
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That would be, unusually high resistance in the socket that the connector plugged into. That is, exactly the fault that the fire service fingered in this case.
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Correct me if I'm wrong here but AIUI this is about the cable that tesla sells that has multiple adaptors so you can charge you car from your cooker circuit or your drier circuit or whatever. Not about the fixed chargers that are custom installed.
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As opposed to designing the charger to handle this not-particularly-outlandish possibil
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I'd say that this is 20/20 hindsight in what's still a relatively new field. Do oven outlets normally have a temperature shutoff in them? It's the only other common household item that could be drawing over 30A on a routine basis that I can think of that actually has a plug, as opposed to being hardwired.
In-house testing problably got a most of the 1% stuff and almost all of the .1% problems., now they're working on the .01% problems with ~25k cars now in the field.
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Thermal protection (Score:2)
I think the thing to consider here is that there's probably a bevy of thermal sensors, fuses, and cutoffs in Tesla's cars. Same deal with the ovens and dryers - the sensors are within the appliance itself, not the outlet as I specified.
Basically, putting thermal sensors in a dryer near the heating elements/air stream to prevent damage there makes sense. Having one in the oven to shut it down before it reaches combustion temperatures also makes senses. Putting one in the plug to try to detect that the out
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So it's a recall on the charger connectors. Not on the in house wiring.
The house wiring was not smoking or catching fire, it was the connectors.
So it was obviously a fault of the household wiring. But can be fixed
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The thing is that though the charger may not have initiated the house fire there have been a number of documented cases where the connector to the adapter on the UMC cable has overheated and in some cases melted. I have had intermittent connection problems with the 30A adapter I was using. The connector is not that great at making a solid connection and the conductors seem rather small considering that they could be carrying upwards of 40A.
I look forward to getting a new UMC cable though I hope they also re
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According to NEC, a standard 15 amp residential wall socket must be derated to 12 amps for any continuous load that lasts longer than 4 hours.
Incorrect in almost every way.
1. NEC doesn't 'derate' anything.
2. an up to code 15A wall socket is good for 15A, period. Probably 20A(they're rated for 20A passthrough; it's fairly common to run a 20A circuit with more 15A sockets). It's the wiring behind the socket that's the real concern...
3. The 12A is for 'dedicated load' use when designing a dedicated circuit(or deciding whether you need one). IE if you KNOW what an outlet is going to be used for before you install it. Maximum design load on a