I watched the video and it seems to make good points, but no matter how many times I see something related to US power circuits it just feels so ... antique? I have 3x25A fuses on the house and several 3x16A outlets around so getting 11kW out is just a matter of plugging in a socket.

Obviously it would be a good thing to have controls so that water heater, floor heating or sauna stove aren't all on together but I think I've replaced a single 25A fuse over 10 years we've lived on this house and I'm pretty sure that was caused by a small(ish) surge on the grid and not our load.

We have a granny charger that came with one of our EVs that we use as a backup and with our caravan to charge on sites that allow it. As I am UK it tops out at 2.4kw (10A @ 240v) and its annoyingly slow even charging for more than 12 hours at a time.

Our main home charger is 7kw, and as we get cheap electric every night for 7p a KwH for 5 hours, we can charge about 40kwh in that time period. Means even our largest battery is fully charged in two nights from completely empty. If we tried that with the granny charger it would cost significantly more, as it would be up to 40p a KwH outside of the main hours and take 40 hours to charge the same amount.

Now if you doing only a few miles a day, less than 40 miles (4 miles per KwH, charge for the 5 cheap hours using the cars charging timer, charge 10 KwH), it might work out ok for you, but then charging every day cannot be good for the battery? I know it would get annoying quite quickly. It would also get pretty painful if you have more than one EV, we have three between us and the kids, so its not remotely practical.

Granny chargin', not triple phasing like you should.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Any modern US house would have a similar capability, it's just older homes that would struggle since there would never be a need for such high power devices in a garage.

Most older garages would only need enough power to run a single lightbulb, if it was slightly newer, maybe a low power automatic garage door opener.

It's the same in any country with buildings over 100 years old.

You almost had me charging? You never had me charging - you never had your car charging, it had tripped the socket

Pedantic but: 7kw isn't three phase in the UK, just 30A. Three phase electric can give you up to 22kw in the UK for charging, obviously not every EV can charge that fast, most only go up to 11kw AC. I would kill for that extra charging speed but I can't justify the extra cost and effort to get it fitted by the electric company

Any AC load you can throw at an EV is effectively “slow charging”.
My car supports a maximum of 9.6kw from an AC charger, but up to 150kw from DC fast chargers. Even with the fast charging, its not like a phone, it has active thermal management which will cool the battery and slow down the charging if it gets too hot. phones don’t really have that and is mainly why they degrade faster if quick charged.

you are assuming functional infrastructure, not everywhere has that.

My wife had to try charging on a 120V outlet last winter. The plug couldn't even keep up with the battery heating requirements to actually start charging; the battery percentage was going DOWN while plugged in. It was -25°C outside though, so it's a specific situation, but it's actually why she had to try to charge; it's a trip we can easily do without charging in the summer.

It's a neat conversion for EV charging. 7kw x 2.5 miles per kwh is 17.5 mph. Most EV onboard chargers top out at 11kw, 27.5 miles per hour. So from the battery's perspective, 22kw is it's normal discharge rate at 60mph.

You don't double clutch on upshifts either (it was a drag race) so I'd say the parody is accurate

Fuses sound antique compared to resettable circuit breakers. Though, if I remember correctly, your outlets have resettable breakers? Anyway, part of the wattage deficiency comes from the voltage being half of Europe's. The wires are similarly sized so they hit about the same max amperage (largely 15a for most circuits, 20a frequently in kitchens/garages/exterior outlets, 100-250a main breaker for the house) but halving the voltage halves the wattage available

Well I did say I was being pedantic, which is absolutely the best way to watch fast and furious with friends

Uh.

I drove semi trucks in the US for years....

You'd better either double clutch or float those gears, because if you don't, you're destroying your clutch brake, which means you'll have trouble getting it into gear from a dead stop. That applies for both upshifts and downshifts.

Ever sit next to an old truck or bus and hear them grinding gears to get into gear?

That's due to the clutch brake failing to stop the flywheel.

All semi trucks in the US use synchro-less manual transmissions.

When shifting a syncro-less transmission, YOU are the synchro.

The clutch in these trucks has 2 positions. You either just barely engage the clutch enough to break contact, or you depress it fully to engage the clutch brake and (attempt to) stop the flywheel from spinning.

If you do the second one while shifting a moving vehicle, you're causing undue wear and tear on the aforementioned clutch brake.

What they do here for (a good amount of) home car chargers is read out the electricity meter using their serial port and dynamically adjust the charge current to never take more than those 3x25A.

It's not fucking overkill. There's no such thing.

I'm really disappointed with the video. That dude usually knows his shit, but he's way off the mark here. It's just plain wrong.

Getting a smaller charger might save a few hundred, but it will also increase your chances of burning the house down. Good fucking advise, huh.

Fuck that. You'll always want to charge as fast as your main circuit breaker will allow.

Gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that people living in a cabin where the electricity only works a few hours a week aren't going to buy an electric car.

As for access to public chargers... I just spent the weekend in a rural area and had no problem finding a charger within 20 miles of me.

Congrats on finding a solution that works for you. I have a short commute (16 miles round trip) and was OK to use L1 charging on a "usually" basis. However, I do more things in my life than just going to work and back. After work I might drive another 90 miles round trip to meet some friends at a brewery. Or I might drive only a couple miles to a buddy's house and not get home until 11pm, so I now only have 7 hours to charge at L1 instead of 12 hours. And on weekends when I'm maybe driving a couple hours to hike in the desert and come back, I now have 16 hours to charge for work on Monday after driving 210 miles round trip.

Switching from L1 to L2 charging at home made driving an EV go from a daily chore to something I almost never thought about.

This is not about me or you, this is "usually".

Yep – US also doesn't generally do residential three-phase unlike many countries in the EU. A lot of garages around here have 3x16A 230V, not (only) due to the power requirements but because having three phases allows for simplest induction motors for things like blowers and circular saws. When you have three phases having a proper outlet in the garage starts making sense.

Around here (Finland more specifically) we have three-phase even in most apartments. My two bedroom apartment has a 3x25A main breaker, and two devices on 3x16A circuit's – the sauna stove and oven+stovetop. Most single-family homes have 3x25A or 3x36A as well.

US households are missing out on a lot of things due to their split-phase system.

One thing I really don't get in the discussion around EVs and charging is, why are people so afraid of tripping the main breaker? If you have a total of e.g. 17 kW available and happen to go over, just reset the main breaker (or replace it in case it's still a traditional one). It's there precisely so that you wouldn't need to care about overloading the connection.

In my experience people get by with a 3x25A (17 kW available, matches approximately a 70A service in the US) while using the available power to

• heat/cool a single family home (in -20 °C weather mind you)
• run all appliances (including the oven, stove, dryer etc.)
• heat up a sauna
• charge an EV
• whatever else you typically would want to plug in, kettles and such

While it's true you can trip the main breaker if you have everything on at the same time, typically it never happens even if there are no lockouts in place preventing overuse. And it's not like tripping it causes any permanent harm.

Why is an electrical service upgrade constantly brought up as a solution when any home with >15 kW of available power won't need it? Is it against code to purposefully overcommit your mains in the US or something?

Edit: there were valid concerns raised over how long-lived the breakers are (probably won't be rated for tens of fault-condition related trips), also that these smaller service specs aren't as common as I've gathered from the media. That might have something to do with this at least. Thanks for the replies – it's been an interesting discussion.