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Comment by tekromancr | Hacker News Reader

Charging a car on a normal outlet is already possible. It just takes for-fucking-ever. You can't draw enough current from an outlet to charge it in a short span, without tripping the breaker or burning out your home wiring.

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In America and other countries with 110v mains, you might have a point. In the UK, my Ampera charges to full in 4 hours.

In America, most houses have some 220, intended for a clothes dryer and perhaps an oven or air conditioning.

For a Tesla, a standard 110v circuit charges at 3.5 mph; 220 is 2x or 4x depending on the amperage of the circuit.

In US, many houses have 240v outlets in addition to 110v, for high-energy devices like stoves and dryers and large washing machines.

http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/30926/what-types-of-e...

There will be some solution to this too, we will come up with some clever hack, like pluggable capacitors, multiple breakers or something. Or better outlets and breakers will become the norm.

I had 2 new breakers put in for an office of mine a few years it cost less than $200. If I could pay this then pay half as much for fueling my car for the next year, I would do it every year.

I think the "power wall" product by Tesla solves this.

You can already buy a portable box that lets you combine the power from two different circuits that are out of phase with each other, to get twice the power. I saw a post by a Tesla owner who uses it to get effective Level-2 charging from friend's country homes.

The box is empty, right? Two out-of-phase 120V circuits are a 240V circuit.

We had the same issue. Our 120V circuit couldn't recharge fast enough overnight to handle ~ 50 miles daily of commute/errands. We ended up getting a 240V/40AMP circuit installed for a 32AMP charger and now it charges in ~ 3 hours. The faster charger also meant we could time it to always use the night time electricity rates.

The fuse box is normally located in the garage anyway. It strikes me that it should be fairly cheap to install a higher amp hookup for the car in that case.

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