Hacker News Reader

Nope, 120V/15A. We get about 5 miles per hour, and the car is generally parked for ~14 hours, so about 70 miles of charge per night. Our car uses about 240 Wh/mi, and a standard US outlet can safely deliver maybe 1400 Wh per hour, so it pencils out.

EVs don’t need special plugs for most people.

View on HN

This is interesting because in European 230V sockets a 2kW power is safe and well under rated maximum of ~3kW. So if you park your car at around 7pm and leave at 7am you get 24kWh charge from a simple standard socket. It could deliver another 12kWh, if you have a charger that can be configured to go higher and you know you won't overheat any cables or connections along the way.

Some houses have the red plug, a three phase plug which can do 11kW continuous, around 7kW sustained and very safe.

Yep, high voltage can be useful heh. The US has 240V sockets for things like dryers and ovens, they're just not as abundant. Prospective EV owners here seem to fret about not having one in the garage, but it's not necessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com