The box in that guy's build is outside and could probably burn to a crisp without hurting anything else. I suspect it would not hurt anything even inside a garage, other than making a lot of smoke and setting off smoke detectors.
It's surprising that we have such cavalier attitudes when it comes to our own field, but so much fear and magical thinking about the power of government oversight when it comes to everything else...
You must be new to HN. Let me introduce you to the two types of comments:
1) The problem I am responding to does not involve software. The people in that industry must not be competent. Therefore, the solution is more government regulation.
2) The problem I am responding to involves software. Everyone in my industry is highly competent and moral! Therefore, let the free markets operate and the problem will automatically disappear.
Just no? That analogy is EXTREMELY strained. From his own link: A word about safety. I’m not an electrician. I’m not allowed to make alterations to my consumer unit.
I let my kids play outside all the time solo and with friends without supervision. On the flip side, I don't do things like design my own L2 charger because it violates several codes, would nullify my homeowners insurance, and could quite literally land me in prison should I mess it up and cause a licensed electrician to die because I did something dumb or cause my car to start on fire killing my family.
Do I do my own wiring? Absolutely.
Would I mess around with attaching something at 240v that I made from scratch that could burn my house down and kill my family if I do it wrong? Nope, I'm good.
What is up with this common refrain? One of the main functions of insurance is to indemnify you against your own negligence. Let's say you turn a small stovetop fire into a house fire by trying to put it out with water - the insurance company doesn't just get to stiff you because you were responsible for causing the problem. Are there actually prevalent and enforceable weasel clauses about DIY work in some areas, or is this a scare story popularized by oversocialized redditors fantasizing about what might happen, or what?
Also then, a different example: You plug in a non-NRTL-tested appliance from Amazon, and it burns down your house. Clearly outside the bounds of what is prudent, but also something many people commonly do. You're telling me that insurance is set up to stiff all of them, and yet we're not seeing endless news articles about that happening?
As an aside- do cheap electronics actually burn a lot of houses down, or is that scare mongering? I half remember reading that it was large white goods like dishwashers and washing machines that actually started most fires, and they are not typically bought on Amazon or only on price.
An intentional or reckless act wouldn't be insured if it directly causes a loss, but anything else is. There's no exclusion for doing things that are illegal other than illegal substance manufacturing, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything because the whole policy is 12 pages, including the cover and table of contents.
Electricity regulations wise, it's legal for me to do anything that plugs in to a socket. If I owned and occupied the property it's legal to do anything that doesn't require moving or adding a fixed cable to the consumer unit. Adding new fixed cable runs required a licensed electrician to sign them off before energising. It's illegal to do DIY electrical work on a property if it's let to anyone other than family, unless it's certified by a licensed electrician.
It's reality? Installing an L2 charger requires a permit. You don't technically have to get one, there's no county police that goes door to door checking for improper/horrible EV charging installations. However, if your house burns down, and they see you decided to jury rig your own charger from piece parts, I can guarantee you with 100% confidence they're going to tell you to pound sand when you make an insurance claim.
On the off chance your home-made charger didn't start the fire, you can spend a decade fighting them in court. But you'll probably lose.
Anyway, how many DIY EVSEs start fires? It's a glorified extension cord, not exactly rocket science, and as long as the builder applies a modicum of sense to choosing the components and wire gauges inside, and torques the connectors and stuff, there's really not much going on in there that should produce heat in the first place.
Also, this isn't a charger. It's an EVSE, there's no power electronics inside. There's a contactor, that's it, no silicon in the power path. It's really hard to screw it up.
Perhaps I'm just accustomed to the Hackaday comment section, but HN commenters are weirdly terrified of anything involving AC. It's just electricity. Not even very much of it, like, normal household levels of 240v AC. My clothes dryer uses more power, and it pulls it over wiring installed in the 1970's. Heck, when I moved, I even replaced the cord on my own dryer with one that matches the outlet in this house, an action explicitly allowed and encouraged by the access plate on the back of the appliance. The bare cords are sold at Home Depot and they come with a little slip of paper explaining how any homeowner can install them.
It's fine. It's just wire. Pick one that's thick enough, torque the screws, it's fine.
And if you think about it, such an exclusion would be crazy. The average homeowner is in no position to judge whether the work someone they hired does exceeds the scope of their license, or whether all the details of the work that need a permit get one, or whether work any work that doesn't get inspected is in fact done to code. Furthermore, the average homeowner isn't the original owner of their house, and is in no position to know what tomfoolery the prior owner might have done.
For those of you out there that are certain that DIY electrical work voids your homeowners insurance, can you prove any evidence to support your claim? A local news story about a guy whose homeowners insurance denied him because he DIY'ed something in good faith? A FAQ page from an insurer that says that DIY'ing something voids the insurance? Anything other than a vague reference to there being a lot of words in your policy and it gets interpreted through the lens of an enormous body of caselaw and the insurance company can afford more lawyers than you?
Insurance regularly pays out when people do stupid stuff and cause a loss to their own insured property, as long as they weren't trying to do damage. Doing stupid stuff that happens to involve electricity doesn't seem any different to me. And frankly, building your own L2 charger after much research and thinking about the safety aspects seems like a far cry from a "here hold my beer" moment.
It almost certainly wouldn't.
Generally speaking, in the United States, homeowners insurance "covers stupid".
DIY electrical wiring, and the like, would be covered unless something was intentionally or maliciously negligent.
If you miswire a three-way lightswitch (in good faith) and (somehow) burn your house down, that is generally covered.
It's funny how we reach a society where you need government as a babysitter and tell what you can do and whatnot.
> Would I mess around with attaching something at 240v that I made from scratch that could burn my house down and kill my family
It's also funny how those people readily plug in any consumer device they buy on amazon, which is assembled in china/india without any thought about safety.
every code regulation is written is blood. the inconvenience is designed to prevent people burning their house down or worse.
Every code regulation is written because some forces lobbied it. It’s nice to think those forces care about you and me, but it’s also incredibly naive.
So two funny things about this in UK law - the law doesn't say who is allowed to work on your consumer unit, you can do it by yourself if you wish. What the law does specify is that the work has to be certified by a "competent person" but then doesn't actually narrow down what a "competent person" means. Local regulations might, but the UK law on this does not.
There was a huge debate about this couple years ago, when someone asked "can a foreign electrician certify a UK electrical installation as safe", and after very long debate the outcome was that yes, they can, because the British regulations never actually specify what they mean by "competent" and a certified electrician(even if foreign) is definitely "competent" even if not registered with any UK based authority.
No. You can't touch the consumer unit, and there's a restricted zone around bath/shower for example (by distance), but most things a homeowner might want to do are perfectly legal to DIY.
> the US, but the UK is noticeably more safety-obsessed.
Crikey, are you joking? Internet forums are awash with US concern over 'code', and to extend beyond electricity: food safety, FDA guidelines, all sorts of common senseless rubbish.
It isn't uncommon for people to be scared when they learn I wired my home which has a 400 amp service. I wired the previous two also. Sure electricity could kill me, burn me, burn down my house, etc., but I don't have to be the one to discover how it works. People have done that and there are building codes to follow that are build upon a whole bunch of previous failures.
We all learn different things and are at different places. I can wire my whole house and pass inspection, but I'd never take on this project, that is beyond me - but more power to him for trying. I agree, nothing wrong with some DIY that at most will go up in smoke.
And I have a large number of items that either came with my house or I purchased legitimately that could absolutely burn it to the ground. It's all measured risk.
When I get an EV, I'll be adding a consumer grade charger to the house. And then I'll trust, with zero actual knowledge, that it won't burn down my house, or that my car won't.
It's also my experience that if you have the know-how, you can often do a better job than the professionals you hire, or the factory that mass-produces a product for the highest possible margins.
The leaps here are way too big.
>I'm disappointed at the anti-DIY sentiment
This is essentially the equivalent. Total insanity.
But I appreciate he didn't put this in his garage. However, even hooking it up to the CU is not something some random guy should be doing: https://www.speakev.com/threads/a-cautionary-tale-of-severe-... (this one was probably due to not-adequately tightening the terminals, would you even think/know as a DIY'er?)
So? The system that controls the relay (with logic to prevent exposed high-voltage contacts while the car is unplugged, or danger if the cord is damaged or immersed in water) is just as safety-critical as the relay itself.
> "didn't use a GFCI or AFCI breaker where one is required, but did try to address the same safety hazard those breakers address, in a way that wasn't as good as such a breaker
Stop right there. What you describe is automatically incompetent, all by itself.
Seriously, don't do this ever. There are extremely good reasons why anything but certified, unmodified hardware is illegal to install in electrical wiring. There are equally good reasons why you can't omit required safety hardware, even if you "tried" with something else.
These laws are written in blood.
Doing & making things (within reason) is the essence of human experience. Buying all the things is the essence of consumerism.
I just think it's a good principle that someone older than me shared with me a long time ago, in an electronics hobby store that no longer exists, when I was buying parts to build a bench power supply, though I had to discover some reasons the hard way.
I thought they were being an ass at the time, so I plowed ahead with my project, and realized halfway thru that this project was pretty dumb and I should have just bought one and moved on to a better more interesting project.