Experimenting with a Level 1 Charger
A few posts ago I mentioned that the dream is to have a Level 2 charger at my house. That’s my current EV project. Alas, once again I’m running into decision difficulties.
There are three things slowing me down: 1. I’ve got to buy a charger; 2. I’ve got to find an electrician who will install it; and 3. It’s probably going to cost me thousands of dollars to run the very long 240V line that I’ll need to reach my garage.
Thus far I haven’t even made it to issue 2 or 3 yet. I’m stuck trying to find a charger. I’ve learned that at least some charger companies collect and sell real time data about their customers and their cars. I’ve got some privacy concerns so I’m trying to find more information before I make a purchase.
A week ago, in the midst of this indecision, I had a glimmer of hope. I envisioned a solution might be elegant, simple, private, and free! I thought I might be able to happily get by with the Level 1 charger that my neighbor found in the trunk of my new car.
If EV lingo is new to you, let me take a brief time out to get you up to speed on some of the technical details. As near as I can tell there are three basic types of EV chargers; aptly named “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and “Level 3.”
A Level 1 charger quickly and easily connects your car to any normal 120V outlet. It’s almost as simple as plugging in a toaster.
A Level 2 charger requires a 240V outlet – the same kind of outlet that most ovens, clothes dryers, and central air conditioners use. These can be installed in houses, but may require a bit of extra wiring.
A Level 3 charger requires over 400V connections and typically you don’t have one of these at your house. The charging I’ve done to this point has all been at a Level 3 charger in the parking lot of a shopping mall.
As you might well expect, each of these different charger types charge at different speeds with Level 1 chargers being the slowest, and Level 3 chargers the fastest. The question I had last week was: just how slow is a Level 1 charger?
That glimmer of hope I mentioned was raised when I noticed the following statement on a Hyundai website*:
“Level 1 chargers are the slowest charging types… full charging can take up to 10 hours or longer.1”
Ding! A lightbulb went off in my head. 10 hours is a long time to charge if you’re driving cross-country. But usually my car sits for at least 10 hours each night. If I could get a full charge in 10 hours with a Level 1 charger I wouldn’t have to buy a new charger, hire an electrician, spend thousands of dollars, or share any more information about myself than I already am! It almost seemed too good to be true.
And, of course, it was.
If you’ll notice there’s an odd little thing at the end of that quote above. The little superscript “1” signifies a footnote. That’s something you don’t usually see on a website, so it caused me to be slightly alarmed. I scrolled down and found in very small print at the bottom the following:
“1Actual charging time varies based on a number of factors, including the vehicle model and trim, current battery charge level, output of the charging unit, vehicle and battery settings, and outside temperature.”
In my ever-hopeful brain these caveats didn’t seem too alarming. After all I’ve heard about temperature being an issue and certainly different models work differently. This is all fine, I thought. Even if the 10-hour figure is 20% or even 40% off, it still meant that I could charge my car in roughly the amount of time it sits in my garage each night.
On Saturday night as I pulled up to the house I decided the only way to really know was to put my car to the test.
The first step was to back the car into the garage so the cord could reach. Thankfully, with a bit of guidance from my wife I managed not to hit anything.
Second step was to plug it in. I waited and… nothing. Uh oh.
Quickly, however, I remembered that my house doesn’t have the best wiring, so I tried another outlet. After a couple moments my silent anticipation was broken by a female voice that called out: “Charging Started.” After the initial alarm caused by the fact that my car had just talked to me, I was elated by the knowledge that it was actually charging in the comfort of my own garage!
I made my way to the driver’s seat to see what was happening and found charging stats displayed on the dashboard. The car was currently at a 28% charge. That sounded about right. And the time to 80% charge was estimated to be… 54 hours and 50 minutes. What??? What happened to 10 hours? What happened to 10 hours with a footnote indicating some margin of error? “Actual charging time varies” shouldn’t mean “charging time can vary by over 500%”!
Ever the optimist, I told myself to be patient. Let the charger work for a bit; maybe it will ramp up to speed.
On Monday morning, about 36 hours later, I unplugged the car. In a day and a half of continuous charging it managed to get up to a 47% charge. My predicted range had increased from 86 miles to 151 miles, a rate of 1.8 miles of range per hour of charging. At that rate (if it stayed constant, which I’m learning it doesn’t in an effort to protect batteries) it would take 98 hours to go from 28% charge to 80% charge. That’s 10 times longer than what Hyundai says in its marketing materials and nearly double what my car estimated when I started charging. You might be able to sense that I was experiencing a bit of frustration. My dream of cheap and easy home charging had been squashed.
Later that afternoon I made what is becoming a familiar drive to the mall to charge my car. After the weekend’s disappointment, recharging in a parking lot was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. I won’t go into all the technical details, but the mall’s Level 3 charger got me from 37% charge to 80% charge in 20 minutes. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that is over 250 times faster than my weekend experiment.
Sitting in the driver’s seat as I watched my battery charge go up quickly in real time was almost blissful. As I relaxed in the car, happily sending e-mails to a few friends, I would occasionally look up and see that my car’s charge had increased by a significant chunk. Each glance caused my shoulders to slightly relax and my breathing to become calmer. I’m beginning to think that a quick parking lot charge could be better than a spa treatment.
As for the claim made by Hyundai? Curiously it’s become harder to find even in the couple weeks since I first saw it. It doesn’t appear on the official corporate site. Some local dealers, however, still include the “10 hour” text on their websites. My guess is that as the complaints roll in, they’ll be updating their sites as well.
So, yes, I’ll be restarting the search for a Level 2 charger at some point. In the meantime, I’m actually looking forward to those 20-minute charges in the mall parking lot. They seem more luxurious than I would have ever imagined.
* See for instance: https://www.mcgeehyundai.com/hyundai-ioniq-5-charge-time.htm