As the electric vehicle takeover slowly lumbers along, marginally increasing efficiencies for certain applications while entrenching car-centric urban design even further, there are some knock-on effects that are benefiting people and infrastructure beyond simple transportation. Vehicle-to-grid technology has applications for providing energy from the car back to the grid for things like power outages or grid leveling. But [Technology Connections] is taking this logic one step further. Since a large number of EV owners have charging stations built into their garages, he wondered if these charging stations could be used for other tasks and built an electric heater which can use one for power.
This project uses a level 2 charger, capable of delivering many kilowatts of power to an EV over fairly standard 240V home wiring with a smart controller in between that and the car. Compared to a level 1 charger which can only trickle charge a car on a standard 120V outlet (in the US) or a DC fast charger which can provide a truly tremendous amount of energy in a very short time, these are a happy middle ground. So, while it’s true a homeowner could simply wire up another 240V outlet for this type of space heater or other similar application, this project uses the existing infrastructure of the home to avoid redundancies like that.
Of course this isn’t exactly plug-and-play. Car chargers communicate with vehicles to negotiate power capabilities with each other, so any appliance wanting to use one as a bulk electric supply needs to be able to perform this negotiation. To get the full power available in this case all that’s needed is a resistor connected to one of the signal wires, but this won’t work for all cases and could overload smaller charging stations. For that a more complex signalling method is needed, but since this was more of a proof-of-concept we’ll still call it a success. For those wanting to DIY the charger itself, building one from the ground up is fairly straightforward as well.
Thanks to [Billy] for the tip!
This is cool, and I know the answer to the following is “Because they wanted to” but, why? I must be missing something, it doesn’t appear to use the car’s battery to run the heater.
…this has inspired me however to wire up a sketchy splitter cable so I don’t need to unplug the welder to use the plasma cutter however.
It’s “I don’t want to put another high-current mains connection in the garage for occasional use when there’s a perfectly functional one RIGHT HERE”. The car has nothing to do with it.
Sort of a similar story, one of the carpenters who was building my house was talking about the great idea he had in his house. He wanted an on-demand hot water dispenser to make coffee and a insinkerator (a food grinder… no idea if those are only an American thing) but he only wanted to run one circuit. So he used a three-way switch where “off” fed power to the water heater and “on” switched power to the disposal instead. Not that he couldn’t run two dedicated circuits, but he wanted to just utilize the one circuit fully.
I wonder where you can find a motor-rated SPDT (“three-way”) wall switch.
If he used a conventional light switch I’d like to hear how that worked out for him.
Just put a subpannel in with separate breakers for the heater and the car charger. Dont even need to switch a switch over between them. Just don’t run them at the same time and trip the sub main.
I kinda feel like the solution here is to wire a 240 plug to the car charger and unplug it from the wall when you want 240v for other things.
Or if you want things hardwired, put a little subpannel in next to the car charger with separate breakers for the car and a 240v outlet.
Using a car charger to just run a resistive heater is… kinda unnecessary? That same resistor will work just as well on bare 240v. And then you’re heater isn’t dependant kn your car charger interface that may or may not change in 10 years.
Hard to beat a good ol’ 240v plug for future proofing.
As a ‘have fun connecting a dummy load to a car charger and working with the interface’ project, it could be fair though.
This is definitely a solution in search of a problem. If he’s already run a line for the charger, just hook into that for an extra 240 outlet, or if that violates code, do a single 240v outlet plug that the charger plugs into as other suggested. I guess to each their own…
He spent a goodly portion of the video forestalling the comments already made by people here who clearly didn’t watch it.
But whatever, why break with tradition. Carry on.
I’d suggest using it to power a decent arc welder.
This will be great when the tow hitch tears out of your Wankenpanzer and you need to weld it back on at the supercharger.
Ok, when this is a dedicated source for car charging (with according metering), using it for different purposes is just “stealing” aside the mentioned fact that the power grid on the lowest level is mostly not capable at all for the things “used to be done when nuclear power was better put in heating than in cooling towers”. And I thought, we were further than in the 1970s. Smart grids someone? If that is solved, then, yes then, we can talk about utilities.