Pulled the socket thankfully none of the wires showed signs of serious heat and all terminals were tightly secured. The brand is Leviton. I will still wait for the replacement outlet before I use charge again though.
Would you guys recommend cutting off and exposing new copper to clamp down on? Looks like there’s plenty of slack. The charging plug looks to be good as well; no scratches or scores.
I do occasionally use my welder on this outlet. Maybe it’s time to consider a wall connector?
View attachment 724494
From what I can see here, looks like naked copper (good) going into the connector, although from the angle the phase with the red wire on it, I can't quite tell. So, no point in re-stripping.
I suspect that you've got an issue with the actual connector surfaces inside. I'm decent at itty-bitty connectors used in electronics systems with plug-in boards, not to mention the occasional mechanical switch. Both of those have either silver, gold, or some alloy or other. The general idea is that when one pushes a plug into a socket, the metal blades on the plug rub along the metal inside the connector, knocking off microscopic corrosion products so one gets, on each blade, a wide area that's gas-tight metal-to-metal contact. The "gas tight" meaning that oxygen and pollutants like SOx/NOx can't get at the mating surfaces and corrode them. The corrosion is sometimes conductive, but nearly as conductive as the bare metal. (This sometimes gets really interesting: aluminum wiring has this issue with aluminum oxide, which is truly a non-conductor, so getting a gas tight connection means higher forces to break the oxide off and keep it off. Don't do that right and houses burn down; enough houses did that back in the day when copper got expensive that aluminum-wired houses got banned.)
Thing is, then, that, inside the socket, one has contacts with some kind of plating on them. The plating that doesn't corrode usually costs $$, so there's every reason for a cheapie manufacturer to skimp on the expensive plating. Once the expensive plating gets rubbed off over time, one gets left with exposed base metal, which is about as conductive as one might expect. That is, not much.
As I said above, NEMA14-50's aren't really designed for tens of thousands of cycles; I'd guess nominal would be a couple of hundred, lifetime, with a thousand on a good day.
I've done work on gold-plated contacts; a good, thick plating might be 0.75 um, but the cheap, flash gold would be 0.05 um. Which will work for a little while, then bite one on the nether ends a couple of years down the road. I haven't done the research, as in, pulling out the
real manufacturer's data sheets where this stuff gets specified. On consumer products like the above, it takes some serious digging to get past the "Buy Now! 5000, really cheap!" $BS that tends to pervade the on-line marketplace.
Finding serious reliability numbers? Ha.
The Wall Connector has hard-connected wiring contacts designed to Live Forever, so the connection to the breaker box is assured. The Tesla connector that goes into the car; dunno what the numbers are, but it looks like silver contacts in both the plug and socket, which is seriously good.
