Charging Help

[anevares]

Sorry if this has been talked about before. I could not find it on a search.

I am waiting for my electrician to setup my 50 amp breaker. He owes me a favor and is doing it all free so hard to pressure him to get it done. Right now I am pulling power from my dryer outlet running 30 amps. It roughly gets me 15 mi/hr. I am using a clipper creek charger currently with my old setup for a Volt I had. I don’t have the 14-30 adapter. My question is if I get an adapter to from 14-30 to 14-50 will the car know to pull less of a charge or will it try and pull the full load and pop the breaker?

 

[jmaddr]

It will technically work but not recommended. You will need to set the max current the car can pull (in the charging screen on the car) to 24 amps as that’s 80% of 30a. The reason it’s not recommended is the car itself will detect the 50a cable and will not know not to attempt to pull 40a (80% of 50a) unless you manually set it.
So while it would technically work, you really shouldn’t be doing this long term for a bunch of safety reasons and it may be against local safety codes. The main reason is you are relying on human settings (and thus error). If the car’s settings were ever to get “reset” by a software update or something else for whatever reason, then it could attempt to pull the 40a the pigtail can handle. The breaker could then fail, or the wiring could then heat up too high. You would at minimum trip the breaker and at worst start a fire. The right thing to do is to order the appropriate pigtail. It’s only $35 from the Tesla website.

EDIT. BTW, you will only be get 22 mi/hr with this temporary setup. That’s still a 46% improvement over 15m/hr but the vigilance needed to ensure safety is not worth it.
Mobile Connector

 

[swaltner]

What amperage are you getting out of the ClipperCreek setup? You can see this on the Tesla’s charging status screen. If, while charging, it’s saying “24/24 Amps”, you are getting as much power as possible out of an outlet rated for 30 amps and there is no reason to mess with adapter that have the potential to cause problems like outlined above.