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Drywall Romex entry into garage space - inspection questions

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voip-ninja

Give me some sugar baby
Mar 15, 2012
4,530
5,607
Colorado
i just completed my HPWC installation today but before inspection I have a few questions.

I had an electrician run a new 100 amp line from my main 200 amp service into a new sub panel that I provided and installed in my basement.

I then ran 6/3 romex with ground from a new 50amp breaker on the new panel up to my attached garage and made entry through the basement ceiling into the attached and finished garage wall. I had to bend the romex to make rear entry into the HPWC this did not appear to be avoidable and it is against code in my area as far as I know to run NM-B inside of a conduit junction.

Neutral was terminated at the panel for possible future use and the neutral wire was capped at the HPWC.

My only two concerns at this point are

1. The limited space inside the HPWC to terminate the cables forcing a short bend radius for the individual conductors. Does the inspector expect the sealing plate to be removed at inspection? I closed it up to keep my kid out of it.

2. With the mounting bracket for rear cable entry and with this being old work it did not seem feasible to provide a junction box behind the HPWC. Is this ever required? The wall bracket is attached to stud on one side and I installed high strength toggle anchors with shovel head machine screws to make sure the charger seated into the bracket properly.

My only comment about the install difficulty is that the terminals on the HPWC are a real nightmare to work with. If I had been told it would take nearly an hour to connect the terminals I would have laughed, but it did. I also didn’t see where Tesla provided a torque rating on the connectors. Should I torque them to the same 35 in/lb that my breaker required for #6 CU conductors?

I guess that was four questions.
 

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Every inspector is different so it's hard to say what will happen. I struggled with similar problems and my novel way to deal with it was to bend a custom conduit from the sub panel above the HPWC to the back of HPWC. In this picture you can see the mounting board the charger will screw to. The idea was that after the drywall was in place I would slip the threaded connector that had glue on it over the exposed conduit and then attach the wires.

If you think #6 is bad, you should try #2. It did probably take an hour to get those bent and seated in the clamps.:mad:

I ended up wiring the conductors to the HPWC first and then stuck the wires back through the conduit when mounting the HPWC. At that time I glued the conduit to to the threaded slip connector to the back of the charger.

BTW on the other side I purposefully left the drywall off so the inspector could see how I routed the 00 conductor to the sub panel from the main panel. He was apologetic and almost did not pass me because I had not covered everything up. When I explained why it was still open for his inspection and showed him the drywall waiting to go on he was good. I also took pictures like what I am showing here just in case he needed to see how it was done but he never asked. We spent more time talking about Tesla's than inspecting details of the install.:D

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My inspection was just completed and I wanted to provide some feedback to my own thread for posterity of others who might find this with similar questions. Keep in mind that my jurisdiction is a county in Colorado and every municipality has its own requirements.

The inspector showed up and his immediate question as he looked at the wall charger was whether I had installed a box behind it. I explained to him that the rear mounting bracket mounted to a studs and had its own conduit entry... at this point he said "okay it's like a junction box" and we moved on. He never mentioned anything whatsoever about a disconnect for the device.

He thought the box was mounted too low, so I had to point out in the documentation where it gives a minimum maximum height and that the bracket was within that range.

I mentioned to him that I had to put quite a bend in the conductors to get them into the charger and he said he really wasn't concerned about the bend radius of the individual conductors, as long as they weren't kinked.... he asked me how I terminated the neutral wire and I told him I used an appropriately sized skirted wire nut to cap it.

He never asked me to take the sealing plate off of the charger.

He had no other real concerns so my inspection passed and was pretty quick and uneventful.
 
Someone tickled one of these posts so I just wanted to make one more observation.

Some HPWC documentation shows that there is a collar for securing the romex entry into the rear of the HPWC wall bracket using a plastic secure ring just like you would see in any typical panel connection. My HPWC did not include this securing collar and the printed documentation makes no mention of it.

I'm a bit baffled by way Tesla changed this to a "naked" entry and am not sure if technically this means that the HPWC does need to go on top of a box but I did not do this in my installation and since I stapled and foamed my cable in place I'm not really concerned about cable strain being an issue.