Just received my unit today from Lectron. I’ll have to take it for a trial run when my SOC is lower, unfortunately I charged last night and am around 87% at the moment.
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Has anyone gotten a CCS adapter in the US?
- Thread starter Tha_Ape
- Start date
So, inquiring minds would like to know. Just checked out their web site. As it happens, I'm a EE. And, just like an English teacher cringes when people use bad grammar, EE's cringe when people use energy terms incorrectly. And, so, Lectron's web site has Issues.
Let's be clear: Energy is measured in lots of different kinds of units. Joules. Watt-hours. Kilowatt-hours. Electron-Volts. And so on.
Next: rate of usage. If one is using One Joule Each And Every Second, than the Rate of Usage is 1 Watt. In fact, it's a definition: 1 Watt = 1 Joule/second. That 100W lightbulb in the overhead? That's 100 Joules per Second.
So, you show up at a V3 Supercharger: They tell you it can do 250 kW. That's 250,000 Joules per Second. That's how many Joules it's stuffing into one's battery each and every second, at least, until the Battery Management System slows down the charge rate to keep from damaging the battery at higher States of Charge.
The battery capacity, if it was being measured in SI units, would be measured in Joules. But, for various strange reasons, power companies like to charge for electricity in kW-hours. So, if you got ten 100W lightbulbs lit for one hour, you'll have used a kW-hr's worth of energy and will be charged by ye electric company accordingly. For what it's worth, there's 3.6MJ in a kW-hr. (Kind of like there's 64 pints in a gallon.)
So, when some marketing genius over at Lectron says the fateful words,
"FAST CHARGING - Up to 70-80 kWh charging rate supported for Tesla Model S/X and up to 50 kWh supported for Tesla Model 3/Y"
Yeah.. kWh is energy. "Charging Rate" is measured in Watts, or kiloWatts. So that bit of advertising blurby foolishness means Nothing.
Now, if they said something like, "70 kWh achieved in an hour!", then we'd know that it could accept a 70 kW rate of charge.
So, on this box you got: What is the maximum charging rate the adapter supports?
There's a reason I ask, beyond insulting marketing types. Remember that V3 Supercharger I mentioned? That charges at 250 kW, DC? That cable on the Supercharger is liquid cooled. That's because when one has something other than a superconductor, there's resistance in the conductor. Longer the cable, resistance scales proportionally. Losses (as in heat) in the cable go as current*current*Resistance, or I-squared-R losses. I think that the DC voltage in most Teslas is around 600V; at 250 kW, the current would be 250e3/600 = 416A. Um. That's a lotta amps. Say there's ten milliohms in the cable; then, power dissipated in the cable would be 416*416*10e-3 = 1.9 kW. That's 19 100W lightbulbs; that'd keep one warm on a cold winter's night. To keep the cable and the connector at the end of the cable from Catching On Fire, Tesla removes that heat with liquid cooling. (And, if one looks at the available pictures of what the inside of a Supercharge stall looks like, one will notice big, thick bus bars. Less resistance, natch.)
Now, let's get nasty. I play with connectors from time to time. Connectors (and this should be no surprise) tend to have more resistance than a straight length of cable. So, when a Supercharger cools the cable, yup, it cools the cable - but I'll bet a plugged nickel that it cools the connector plugged into the car as well, and probably has more cooling concentrated around that handle than one might otherwise expect.
So, here's an adapter. Connector at one end. Connector at the other end. No cooling inbetween. Um. Just how much power is being dissipated in that thing?
My suspicion: One might walk up to a, say, 100 kW CCS charger. But the adapter is going to have firmware that saves the adapter from Catching On Fire, and, instead of getting 100 kW, one might get 50 kW. Or 20 kW. Or maybe even 10 kW. The advertising on that Lectron web page is not just some minor error. That adapter is being sold by a company that durn well knows the difference between energy and rate-of-use-of-energy and I strongly suspect they're being obtuse on purpose. "70 kWh" might just mean, "You can charge your car to its full capacity if you wait 8 hours for our piddly little connector to leak energy into your car at a very slow rate. We're not telling you the rate."
Buyer beware.
I actually don't think it's being sold by a company that knows too much about it. I'm fairly certain the adapter is the same one that's being sold by about 4 chinese companies that all slap their own brand sticker on it.
I think it's pretty well understood that you'll only get 50 to 70kW out of that thing under best conditions.
Word on the street is Tesla still hasn't released their South Korean CCS adapter because of reliability issues... I'm still holding out for that one.
I am an EE and the son of an English teacher, so I get both of them.
...but this is kind of ridiculous paranoia. Lectron doesn't make that thing. It's made by Setec. And the writers who are putting together the descriptions to post for the website listings are not the engineers who design it, who actually WOULD know that terminology difference better. It's just sloppy, but bad writing does not necessarily tie to bad design.
Yeah, there's a phrase: "Never accuse somebody of maliciousness when there's a possibility that the issue is stupidity." Or something like that.
But, if one is going to play in the electric sandbox, one had better know the terms. I walk into Home Depot and ask the resident salescritter in the electric section how much power I can get out of that gas-powered generator over there, he/she's going to give me an answer in kW, not in kW-hr, and can probably quote ad literature on how many appliances and/or lightbulbs the generator can do at a time.
Lectron is playing in the battery-charging space. A Model Y has, by most reports, an 82 kW-hr battery. A Wall Connector doing 48A*250V = 12 kW will charge said battery to empty to full in roughly 82 kW-hr/12kW = 6.8 hours; this isn't rocket science. And that 12 kW is a rate, not an amount, like energy is.
As I said, not rocket science. And the company is selling electrical equipment. I thought about it a bit: I don't think this is stupidity. I really think that they know that this thing doesn't have a decent charging rate and they're not willing to admit to the fact. I think that they're in China and are, essentially, judgement proof.
Buyer beware.
That would be very unlikely though. The very sensible explanation is just that the technical people are not the people writing the ad copy.
Remember that there are already a lot of people who have been testing this product out. You are commenting in a thread that only has two pages, rather than the 62 page thread about this product:
Setec CCS to Tesla Adapter
Support would be needed for the bottom than the top, as non-Tesla DC plugs are larger and heavier. I looked at the car to see if there’s a hole that plug would fit in, but nope! Nothing there. One possibility is that may be a button, that would *know* if the adapter is removed from the car...
teslamotorsclub.com
Granted, there are other good reasons to beware of this product, because they have made some experimental firmware for it that has smoked at least one person's charging system in their car, because of applying power at rates and in ways it shouldn't have been, so I wouldn't trust it. But that's a more real reason, rather than a web page writer not understanding units.
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That would be interesting if it was... I'm checking with my Korean buddy to see if the order he placed for me has shipped yet... He placed a second order (after the first one was cancelled because it was during the "limited pre sale" for SR owners only) on October 25th, as of October 31st the order had not yet shown as shipped, but also hadn't been cancelled...
Knowing my luck it'll ship, he'll package it up and forward to me and as soon as he drops it off at the post office the Tesla Shop USA will start selling theirs... and then it'll turn out for some reason the Korean one doesn't work for me.... but crossing my fingers!
I'm an EE, child of an English teacher and also married to an English teacher!
Yeah, brain fart. 8 pints in a gallon, sorry. I was thinking cups, but that's wrong, too.
Read the article for some answers:
I bought the Lectron-Tesla CCS adapter, but it doesn't work. They require you to download a software update that is written for antique computers and won't work on Windows 10, even after turning off Norton 360. Lectron's support is some lady out front who doesn't know anything. They will not talk to me on the phone or give written support. (I can't understand Chinese anyway)
The adapter you bought is made by Setec. There's a thread on the Setec adapter:
Setec CCS to Tesla Adapter
Because of multiple threads in multiple sub-forums concerning this adapter, starting this one as a single point of knowledge. Background - Purchased the Setec CCS1 adapter and received today. Tried on a BTCPower station operated by Blink. Got both communications errors and failed isolation...
teslamotorsclub.com
That's exactly why I will keep waiting for the official Tesla one. I'm not dealing with questionable Chinese versions. No problems with it being made in China, but I want it officially supported by Tesla or the 3rd party charging network (like EA or something).
EVer Hopeful
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