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Tesla Sending New Wall-Charger Adapters After Garage Fire
JoeyRox writes "Tesla is sending its customers new home charging connectors after recent reports of chargers overheating in garages and one instance of a fire inside a wall socket that held one of the chargers. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the new charging adapter will contain a thermal fuse capable of terminating the charging process if it gets too hot. 'These are very rare events, but occasionally the wiring isn't done right. We want people to have absolute comfort, so we're going to be providing them with an upgraded adapter.' The company also issued a software update in December to address the overheating issue."
... the way 20 year olds make web sites nowadays?
I'll get in before the nutjob Tesla detractors.
This is a very responsible move by Tesla which takes guts. They are changing the charger design to ameliorate a problem that has nothing to do with the car and nothing to do with the charger and everything to do with the house wiring. Obviously the nutjobs will point their skinny little fingers and accuse Tesla of papering over their own flaw, which is a lie.
Well, not if you want to get flamed anyway
huehuehuehue
Tesla cars are really expensive, but they keep doing things like this. "Worried about the battery catching on fire? Okay, we will insure you against that for no additional charge. Worried about your garage charger catching on fire? Okay, we will give you an upgraded charger for free."
Anyone with a Tesla car is an early adopter, and paying a lot for the privilege. But Tesla really is doing their part to take care of the early adopter customers.
And this is why their overall strategy is brilliant. Start at the high end of the market, make money while building technology and infrastructure, and then come out with a new-gen car that costs less. Meanwhile they have fewer customers to take care of when issues like this pop up, and they have the money to just deal with it.
I can't wait until Tesla hits the Ford/Honda price level.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"Occasionally the wiring isn't done right" --- ?!?!?! Seriously?
Maybe nothing was really wrong. Maybe the wiring sucks, the charger draws too much RMS power due to a dirty wave (Fattened with harmonics), the excess current causes overheating, etc. So rather than putting in a current detector or whatever else to detect faults, he just ... stuck in a thermal fuse. If it gets too hot, it shuts off.
Most hardware doesn't constantly draw that much power. It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power. Thermal fuse--even a current fuse--is really a "this will never happen, but if anything does happen that creates any kind of bad situation, this will stop it. Whatever it is."
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Rtfa it says house wiring, bad sloppy Slashdot editing makes it sound like the charger wiring is at fault
there was at one time a cafe here in Portland, that had lots of power sockets, with lots of people plugging their laptops in.
Most of their cover plates were missing.
Power sockets are contained in boxes that are fastened to wall studs. Most of the boxes their sockets were in had come loose, so they would pull out of the wall when one attempted to pull out one's plug.
they had a stage for live music. All the electronic instruments and loudspeakers were plugged into a single power strip that was connected via a long extension cord to the wall.
I repeatedly pointed out to the baristas that an electrical fire was bound to happen, and begged them to convince the cafe owner to have an electrician replace all the sockets, but no he never did.
I was quite shocked when they told me that the Portland fire inspector visited once a month, but only to ensure that they had adequate escape routes. The inspector never bothered with the sockets.
One fire? Out of how many, 30k cars?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Because he wants to put his customers' minds at ease? It's a smart move on the part of the company.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power.
Well I guess that solves it. After all, all you need to do is slap in MOSFET's that are below quality, or capacitors that are filled with gunk(instead of electrolyte), instead of solid state and watch it melt and ooze all over itself. Pretty good chance of either one happening, and it's a fairly good possibility with either knock-off components or recycled components being marked as new and put back into the supply chain. This issue has been haunting PSU's for computers for years now, especially mid-range and the very cheap jobs.
Thermal fuse--even a current fuse--is really a "this will never happen, but if anything does happen that creates any kind of bad situation, this will stop it. Whatever it is."
Well that's great, until you run into the "thermal fuse really isn't a fuse" or the "current fuse" is actually a chunk of metal that's simply bridging the two points. Again see the issues with PSU's.
Om, nomnomnom...
Oh man, the beta site did not-auto load this time for me. Thank goodness! Just had to express my joy.
While I assert that the GMO wheat in my company's bread did not cause your child to born with 12 toes. It is worth $200,000 to us to not find out if a jury will be composed of my peers or yours.
Because all aspects of this settlement may also be found "interesting" by local and national news organizations, we will also make a lot of noise about researching the health risks of all ingredients that will result in 2 point font warnings on our product labels.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
Alternatively... it could be exactly as he said, the car was not fire prone (as borne out by the stats showing it had lower fire rates than other cars, and better outcomes when they did happen), and that the fire department agree that it was not caused by the charger.
Instead, it could simply be that even though they're working fine, there's way to mitigate the risk of other faulty things causing problems, and it's nice to do something towards that.
Honestly, I hate this aspect of the modern world –no one is allowed to improve something without implying that something was broken before hand, or that it was their fault that something else was broken.
I was going to say, it's entirely possible the wiring in the wall was bad.
This is one possible scenario which has happened in the past. Maybe it was aluminum wiring, which has a much lower thermal expansion rate than copper. Back in the 70's it was really common for developers to use aluminum wiring in houses because it was cheaper than copper. My house had aluminum wiring. The previous owners of my house were really underhanded. They ran copper off the electrical box up in behind some insulation and connected it to the aluminum from junction hidden junction boxes, and because home inspectors don't do "destructive" inspections, meaning they don't even move insulation, we didn't find out until years after we had bought the house. We had a wall socket stop working and when I opened it up to see what was wrong I found the aluminum wire had completely detached from the terminals. Luckily my father-in-law, who doesn't live near by, is an electrician because we had to have the whole house rewired. It's still not illegal to use aluminum wiring, copper is recommended, but it's not requried. The higher temperature of the adapter could cause the aluminum wire to expand and pop off the plug terminals in the wall box, which can lead to arcing and fires.
It really wouldn't be Tesla's fault if developers were using cheap materials when building the house, but it is nice of them to do something to try and mitigate future issues after it becomes a known possibility. We can't account for every scenario that will ever occur, but we can learn as we go along.
Ah fuck, have all the engineers left Slashdot?
Hardly any major incident is the fault of an isolated piece of equipment - it's usually one or two things going wrong and then everything else reacting badly.
Like Postel said, Conservative in what you send - liberal in what you accept.
Any equipment which draws a large amount of current for a long time should be sensitive to the sort of things that can go wrong within the device, the load, and the source.
Tesla made an engineering error here. They won't ever admit to making a mistake, because Musk has the ego of a small planet - he thinks that just because he gets some things right (which he certainly does), he gets everything right.
The math has been done in every previous thread. The fire rate for Teslas is something like 5x lower than normal cars -- but we'll see if that changes once they age.
Because the new ones protect against faults in house wiring, as well as working correctly like the old ones did, and because that gives him great publicity, and return customers?
Story says "about a half dozen". And these are not all fires. Smoldering, smoking chargers and wires; people getting burned when then touch molten insulation, etc.
If you're going to charge giant car batteries from your house wiring the house wiring needs to be 100%. Builder grade work is often not perfect. So buying a Tesla and plugging it in without getting a grown-up electrician to rework the wiring a Bad Idea, as some of these Tesla owners are discovering.
Next step; posh neighborhoods with multiple Teslas discover that neighborhood transformers do not have infinite capacity.
Yes, it's a smart move. However it should have been done INSTEAD OF elon shooting his mouth off on the original news story.
Not along with.
Its a crazy concept of doing right by your customers. I know this is insane to even consider, but shockingly some companies do this. If you RTFA you would see that Musk talks about home wiring not always being done properly, so in order to avoid leaving that variable up to chance, Tesla has sent out chargers that shut themselves off at a certain temperature. Its almost like he cares if his customers are happy and hes willing to do what it takes to alleviate as many issues as possible while using his product, even when not caused by his own product.
A charger built by my company overheats and catches fire. The house burns down with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of chargers in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
They're less than a dollar in bulk. Every charger & power supply should have one.
You obviosly didn't RTFA. And if you think the chargers are plugged into existing house wires, not a specially installed new circuit, now then you are just plain silly.
I approve of engineering for safety. Your device could be operating perfectly fine but you don't know about the quality of wiring at the customer's location.
Reminds me of my parent's place that had a breaker tripping regularly: a clothes dryer was drawing current well below the breaker label, but it was tripping anyway due to heat from corrosion on the copper wire at the breaker. Good.
Frankly, those chargers should have ALREADY had these changes on revision one...
Who designs a car charger that is using 230V at 30+Amps for hours on end and leaves out a temp sensor and a mechanical mechanism that would shut it off if it overheats?
The temp sensor for statistics and monitoring (since these are still early generation) and the mechanism for safety.
Only because Steve Jobs died.
Plane manufacturer makes a small change to improve the reliability or performance. Some one with a 30 year old plane crashes and dies, and because small plane owners as a general class have a significant percentage of high income individuals (doctors and lawyers, etc.) their heirs and assigns lawyer up and go after the mfr and say "you KNEW that it was defective or substandard because you changed it 24 years later".. "pay us the value of our beloved spouse/father/patriarchs future earnings".
Eventually, the plane manufacturers say "screw this, we're not going to make planes any more". Or if they do stay in business, they don't change anything. There's a reason Lycoming and Continental are still making the same overgrown VW engines for 70 years, and it's not because they need bolt pattern compatibility for replacements.
1) 14ga wiring is allowed on 20A heating circuits. It's artificially derated for general purpose circuits for extra safety.
2) 20A circuits can have 15A receptacles as long as there is more than one receptacle (and a duplex outlet counts for this purpose).
3) Doesn't matter which way you wrap the wire around the screw, as long as it's tight. It shouldn't be loosening, period.
4) 1800W divided by 120V gives 15A, not "over 16A".
the real Tesla would have charged cars from remote, without sending the customer a mains charger!
There's another common denominator in the construction or remodeling process. Occasionally a competent electrician is used, one who understands load calcs, amp draw, and wire sizing. Many more times than you would want to know about, you get the other kind of electrician.
Apprentices training on the public, contractors who have perennial negative cash flow problems, and workers right in the middle of not giving a damn.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
No, I did RTFA, unlike you, who RTFS. The issue being pointed out here is with the house's wiring. The wiring that is custom installed for the car, but is not installed by Tesla. The charger is merely protecting against potential faults in that wiring.
Simple : It's not the fault of the charger, but the new charger protects against deficiencies in other areas... like shoddy house wiring.
This signature is false.
If you RTFA you would see that Musk talks about home wiring not always being done properly, so in order to avoid leaving that variable up to chance, Tesla has sent out chargers that shut themselves off at a certain temperature. Its almost like he cares if his customers are happy and hes willing to do what it takes to alleviate as many issues as possible while using his product, even when not caused by his own product.
As opposed to designing the charger to handle this not-particularly-outlandish possibility to begin with?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
"The charger connectors, which tether Tesla-issued cables to wall outlets, will be mailed out in the next two weeks, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in an interview today. The replacements will be treated as a recall, though owners won’t be required to travel to service centers."
So it's a recall on the charger connectors. Not on the in house wiring.
The house wiring was not smoking or catching fire, it was the connectors.
So it was obviously a fault of the household wiring. But can be fixed by replacing the connectors.
Really?
You know what taking care of the customers is? Being honest. Like we are looking into it. And we found a possible issue, so we are sending a new connector. Not blaming it on the ghost in somebody else's work.
If there was a problem with in-house wiring, they would and should be fixing the issue there.
.
Nah, I RTFA.
So please. Do tell. What in house wiring issue makes the connector, not the in-house wires, overheat?
"You have some shitty wiring in your walls. It can set stuff on fire! But don't worry about the shit wiring job. Here's a new flameproof connector."
Geez. Yeah. Now that should make the customer sleep easier. In his house with the shit wiring.
.
House wiring is probable given the case....however, unlikely. As stated above, no one that actually enjoys their Tesla uses the house wiring to night charge. Might as well connect it to a USB charger.
The charger itself resides in the car. The connector is simply a 240V, high current (30 Amp or more) special purpose plug.
Plugs overheat due to bad (high resistance) connections. And when they do so, they tend to draw less current, not more (like a short circuit would). A standard fuse is not what you want. A thermal sensor that would drop the charger load would seem to be more appropriate here. Possibly with arc fault sensing as well. If the fault was in the wall receptacle, it sounds like the electrician f*cked up installing it.
Have gnu, will travel.
There is likely some regulation that the solution has to meet, like a UL or ETL standard. The parts used in those solutions have to be already UL approved or have to go through exhaustive testing. Its much easier to grab an off-the-shelf solution that already meets the regulation, they could get away with just paperwork on a revision and could skip re-testing.
I own a Tesla model S and was never very fond of how the adapters connect to the UMC cable. The UMC cable has a 5-pin connector on the end that plugs into the wall where it plugs into one of numerous adapters. The adapters contain pins for ground and the two 240V legs (not neutral) or the hot, neutral and ground for the 115V adapters. There's also a resistor in it that signals the amount of current that can be drawn between one of the pins and ground. I don't recall what the last pin is for.
The connector between the adapter and the cable is a weak link. I myself have had intermittent issues with my NEMA 14-30 adapter and the cable where just wiggling it causes a fault to show up. The adapter connector is not all that tight nor is it particularly secure. The pins are also rather small considering how much current they can be carrying (up to 40A).
A number of owners have reported that this connection between the UMC cable and the plug adapter has overheated or melted. While it sounds like in the case of the garage fire it was likely the fault of substandard wiring of the NEMA 14-50 outlet the UMC cables have been a known problem.
About a foot from this adapter cable is a small box that has a relay, GFI and some signalling circuitry to interface with the Model S.
I've only used the NEMA 14-50 adapter a couple of times since I have a separate high power wall connector that's hard-wired into my home (100A feed). I'm a lot more comfortable using that over the UMC cable but Tesla has to fix the early HPWCs as well. The resettable fuses are too sensitive so they recommend not charging at the full 80A. I myself have not had any problems at 80A but normally they reduce it to 60 until they send someone out to replace the fuses.
I don't think this will be a major setback for Tesla. The retail price of the UMC is $600 which means it probably costs a lot less to manufacture. I just hope that if they change that connector that they replace all of my adapters since I bought a number of additional ones (at $45 each) to handle NEMA 14-30, 10-30, 6-50 and 120v/20A.
The UMC is basically the equivalent of a normal J1772 EV charger but with a switchable plug and in a much smaller form factor. Hell, my HPWC charger is a fraction the size of most J1772 EV chargers yet it handles a lot more power than most J1772 adapters (and it doesn't even get warm when pumping 80A through it).
The UMC is nice since it means I can charge my car at any RV park that has a 240V hookup or that an owner just needs to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet which is a lot less expensive than either a high-power wall connector ($1200) or a standard EV charger.
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Indeed.
There's another common denominator in the construction or remodeling process. Occasionally a competent electrician is used, one who understands load calcs, amp draw, and wire sizing. Many more times than you would want to know about, you get the other kind of electrician.
Apprentices training on the public, contractors who have perennial negative cash flow problems, and workers right in the middle of not giving a damn.
the issue Vanderhoth mentions is way beyond a matter of competency. It was extremely unethical and possibly criminal endangerment. The exposed junction boxes were rigged up with hidden junctions (which are not up to code) in an attempt to hide all traces of Aluminum wiring, while still having the entire house wired with Aluminum. The Aluminum wiring is not a problem per se, but any junction with copper wires (like in those hidden junction boxes) can cause galvanic corrosion. The fact that the copper wires just came loose here shows that improper connections were made. Aluminum wire connections have been implicated in fires and hazard insurance will either not cover a home with aluminum wiring or the rates will be higher. If there was a fire, his insurer would probably try to not pay any claims because the wiring was misrepresented to them.
The real issue is whether an electrician follows the building code or not. The building code specs out basic things like gauge of wire for circuit breaker size, number of outlets, types of connections, etc. If an electrician follows the code, they will never have to really do any calculations to ensure proper wiring is done.
There's nothing wrong with the car that makes it fire prone... but we'll raise the clearance just because.
There's nothing wrong with the charger that caught fire... but we'll fix it anyway.
Seriously does anybody believe one word Musk says?
Engineers: People who, when finding out that their system might fail in your horrifically substandard conditions, attempt to address the problem present in your conditions and incorporate that knowledge of those conditions into the system, both in your version and the future.
I am not a crackpot.
Tribalism applied; it's actually basic Freud the same kind of stuff that gave birth to modern propaganda.
The tribal appeals work extremely well on primitive tribal minded people and is still somewhat effective on normal people. I would think the more extreme ones are the haters in these edge cases. It is not all that well hidden that there was an intentional strategy to attach traits to the tribal identity; denying global warming for example was actually planned. It is quite a brilliant way to control people; just as people wear, chant, and behave certain ways to be part of their "team" without much thought other than (I want to be in this group) people will tend to adopt positions of the group as well; the members indoctrinate each other but there is a strong pressure from the group identity underlying it all. You see it clearly in war propaganda, where the other tribe are baby eating inhuman monsters and merely doing something like them becomes unacceptable behavior. A recent example of how ridiculous (but effective) it can get is the "Freedom Fries" hate against our French ALLIES when the war propaganda machine turned against them.
Being a successful maverick/individualist businessman going against all odds etc, fits in well with the identity (as well as the tribal identity;) however, that doesn't have the level of propaganda behind it as these artificially appended traits which are also elevated to the level of it being taboo within the tribe. One can be in the tribe and be neutral on businessmen but if you are "green" that is a really huge taboo! It's as bad as taking a wife from an enemy tribe.
One could theorize... that these extra gullible tribal people are so easily gathered and controlled that all strongly cohesive groups form and thrive on this basis; therefore, such groups are tribal because non tribal groupings can't form that level of a monoculture (for lack of a better term.)
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The real issue is whether an electrician follows the building code or not. The building code specs out basic things like gauge of wire for circuit breaker size, number of outlets, types of connections, etc. If an electrician follows the code, they will never have to really do any calculations to ensure proper wiring is done.
Sure. But. Calculations are still required for amp draw per circuit (which determines wire size and breaker ampacity), particularly when a specialty appliance has the unique demands of an electric car charger.
With regard to new construction, codes are followed religiously precisely because city inspections are required.
Remodels are a horse of another color.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Not exactly... Tesla Model S has 4x lower risk of fire so far compared to 10-year-old on average cars, but at least 10x higher risk of fire in a collision (only 3% of gas cars catch fire in a collision).
It really wouldn't be Tesla's fault if developers were using cheap materials when building the house, but it is nice of them to do something to try and mitigate future issues after it becomes a known possibility. We can't account for every scenario that will ever occur, but we can learn as we go along.
And that is exactly what happened in this case, the problem was inside the junction box. (Not saying aluminum was used).
That Tesla can detect it in their charge adapter is great. I hope it sounds the car horn rather than simply stops charging. After all who knows how many upstream junction boxes were also over-heating from bad connections? Who knows what size breaker they decided to put in the main panel when the original one tripped?
Would it have been better if this had been thought of ahead of time? Probably.
But lets check all the other hybrid/electric cars and their chargers before we jealously hang Tesla out to dry.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The thing is that though the charger may not have initiated the house fire there have been a number of documented cases where the connector to the adapter on the UMC cable has overheated and in some cases melted. I have had intermittent connection problems with the 30A adapter I was using. The connector is not that great at making a solid connection and the conductors seem rather small considering that they could be carrying upwards of 40A.
I look forward to getting a new UMC cable though I hope they also replace all of the additional adapters I own. The car normally comes with the NEMA 14-50 and standard 120V adapters. I have all of the other adapters they make.
Now there have also been a number of fires caused by faulty home wiring with other cars as well such as the Leaf and Volt which draw far less current than the Tesla is capable of.
As the owner of a Tesla I think this is the right thing to do. Tesla has generally been very proactive at dealing with issues before some government agency tells them to and without fighting it. They generally treat the owners well.
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According to NEC, a standard 15 amp residential wall socket must be derated to 12 amps for any continuous load that lasts longer than 4 hours.
It is ILLEGAL for Teslas to be plugged into a standard 15 amp wall socket, and it is ILLEGAL for Teslas to be equipped with a NEMA-15 plug.
Or look it at from this perspective.
It's a cheap safety measure that will save the company from any bad press in case a customer does have shit wiring.
Look at the cost of the car, then look at the cost of the thermal sensor. It should have been there from the start.
Of course putting overheat protection in the charger plug only reduces the problem it doesn't solve it. It's perfectly possible for the wiring at the outlet to be just fine while further back in the circuit there is a bad connection or undersized wire.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Sure. But. Calculations are still required for amp draw per circuit (which determines wire size and breaker ampacity), particularly when a specialty appliance has the unique demands of an electric car charger.
Not really any math above addition, and possibly even that if they're running a dedicated circuit for the specialty appliance like they're supposed to. The electrician memorizes some figures/looks at a chart. Heck, I've seen the figures printed on the boxes.
NEMA 5-15(standard outlet): 14 gauge minimum(copper), 15A* max, 12A design
NEMA 5-20(has the notch): 12 gauge minumum, 20A max, 16A design
NEMA 14-30(dryer, 240V): 10 gauge, 30A max, 24A design
NEMA 14-50(range, 240V): 6 gauge, 50A max, 40A design.
The 'formula' for simple installs is easy: Look at the amperage of the product you're using. round UP to the next breaker size. Use specified wire gauge. Manufacturers tend to make this even easier because they tend to not produce appliances that are close enough in amp ratings that you'd need to skip the next largest breaker - IE they don't make appliances that use 'exactly' 30A, they'll produce a <24A model then if you need heavier duty a 32-40A one.
Though I'll note that space heaters and hair dryers today tend to assume that you have a 20A circuit, but there's reasons why the heaters are limited to 1500 watts and dryers to 1875(but they're only this powerful if you feed them 125V, nice advertising guys! In reality they'll be closer to 1.6kw in homes with proper voltage).
*Though to meet code it has to be manufactured to be capable of safe operation at 20A+
I don't read AC A human right
As I understand it they put some logic in to detect power 'stutters' that are likely to come from an overheating, failing connection.
I don't read AC A human right
There's no outlet at work, so I'd like to charge up my Tesla with my laptop.
That would be, unusually high resistance in the socket that the connector plugged into. That is, exactly the fault that the fire service fingered in this case.
(or without batteries) the thing is a toy.
this is a simple fact of life.
question for linus - who is git, and what is he objecting to?
Correct me if I'm wrong here but AIUI this is about the cable that tesla sells that has multiple adaptors so you can charge you car from your cooker circuit or your drier circuit or whatever. Not about the fixed chargers that are custom installed.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'd say that this is 20/20 hindsight in what's still a relatively new field. Do oven outlets normally have a temperature shutoff in them? It's the only other common household item that could be drawing over 30A on a routine basis that I can think of that actually has a plug, as opposed to being hardwired.
In-house testing problably got a most of the 1% stuff and almost all of the .1% problems., now they're working on the .01% problems with ~25k cars now in the field.
I don't read AC A human right
Because it's the fault of the houses wiring not the charger, but it's possible to build a charger with protection against that.
There are plenty of (much smaller) battery chargers and battery packs out there that incorporate thermal fuses, enough to where people complain about them blowing and accuse the manufacturers of planned obsolescence. Yes, most electric ovens are thermally fused, and pretty much every household dryer has one as well.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I think the thing to consider here is that there's probably a bevy of thermal sensors, fuses, and cutoffs in Tesla's cars. Same deal with the ovens and dryers - the sensors are within the appliance itself, not the outlet as I specified.
Basically, putting thermal sensors in a dryer near the heating elements/air stream to prevent damage there makes sense. Having one in the oven to shut it down before it reaches combustion temperatures also makes senses. Putting one in the plug to try to detect that the outlet is overheating is non-standard.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not certain what you're getting at or if you're trolling. Is it now Tesla's responsibility to make sure that the wiring in the home of ever Tesla owner is up to code? Frankly if the wiring is kludged any high-drain device runs the risk of sparking up a fire from a refridgerator to a massive Christmas light display.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
> Next step; posh neighborhoods with multiple Teslas discover that electric companies will eventually upgrade the grid to compensate for rising demand as there is money to be made from selling more power.
FTFY.
You are missing the point. When Elon said that the fault was in the house wiring, he was lying. Plain and simple. He should've just skipped the lie, said we found the issue, we are recalling the connectors (he actually _DID_ say that, google it), and sent out the replacement connectors (which he also did).
Resistance. In the socket. Which makes the connector overheat, start smoking and might set it on fire. Not the socket overheating. The connector. And the solution is to replace the connector, not the shitty socket that is mounted onto the wall. So you leave a crap socket in the house. That can set shit on fire. Wow dude.
Engineers: People who, when finding out that their system might fail in your horrifically substandard conditions, attempt to address the problem present in your conditions and incorporate that knowledge of those conditions into the system, both in your version and the future.
Thank you. The engineer bashing in the rest of the thread is disturbing.
I would probably be doing much of the same if I were in Musk's shoes. I'm a mechanical engineer and I design fire engines. Our products can literally be the difference between life and death and are used and abused for 20+ years. When something like this happens, we usually go overboard to address the problem, even if it was completely the user's fault and unlikely to happen ever again.
Why? Because this is what the customer will remember. Especially in a market like the automotive industry where a customer can go buy a very similar product from a different brand (I know Tesla doesn't have many competitors, but it will at some point) you want to kiss the customer's ass so that they will buy another one.
Nonsense, show another high current appliance that has a dedicated temperature sensor and overtemp fuse *in the plug*.
The higher temperature of the adapter could cause the aluminum wire to expand and pop off the plug terminals in the wall box, which can lead to arcing and fires.
That's not the mode of failure for aluminum wire. It has to do with oxidation. I lived with aluminum wire for years. My whole neighborhood had it. Those houses are still there today.
Yes. If the fire was in the socket, it's probably a wiring issue. Where 10 guage wire and a 20 or 30 amp commercial outlet should have been used, there was something stupid like 14 guage and a 15 amp outlet.
Now, if the outlet was supplied by Tesla and didn't specify what guage wire to use, that's a different story.
In this case though, it's dodgy house wiring in the wall socket that is caching fire, not able to handle a constant high current that it is supposed to be rated for.
No, the socket overheated and smoked, and then set on fire, not the connector. The solution is to replace the wiring, and socket in the house. However, this solution can only be carried out if you actually know that it's faulty. Thus, by installing a heat sensor in the connector, detecting the fault, shutting down safely, and notifying the home owner, you improve the situation, even though the connector was not at any point at fault.
It's good to get on top of these things.
Although, I do wonder what changed their mind, since less than a month ago there was no way, nope, not a chance that the Tesla charger had anything whatsoever to do with that garage fire. Nope, not a chance in heck.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/18/us-autos-tesla-fire-idUSBRE9BH1J020131218