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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."
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.
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
This is a 100% serious reply - Once upon a time, software developers selected beta testers, who used the software with the understanding that it was still in a beta version and bugs should be expected and documented.
Now, no such "testing" occurs in both the software and hardware realms. The developers or manufacturers simply develop something that compiles or doesn't collapse under its own weight and sells it as the release version to customers that expect all that testing to have been done already, so it works. Customers pay full price, the shit crashes or falls apart(or catches fire), they complain to the company describing what happened, and then the company documents what happened and gives the customer a "new" but equally faulty piece in exchange.
There is no more "beta" testing - the beta testers are now referred to as "early adopters."
-- Ethanol-fueled
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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Older houses from the mid 20th century may have aluminum wiring, which turned out to be a really bad idea. They tried it because the cost of copper was going up and the cost of aluminum was going down, but it turns out that the properties of the two metals are different and the aluminum wires performed really poorly over time.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There is a man, lets call him Keith. Keith thinks that repair men and contractors are overpriced, and decides he can do it himself. He does this, and it works...for now.
People haven't stopped beta testing. Either in hardware or software. They have been quicker to release because the vast majority of software nowadays are done inside a sandbox (mobile apps, cloud servers, etc) rather than from scratch.
It's not like software or hardware back then was any more reliable. Office, OS9, Windows (all versions) have always been plagued with problems and one can argue they have fewer obvious bugs now than they did before - When's the last time you got a BSOD?
The counterbalance is that the consumer base is far far far larger now. Some of us who were at Intel at the height of the Pentium 4 were happy to have sold 40M units in a year. Mobile phone processors at qualcomm nowadays clear 400M/quarter.
If it seems like hardware and software bugs show up faster, it is because the userbase that uses and report such bugs (easy to do now via social media) is much much much larger.
This is a 100% serious reply - Once upon a time, software developers selected beta testers, who used the software with the understanding that it was still in a beta version and bugs should be expected and documented.
Now, no such "testing" occurs in both the software and hardware realms. The developers or manufacturers simply develop something that compiles or doesn't collapse under its own weight and sells it as the release version to customers that expect all that testing to have been done already, so it works. Customers pay full price, the shit crashes or falls apart(or catches fire), they complain to the company describing what happened, and then the company documents what happened and gives the customer a "new" but equally faulty piece in exchange.
There is no more "beta" testing - the beta testers are now referred to as "early adopters."
-- Ethanol-fueled
That sounds like an adequate description of pretty much all software development these days, roll it out on schedule, we'll deal with bugs (or deny there are any) later on. That or just ignore customer complaints as long as the software continues to sell: Windows is the most notorious example, but they are far from alone in this practice.
Suffice to say, I get the constant feeling of denying elementary physics (let alone chemistry) whenever there's talk of selling electric cars. It takes a certain and large amount of energy to propel something as heavy as an automobile around. Discharge of batteries is not 100% efficient (though very good compared to charging), charging is less efficient (using more power from the wall than is actually stored in the battery) and some loss of battery performance and capacity happens over time.
A friend bought a Nissan Leaf and became acutely aware of how wind strength and direction; hills and use of something as simple as the ventilation fan affected the range of the car on one charge. Also how terribly slow it charges off 120. Ideally a high current 240 outlet should be available for charging.
Perhaps that outlet in the garage the contractor wired up at the time of home construction or renovation was sufficient for a chest freezer or washing machine, which didn't continue to draw a high current for hours on end, like the charger for the Tesla does.
Anyone buying one of these cars would do well to make sure their wiring is up to the load and a proper circuit breaker and smoke alarm are handy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My 20A appliance loop in the kitchen has 15A receptacles because, heyyyyyyy, you're not really going to draw 20A out of these right? Those 2000 watt appliances don't go on a 20A loop that can pass 2200 watts... I use a Breville 1800W toaster oven drawing over 16A through one receptacle. One 15A receptacle on 20A wiring.
Most 15A receptacles are rated for 20A pass-through, so they should be perfectly fine to use on a 20A line. The only time you should need a 20A receptacle is if you have a single device with a 20A T-shape plug.
I found some steel wire in ours. The conductors were about three times the thickness that copper ones usually are.
I was changing a switch and it took two of us, a jemmy and a car jack to bend the sodding wires to the right shape,
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
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.
Because you can pull 15A from one of them? The requirement for using 15A outlets on a 20A breaker is that there be more than one outlet.
Whats the incidence rate of this sort of thing again?
Can you point me to a specific hardware or software product from your "golden age" which had a 0% defect rate?
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.
""Occasionally the wiring isn't done right" --- ?!?!?! Seriously?"
Residential wiring doesn't have rigorous quality control checks and is frequently as fucked up as a concrete bicycle.
Browse home inspector horror stories for pics of some of the worse examples, then remember very few homes are inspected by pros after construction.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
"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.
.
My Dad did the wiring in our house. He also did wiring inspection for Boeing.
I don't fly.
There have been a number of problems with the UMC (cable in question). The cable has an adapter on the end to choose from a variety of plugs, i.e. NUMA 14-50, NUMA 14-30 standard 120v, NEMA 10-30, 6-50, etc.
I myself have seen issues where my NEMA 14-30 adapter would give a fault if the cable was bumped. The connection between the adapter and the cable is not all that solid and a number of owners have had issues with this.
About a foot away from this connector is a control box that contains a GFI and a relay and the circuitry to interface to the car.
The adapter has 5 pins on it. One for ground, one for each 240V leg (neutral is not used) and a pin that appears to go to a resistor to signal the amount of current supported by the adapter. I don't remember what the last pin does. Anyway, for the amount of current the NEMA 14-50 and 6-50 adapters carry the pins are rather small. The adapter also doesn't always securely latch to the cable which can lead to a bad connection causing the adapter and/or cable to melt.
I don't think this will be a big setback for Tesla. Tesla's retail price for this cable is $600.
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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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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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Which is why I like New Zealand's approach (presuming it hasn't changed in the years since I read about it): You can wire your own home so long as you get it inspected, AND the government provides the information you need to know to do it right. Only if you want to do it for a profit (e.g. by wiring other people's homes) do you have to be a licensed electrician.
This is different to the Australian model, which is literally "if you want to replace even a broken light socket, even in your own home, you need to do an electrical apprenticeship with a registered authority, take a three year electrical course, obtain your electrician's license, and THEN you can replace the broken light socket in your own home as well as wiring homes and businesses for profit."
Guess which country had the higher electrical accident casualty rates? Hint: it wasn't the country they filmed Lord of the Rings in.
Nanny states have child citizens.
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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My problem is I've had more bad experiences with contractors than good. My first house (brand new) with a circuit in the kitchen where the GFI would constantly trip. I opened all of the outlets and switches to check the wires and everything was fine. I finally had enough and pulled off the fuse panel cover. Glad I did. The hot wire was just leaning against contacts. The set screw wasn't even close to being tight. Not only was this a professional but it also passed inspection. The wire had lots of arcing damage and needed to be replaced.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In the USA, NFPA 70 code (NFPA 70 NEC 2014 Table 210.21(B)(3)) allows for a 15A outlets on a 20A breaker. The parallel prong outlets are rated at 15A (e.g. NEMA 5-15R), but there are 20A outlets, which have both regular (straight) prong and a T or perpendicular pong, which is rated at 20A (NEMA 5-20R).
If it seems like hardware and software bugs show up faster, it is because the userbase that uses and report such bugs (easy to do now via social media) is much much much larger.
This. Let's say that Problem X is generally only going to be encountered by 1 out of 1k users per year. If you have a beta group of 1k users and have them test it for 1 year(incredibly large and long in today's environments) you may or may not have it pop up, I believe the odds are around 50-50 in this case of you getting at least 1 instance.
Now you release it to the public where it's sold to 100M users who proceed to use it for a decade. You're near certain to get a number of cases that rounds to 1M, which is a big problem...
I don't read AC A human right
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
Yeah, Aluminum wiring really sucks, which is why all of the high voltage transmission lines in the US are made of it.
Like with anything "best" depends on what your criteria are.
For a given resistance an aluminium cable will be lighter and cheaper than a copper cable. IIRC witht he right alloys it also self-supports for longer distances. On the other hand aluminium (especially older alloys*) needs careful termination practices to avoid joints that fail over time.
For long overhead and underground cables which are maintained and altered by well trained jointers the advantages of aluminium outweigh the disadvantages. For house wiring which is often maintained and altered by householders or cowboy tradesmen and where joints are much more frequent things are the other way round.
* Pure aluminium is almost never used for anything because it's too soft, practical aluminum is nearly always alloyed and the details of the alloy can significantly affect eht properies of the material. This creates the further complication that different aluminium alloys have different termination requirements.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
Incorrect in almost every way.
1. NEC doesn't 'derate' anything.
2. an up to code 15A wall socket is good for 15A, period. Probably 20A(they're rated for 20A passthrough; it's fairly common to run a 20A circuit with more 15A sockets). It's the wiring behind the socket that's the real concern...
3. The 12A is for 'dedicated load' use when designing a dedicated circuit(or deciding whether you need one). IE if you KNOW what an outlet is going to be used for before you install it. Maximum design load on a circuit is 80% of the Max. Because 15-20A circuits normally power multiple devices, there are more rules there, like how many outlets are allowed on a circuit. Due to the tendency to use heating appliances in kitchens(toasters, microwaves, etc..), there's fewer outlets allowed per circuit, and 20A is much more likely to be required. So if you're looking at a 14A device, you're required to install a 20A circuit, not a 15. This is partially to avoid having to redo work when the customer replaces said item with a 'heavy duty' one that draws just a touch more...
4. If you're putting an outlet on the circuit, the circuit must be rated for what can plug into said outlet.
5. Besides, Tesla Model S only draws 1.4kw when pluged into a NEMA5-15, 100 watts LESS than a common (US) space heater on 'high'.
I don't read AC A human right
It is also worth mentioning, with all this Tesla fire hype: Recalling parts for safety reasons in the automotive industry is the rule not the exception. Almost every model from every car manufacturer has had some parts or systems recalled. Fire is the cause of a significant percentage of recalls. It is hard to get exact numbers as each country has it's own database. I looked at the US one quickly for an example. Selected a random model and year (Aluma 2009), and sure enough there were three recalls for that year alone. The first one i clicked had the text "THIS DEFECT COULD RESULT IN A FIRE.".
Given the percentage of the vehicle fleet that is made of Teslas, this is not really relevant news.
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.