ENERGY: How to prep your home for an electric car

nctimes.com ^

[Jet Jaguar]

Getting your home ready to charge an electric car will either require little time or money ---- or a couple of months and thousands of dollars. It depends on what kind of electric car you buy, the wiring in your home and how quickly you want to juice your ride.

[Keith in Iowa]

How will you power the Honda generator?

A big-ass gas can. :)

[Red_Devil 232]

[freedumb2003]

>>only 45% of US juice is from coal<<

OK, so electrics are hybrids — only 45% coal-powered (LOL).

[sionnsar]

With an electric car, the upside is no annual maintainance costs. There are no moving parts that wear out or have to be replaced.

No moving parts? That's quite a trick! A couple of years ago I had to have a 4WD hub replaced -- it would have been really nice if it didn't require moving parts. But my vehicle is only 20th-century technology.

OTOH, batteries wear out and have to be replaced. Do they have a free exchange program? (Like I don't have for my cellphone? *\;^)

[jettester]

Like the libs that forced new homes built in NorthCal earlier this decade to include an outlet for charging a car in our garage - 8 freaking years ago!!! These loons have been on this course far too long...

[ully2]

Its not BS my freaking neighbor hood transformers are near their limits without electric cars plugged in, use your head.

[Ditter]

Any idea how much is will cost to charge your car for 8 hours?

[goldstategop]

Emergency surgery completed in record time. LOL!

All is well with the patient!

[freedumb2003]

>>AP articles have to be excerpted, unless you want to personally foot the leagal bills.<<

So we leave that to the leagal eagals?

;)

[NVDave]

It depends on the pole pig’s rating and how many households are on it.

I’ve seen neighborhoods where five homes are wired into one 15kVA pig. Get two people on that transformer who have electric cars in addition to the house loads and that’s a soon-to-be-ex transformer.

I’ve seen transformers fail because two people on the same transformer installed hot tubs with 40A 240V circuits for them. There were seven households wired into that 15kVA pig.

Utilities often let these situations go until something fails. I’ve never been able to convince a utility or co-op to install any additional distribution transformers until one has failed. Never. And that situation with two hot tubs was so blinding obvious in the overload, it was absurd. There was a 27V swing in the 240V voltage when the two hot tubs came on concurrently. I could just put my Fluke on the drop from the transformer to either one of those houses (by opening their breaker box and putting the meter across the two hot leads from the meter) and just yell across the street to have both parties turn up the heat on their hot tubs. No dice until it went bye-bye.

If you’re on your own pig (which in many new developments might be a 15kVA ground-mount transformer), or you’re in a situation where you’re sharing a 25kVA pig or ground-mount, you should do OK, even if both households were to get electric cars.

[Ditter]

he he That's what I thought you would say. Not much saving there, not cash in your pocket, the environment but it will make the greenies FEEL so good about themselves. LOL!

[nascarnation]

The reality is that these cars will number in the tens of thousands at most for a very long time to come.
Won’t have economic payback unless gasoline prices escalate dramatically.
Europe and Japan have fuel price much higher than US and don’t have significant electric car sales yet that I know of.

[Jet Jaguar]

Please excerpt my post.

My bad.

[SC Swamp Fox]

What will the electric car do to your electric bill? How many kilowatts will be needed to charge the battery?

Using some of the claims above and my local cost of electricity:
3300 watts (on a 120V line)
20 hours (on a 120V line)
3300 x 20 / 1000 = 66 kw-hrs
$0.10 cost per kw-hr (Progress Energy SC))
66 x .10 = $6.60 cost of a full charge
100 miles on a full charge
$6.60 / 100 = $0.066 Electricity cost per mile

For comparison, assuming $2.80/gallon and 32 mpg, a gasoline powered car will consume $0.088 of gas per mile.

I'm not going to rush out and buy one.

[crz]

So here is the thing. They want us to eventually have a car that would allow us to only commute intercity, back and forth to work. Then, if we have to travel long distance, they want us to use mass public transportation and go through TSA type screenings to use that system.

End result? Complete control over the population.

They control the electric grid, the healthcare, the public and mass transportation, food,..everything.

And the American people will go right along with it since it is “for their own good”.

[exDemMom]

People with long commutes, such as the farmer/former physicist in the article, will certainly be charging their cars during the day.

I wasn’t thinking so much of the load on the power plant at any given time, as the fact that more fuel will be required by the plant to generate the extra electricity, even if all the cars charge at non-peak times. Not only that, but cranking up power production to accommodate electric cars will increase wear and tear on the plants, necessitating more down-time for maintenance.

There is no getting around the fact that more power plants will have to be built if a significant number of people start using electric cars.

[Jet Jaguar]

Thanks for fixing it.

[lacrew]

I think that there will be plenty of moving parts on these cars to break.
I wonder what its like repairing a ‘regenerative braking system’...and I’m sure the batteries (only warranteed to 80k miles) put a dent in the pocketbook. I ran some numbers, with subsidy, and the break even was 400k miles, assuming only one battery replacement. I don’t think there are enough dumb greenies to buy all these cars, so the gubmint will buy them for their fleet, and declare a green success.

[freedumb2003]

>>Using some of the claims above and my local cost of electricity:
3300 watts (on a 120V line)
20 hours (on a 120V line)
3300 x 20 / 1000 = 66 kw-hrs
$0.10 cost per kw-hr (Progress Energy SC))
66 x .10 = $6.60 cost of a full charge
100 miles on a full charge
$6.60 / 100 = $0.066 Electricity cost per mile

For comparison, assuming $2.80/gallon and 32 mpg, a gasoline powered car will consume $0.088 of gas per mile.<<

Liberals really don’t like math — it is too fact-based.

[Mad Dawgg]

I have the perfect solution!

I will develop an ethanol burning Generator to charge Electric Cars! The Environuts will love me and I will make Billions when my lobbyists get Congress to make my generator a mandatory purchase by anyone who drives in the USA.