kpj said:
Thank you for all the valuable input. This forum is great.
I charge my car at work and at least for now I only need to charge at home occasionally during weekend if I don't have enough juice for one-way 15 mile commute on Monday. So I was basically looking for the cheapest solution for occasional home charging.
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You have received some horribly bad responses and some very good responses.
Keep in mind that if circuits in your garage do not have separate ground wire that the installation is very old.
I think the change in the code to separate ground wire was sometime in the 1950s or early 1960s.
I have experience with the early Romex manufactured in the 1940s and it is an absolute fire hazard disaster. If it is that old every last piece of it needs to be replaced.
If it is 1950s or early 1960s it might be OK, but keep in mind that all plastic materials eventually become brittle. It might still be tolerable, but at some point it will become unsafe and should be replaced.
It would be better, smarter, and safer to go ahead and put in proper new cables for power to your garage and not even consider using such old cables for 120V EVSE charging.
A repeat of my input from previous questions on 120 V EVSE use:
Note that Nissan recommends the 120V EVSE for limited emergency use only.
Some people have used it for a long time without problems yet, but in general that is a bad idea unless you have a newly properly installed dedicated circuit with high grade receptacle using properly tightened screw connections.
Previous info from another thread:
mikelb said:
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Trickle charging should be safe, though, right? I wouldn't necessarily need to have the circuit certified for it or anything, should I? If I were to go to a friend's house, would I be safe plugging into their outlet?
How safe 120V charging is depends on how lucky you are.
Very few garages have the correct properly installed high quality single outlet supplied by a single breaker.
Code only allows using 80% of the circuit rating for a long term continuous load.
So on a 15 amp circuit nothing else should be on the same circuit while the car is charging.
And a lot of 120V gets put in poorly using push in connections.
One person had a bad fire most likely from staples that had damaged the cable in the wall.
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