QueenBee said:
Levi8than said:
Sorry, I just have a big problem with someone selling very unsafe products like the "quick 220 child shock and fire starter cable". The Juicebox is trying to be marketed as a EVSE product like you'd buy from any of the major manufacturers but it's really just a preassembled DIY EVSE.
I'm not familiar with this "quick 220 child shock and fire starter cable" you refer to is, but I assure you this box is pretty well designed. When it's properly respected, electricity is nothing to be afraid of. The thick rubber boot on the charging cable more than exceeds the minimum thickness required for carrying such a meager voltage and amps. And the box it comes in is solid. I'm impressed at how well built these things are.
I'm also not certain what marketing you're referring to. EMW is a startup. This EVSE was a kickstarter project.
This isn't a big corporation, it's just a handful of hardworking engineers, so give them some slack.
The SW issues are growing pains. A big company like GE may be able to purchase 12 of every electric vehicle on the market, then have each of those vehicles testing continuously in parallel to verify every possible corner case of use you could imagine. But a small shop like EMW is working from 3 or 4 different cars and probably fewer engineers. They're likely to miss a corner use case, like charging only on the 12th saturday of each month between 3am and 3:36am. But they're doing things right for how small they are. Just give them a chance.
I picked up the kit because I didn't feel that spending a grand on a name brand relay made any sense. With the big brand relays you're really just paying for the paint job and pretty LEDs on the box. I guess some people like that. I was more interested in the SW being open sourced, so I could replace the SW with my own bare bones version and maybe add my own pretty lights.. And someday re-purpose my box box to hang 2 charging cables off of it. I've got the plans in my head of how to do it. I'd just need to order a second rely, second charging cable, and a handful of current pickups, which are all listed part for part on EMW's website.
I agree that as long as the ground fault handling is being done in SW and the SW is user-upgrade-able, this box may not end up being UL listed. But I have complete faith that if they put their minds to it, they'll be able to get a listed box out there. The bar for UL listing is fairly low, I've seen AC cables that wouldn't stand up to a fingernail scratch get the UL logo on them. It's more about coming up with the funds to pay UL for the pleasure of putting their logo on your device.
I think what EMW is doing is great. But I'm an engineer and a tinkerer, so I'm partial to things I can look inside of and know exactly how they work. So as long as they're standing behind their project and doing their best to fix things when issues arise, kudos to them.
