Electricity made simple If you live in a suburb with overhead...

Electricity made simple

If you live in a suburb with overhead wires and poles then walk out your front door and look up. There will be four (main) wires going from pole to pole and the one nearest to you will be Neutral and the other three will be Actives (or Phase's). Every house will be connected to Neutral whilst every third house will be connected to the same Active. (If your house is thrust into a blackout then look at the neighbours to work out if it's general or localized.) The voltage between an Active and a Neutral is 240VAC and the voltage between any two Actives will be 415VAC.

This is a handy piece of information for any BEV owner as they may one day need to do this ....





using equipment that looks like this




Just between you and me and the lamp post, I actually believe there are commercial opportunities for homeowners to connect up through an Uber style app and turn their off-street driveways into filling stations, as let's face it, we all have the power.

Now getting onto power ... it is basically the same whether you are using AC or DC or both. Power out = power in x efficiency.

Voltage and current don't mean a thing what matters is power. I noticed a reference by T above in regard to a statement by me that a Tesla takes 9 hours to charge so lets look at the math/s.

An upscale Tesla has an 85kWh battery. This means it can deliver 85kW in one hour or 8.5kW in 10 hours.
A standard power outlet in an Aussie home is rated at 240V @10A. The maximum power it could deliver is 2400W or 2.4kW. Using these power outlets to charge an 85kWh Tesla battery from dead flat to 100% (not actual reality) would take 35.4H.

If we upped the amperage to 20A we could do it in 17.7H and if we upped it to 40A we could do it in a mind blowing 8.85H.

So to charge a dead flat Tesla battery in 9H would require 240VAC @ 40A which would be getting close to the max that an ordinary single phase home could muster. With a 3 phase supply one could obviously get a much better outcome down to a few hours or less subject of course to the size of connection cables, plugs and sockets and the arrangement of internal battery connections as in serial/parallel and so on.

In reality a Tesla would never be flat but may still have a decent charge when it pulls into the home driveway so the actual charge time will be much shorter and my understanding is that they only charge to 80% of their capacity anyway.

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