Dangerous Disconnect: Tesla Home Charging Problem Analyzed And Corrected

electric vehicle home charging is extremely safe when done correctly unfortunately I'm seeing more and more people experience problems with their home charging equipment and that's really due to a number of things including not torquing the connections properly using the wrong type of wire and also using components that are lowcost budget pieces that weren't designed for the duty cycle that electric vehicle charging imposes and I'm afraid this is going to continue to happen as electric vehicle adoption continues to rise in today's video I'm going to visit the home of a Tesla owner in San Antonio Texas that has a charging equipment Nightmare on his hands I'm going to inspect the system rip out the damaged wiring and components and get the electrons flowing back into his Tesla Model y a few days ago I was checking out the comment stream in the Tesla Model y Facebook group where I'm one of the admin and one of the members posted pictures of a melted junction box basically saying look I've got this problem at my house I need some help this is what he wrote hey all any smart electricians so I moved into a new house about 2 years ago the house had a 60 amp breaker that led to a sub panel in the back of the house I had an electrician run a wire to install my generator 3 charger I think he meant gen 3 charger there inside my garage and for the past few days I was smelling chemicals it turns out the electrician installed a disconnect that ended up melting looking at the Tesla guide I think they don't want a disconnect Tesla also recommends a 60 amp breaker and six AWG wire but but 60 amp requires four AWG why would Tesla recommend 6 AWG I felt like the reason this happened is because the 6 AWG is not sufficient or maybe a disconnect isn't designed for all day charging and only used for surges I've been reading a lot and wondering if there's an expert in the group I've contacted a lot of electricians with different theories and if after reading that I realized Dylan could use some help so I messaged him and asked him if he'd like to collaborate with me on this I promised to fix his system for free if he worked with me on shooting a video of this whole process he agreed and we set the plan in motion I then contacted my channel sponsor cerit and asked them to contact one of their electric vehicle charging installation specialists in San Antonio Texas and set up a repair date as soon as possible my goal was to get Dylan back charging within 10 days of his original Facebook post so here we are a couple days later and tomorrow morning I'm going to get up at 3:00 in the morning and fly to San Antonio Texas to meet the CIT installers from charge proo Texas that's the cerit licensed contractor in the area that they conted they're going to meet me at their house I'm also going to meet a master electrician that's flying in from California because he and I are going to first diagnose the whole problem we're going to talk about it on camera talk about what the issues were what caused the problems and what we're going to do to remedy the situation the goal is for me to fly to Austin figure out what's going on there make the repairs shoot the video and be back on a plane in the same day day so in a couple of hours I'm going to be leaving for San Antonio let's see how this all works out this video as well as all of the videos here on state of charge is sponsored by qmerit once I've helped you decide which electric vehicle charger you're going to buy then follow the link in the description of my videos and have qmerit install it all right so I'm here in San Antonio just landed about an hour ago I'm at Dylan's house we're taking a quick look at what's going on here we have the electricians outside looking at the panel outside to see exactly where there's issues we know there's an issue here but we have a feeling There's issues in other places in the house also so I want to first of all thank Dylan for giving us the opportunity to come out here and fix your problem and uh tell me a little bit about what uh is going on here well I've actually had a few of problems so the first one was uh we have a junk box in the back of the house and it was fed with aluminum wire and that kind of like fried I guess electrician came out and taped things off then I a second problem the second problem we had a uh Bricker go bad in the main panel and then I didn't have a problem for about a year and all of a sudden this happened so when you had the breaker go bad electrici came out and just swapped the breaker correct yeah so and and that that's going to be another problem that we're going to have to deal with later because we took a quick look at it already and they shouldn't have just swapped the breaker they should have either replaced your bus bar or your entire panel because where the breaker went bad it charred the whole bus bar and the the breaker on the other side of the bus bar that should have all been replaced so you know it uh looks like somebody just came in and did the bare minimum that they could now this house is only 2 years old it's built in 2022 uh all done licensed permitted by licensed electrici the Tesla charger was installed by a perm you you had a permit pull that was a licensed local electrician so you would think everything would be fine but it looks like it's not um what happened when you realized that there was a serious problem out here I mean how did you even notice that this was going to was looking like that well I I smelt you know it wasn't a burn smell it smelt a little bit like a chemical smell and uh the car just stopped charging and I decided to take a look here and the entire piece piece was uh you can see melted yeah so uh I knew just to turn the power off and then call a licensed electrician I'm not a licensed electrician but I do this a lot now and one of the things that I noticed is that these pullout disconnects shouldn't be used with electric vehicle charging um you should have the scissor type disconnects uh these seem to fail a lot so if anybody has a disconnect on their uh Chargers and they use this type of a thing thing where see this this is supposed to pull out it's like melted and welded now these they're to code that's the crazy thing is even aluminum wire is to code but uh I think the code has to catch up with electric vehicle charging because it seems like these type of disconnects which I'm getting a lot of my followers send me pictures that they're failing but the scissor type ones don't I'm going to talk a little bit later to a master electrician specialist that we brought out to the site here to go over your whole system and I'm expecting him to tell me the same thing but we really haven't talked about this yet all right so um uh we're going to make it right we're going to get you up and running today we're going to swap out all the aluminum wire you've got a huge run of aluminum wire going around the house might be 100 ft long they did use copper going from this disconnect to the Tesla charger but that's the only copper that they used and um I just think the aluminum wire is just one of maybe three or four errors that were made here in the installation we're going to go over all them we're going to figure it out and we're going to get you charging your Tesla again really appreciate it all right thanks for letting me come out here and do this thanks all right so I'm here with Matt Trout from qit those of you who follow my channel might remember Matt Matt and I did a charger installation safety video about six or seven months ago maybe it was even longer maybe it was like a year ago where we talked about the Nema 1450 outlets and how if you don't buy a good quality Outlet it can fail and lead to problems we're here now at Dylan's house and there's no Outlet involved that this is a hardwire installation which we tend to promote tell people hardwire is better it's safer and it generally is but it has to be done correctly for it to be safe and arriving here at Dylan's house it appears that this was not done correctly safely which is why he had the problem you just did an inspection of this whole system it seems like you found multiple problems could you tell a little bit about what's what's going on here yeah so multiple problems here we started off with the main electral panel uh the main electral panel actually had some melting occurring on the the on the breaker that was actually feeding a back sub panel so the back sub panel was ran uh they had aluminum wiring going from the main panel to the sub panel uh then from the sub panel they they demoed the guts of it and then they just splice it inside of there uh kind of find out they actually had problems there also so shortly before you see the problem right behind me uh before that they had an issue inside of the main uh sub panel in the back where that actually melted also so he had melted main breaker uh at his main panel melted sub panel and now a melted disconnect here so that was all ran with aluminum wiring they then put RX wiring which is an NMB on the back on a 60 amp breaker which is not up to code um for a 60 amp breaker and then they ran it into this disconnect here so this disconnect here is a pull out disconnect which typically we do not use let me grab it while we're talking about it so go ahead yeah so the the the pull out disconnect is right here it's actually completely melted on to where you can't pull it out anymore uh so that disconnect went right up here and they it looks like they could have had a loose connection or maybe it wasn't torqued properly which created some heat and then that main that main pull out went here and it actually singed all the the plastic together it got so hot it melted it together cuz I noticed this is aluminum W I mean this is copper from this disconnect to the Tesla charger it's only about 2 feet they did use aluminum wi so if you just opened it up you would think everything's okay yeah so the aluminum wiring is from the main panel to the back sub panel they spliced it in there from aluminum to copper and then brought Copper from the back disconnect over to this disconnect right so the the the problem for here that we're seeing here probably had nothing to do with aluminum wires that the aluminum wire ratio probably was at the main panel that caused the the the breaker to melt from first so two problems with that aluminum wiring so the aluminum wiring did have a problem in the main panel and it also had a problem in the back sub panel so when I first got here Dylan let us know that it did melt at the back sub panel also so anytime that you you connect aluminum wire iring you're going to have the expansion and contraction which creates loose loose connections which creates heat yeah so this disconnect okay from what I understand because this is 60 amps or less it doesn't require a disconnect that is correct so but I mean there's there's nothing wrong with putting a disconnect on it's it's an extra point of failure but I mean if it's done correctly it should be fine why did this fail so th this one failed here for a couple reasons the the one of the main reasons that I see and we weren't here when it actually failed so we don't know for sure but there's two potential problems that could have happened one of them is these screws here were not torqued properly if the screws aren't torqued properly it will start to create heat which then will create the melting uh the other issue that it could have been is that this is a pullout disconnect now these aren't really made for continuous usage these are more of like an AC disconnect where it goes on and off throughout the day um with EV charging though we have a continuous use so the the charger could be working for up to 8 hours uh and then that's what's going to create that heat which is is what we're seeing here so if you are going to put a disconnect in the disconnect that we typically use is a knife style disconnect it's been it's a commercial grade uh that will be able to handle that continuous usage of of EV charging those are the ones that put you pull down that is correct yeah okay yeah so you you don't want one of these I actually have one of these not for my EV charging but for my central air conditioning that's correct uh you know and uh and actually I have a garage heater and I have it in the garage heater it's a low low amperage garage heater because I know in the summer I just pull this out because I said I don't want it being turned on by mistake but not for EV charging okay so and one of the things I want to point out about you talked about torquing these to the right um uh you know amount of torque I've seen my followers um have issues with over torquing cor not just a lot of people think well it's got to be torqued tightly enough so if I just keep cranking on it and torque it stronger it it'll be good but what happens is the wire's supposed to be a certain thickness and if you just keep cranking on that thing and mash it down now it's not as thick as it's supposed to be and you also have the problem so you know it's it's very important that on all your EV charging installation all of the connections are torqued to the proper torque you know amount not over not under and that's one of the reasons why I brought CIT out here to fix this because I know there's a couple golden rules with CIT don't use aluminum wires use all the right equipment like you wouldn't use a a disconnect like this you'd use the the knife style disconnect and I know torquing all the connections is Paramount because I see it in your meetings and stuff all the time you know you're my my channel sponsor we talk about this stuff and I've also tossed some issues to CIT when my followers have sent me problems like this and I said guys what do you think happened here and you know just from you know a th000 miles away looking at a picture this is probably wasn't torqued properly because that that seems to be the the issue a a lot so we're going to swap all this out now yeah so we're actually going to swap this out we're going to get rid of the disconnect because this is on the 60 amp breaker which we do not require a disconnect here and Dylan actually has a very beautiful garage and and he wants less uh less boxes on the wall and a little cleaner look so we don't need this we're going to get rid of this it's just another point of potential failure so uh main breaker we're actually running a complete new line from the main panel across the house and we're going to hardwire a brand new Tesla charger into place right where this hole is coming through to give them a nice nice clean look yeah and and that's the right thing to do the charg is probably okay probably but since we're here doing everything right and he Dylan's had so many problems in the past he's had electricians here three or four times to deal with all these problems it's it's good to just no you know new service eliminate this get rid of all the aluminum wire pull copper wire Swap this out and dy's going to be good to go that's correct and the last thing that we're going to actually do also is because his main panel the bus bar was burnt as we we seen a little while ago so we're actually going to be addressing that issue also to where he's got to Brak brand new install he's got brand new bus bar that's not overheated and melted uh anytime you have any kind of of heat on a bus bar it's not as conductive anymore so it was actually fried in a couple of areas on his panel and I saw that so yeah we're going to we're going to address that problem also so brand new line All Copper THHN wire uh coming over to the the Tesla wall connector and he's going to he's going to be able to finally charge without having issues absolutely and here's the interesting thing that I find interesting about all of this work was permanent and inspected and it was all up to code MH so it's not like you know he had his neighbor come over and do all this work everything here was to code the problem that we're seeing now with electric vehicle charging equipment is the code needs to catch up with EV charging because all of these things in in in in his system here between the The Breakers the eaten Breakers in the panel the aluminum wiring this pull out disconnect these work fine for normal household loads air conditioning even if you had a welding equipment in the garage you'd never see these problems we're seeing these problems today because EV charging equipment doesn't matter that it says Tesla it could be an nlx juice box it could be a charge point it could be a Grizzly that doesn't matter it's the load that matters requires more of a of of a load than anything else in your house as a matter of fact when you're charging your EV you may be pulling more power than your house and two of your neighbor houses combined at the same time and you're doing it sometimes every night for four 5 6 hours and that load that duty cycle exceeds what these things were designed to do even though you say well this should be a 60 amp panel it should this shouldn't happen it doesn't happen under normal use the code needs to I think evolve with electric vehicle charging equipment right that is correct yeah so the code is catching up to what we're seeing out in the field and a lot of the products that were designed this was not designed for an electric vehicle charger you know the breakers that we seen outside are not designed for an electric vehicle charger doesn't mean that they were done wrong they were absolutely up to code just like aluminum wiring aluminum wiring is still up to code it's it is legal to use uh it's just not the safest option that we could do for EV charging and it's it unfortunately it is rearing its ugly head you know and that's why I partnered with CIT honestly and that's why I had a lot of companies that wanted to sponsor state of charge but um as you know if you watch my videos I talk a lot about safety and I know that the network of contractors they know electric vehicle charging equipment installations they use more expensive disconnect bars they use copper wiring which cost way more per foot than than aluminum wirings they every C contractor uses torque wrenches to torque all the connections so they know everything is done right and is it possible that it might cost more because you're using better equipment and better wire and all that stuff yeah you might pay I don't know 34 $500 more for installation than if you hire you know the local license electrician which what Dylan hired to do this his local licensed electrician but did it did it end up saving the money well it did because CIT actually um took on this job for free we're doing this repair for Dylan for free we're not charging or anything we're swapping everything out at no cost to Dylan but in normal circumstances you'd be paying I don't know a couple thousand dollars for what we're doing yeah we're replacing his panel pulling all the copper wire it's got like 100t of copper wire taking this out installing a new charger so you end up you know it's like you know Pennywise and dollar foolish and um you know just get it done right the first time even if you don't use use CIT I recommend use CIT but whoever you use Grill your electrician ask them about charging a vehicle uh equipment experience how many how many electric vehicle charging equipment uh installs has he done does he use a torque wrench uh you know does he use only aluminum wire you know does he use pull out disconnects you know or all these things ask your electrician these questions to make sure that you're getting it done right because quite honestly dilling off easy here with what we're seeing in this panel and in here this could have been catastrophic that's absolutely correct yeah anyway any anything else you have to say before I wrap things up I think that's it I think that's it I mean brought it home so that's good well Matt thanks for coming at Matt flew here from uh California to to to oversee the whole construction we used a local uh cummer contractor here in San Antonio they're out pulling the wire right now we're going to we're going to get uh Dylan up and running today and he'll be charging his Tesla Model Y in a couple of hours well okay dillan's problems were even worse than I thought before I headed to San Antonio so we ended up completely cutting out that aluminum wire that ran around the back of his house to that junction box and then around the other side of his house to feed that disconnect instead we ran new THHN wire up the side of his house through the attic then back down the other side of his house through the wall and directly into the Tesla wall connector we also gave him a new Tesla wall connector now the original one was probably fine but just to air on the side of caution we did swap that out for him also now Dylan has to decide if he wants them to install a whole new service we didn't do that while we were here we really can't that for that we need to get the utility involved CU they have to shut the power off and uh in order for us to put in a new service so what charge Pro is working with Dylan now to decide does he want an entire new service or does he just want them to swap out that bus bar that's charred inside his existing service panel if he goes that route CIT will provide a new replacement bus bar for him at no cost but if he does want to upgrade his whole home's electric service that is going to be out of pocket for Dylan but when I left everything was working his car was charging we actually didn't use that space on the bus bar that was charred he had a lot of open areas so we were able to put in a new breaker in another location that was fine so he's charging and everything's working fine I was able to make my flight and fly back to New Jersey that same day and barely beat a snowstorm that hit New Jersey the biggest snowstorm of the year which was actually good because it gave me an opportunity to try out my all new ego electric snowblower I actually made a video review out of that and you could look for that here on state of charge in about a week all right so what did we learn from this well first of all all of the work was done by a licensed electrician permitted and inspected also the equipment used and the wiring was all up to code yet it still failed in multiple locations and and the problem is electric vehicle charging places a strin on the equipment greater than anything else in your home I've mentioned this earlier I'll say it again when you're charging your EV you could be pulling more power than your house and both of the neighbors houses on both side of you more Powers going into your car than the rest of those houses are using at that moment and that puts a strain on components that weren't designed for that type of duty cycle and that's why for years I've been urging my followers to only hire experienced electrical contractors when they install their EV charging equipment it makes a difference there's a lot of electric out there that can do this uh but there's a lot that can't there's a lot that buy cheap lowquality components they want to have the bid lower so that they get your business they end up installing things are going to fail and uh you know we've seen it so much now the poor quality Nea 1450 Outlets that cost a lot less they fail you saw the the disconnect box here that's the wrong disconnect box to use on EV charging um the code needs to catch up to EV charging and it is there's a lot of work going on now with NEC to make sure that components that are used within uh this industry all can handle the duty cycle that electric vehicle charging places on it now people sometimes say well you know this contractor gave me a bid of $400 or $500 More Than This contractor so you know it seemed like it was the same thing they're licensed they're insured they're going to pull a permit why should I pay the extra money I think videos like this and I may do more of these videos where I go and fix people's problems let me know in the comment section if this is something that you'd like to see me maybe start a series on um but this is why it cost more in many instances um not all the time sometimes some electricians just you know get a little greedy and charge a little extra but many instances it's the fact that they're buying better equipment and it costs more and that has to get passed along to the customer so whoever you hire to do your electric vehicle charging installations I recommend CIT but whoever you end up hiring ask them questions about it make sure they're using Quality Equipment make sure that they're going to torque everything properly make sure they don't use aluminum wire and then while they're doing the work inspect it don't just let them leave and just assume everything's done right we're seeing a lot of problems with electric vehicle charging equipment now because the electricians just don't have a lot lot of experience installing things like this that pull so much power continuously for many hours every day sometimes every day of the week and the crazy thing about it is most of the time we charge at night while we're sleeping and that's the worst time that you want to have a problem in your garage or wherever your charger is when you're sleeping so if you do it right electric vehicle charging is extremely safe as I said in the beginning of this video but it has to be done by a professional that knows what he's doing and that uses all of the right components and wire listen if this is your first time here at state of charge please don't forget hit that subscribe button and ring the notification Bell so you don't miss any upcoming electric vehicle news and reviews and as always thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: State Of Charge

Views: 88,195

Keywords: tesla, tesla wall charger, tesla problems, tesla charging, tesla mobile charger, wall charger problems, charge, ev charger problem, tesla model 3, tesla charging problems, tesla supercharger, tesla charger, tesla charger uk, tesla mobile charger slow, slow tesla mobile charger, tesla home charging, tesla nacs charger, ev problems, tesla wall charger uk, 3rd gen tesla charger, tesla charger at home, tesla charger adapter, tesla model x, tesla model s, ev charging issues

Id: zsbSj0a-BfE

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024