How to Install an Electric Vehicle Charger Receptacle

did you recently buy an electric vehicle or are you an electrician and you have a customer that just bought one and you need to figure out how to install an ev charging receptacle this video is for you [Music] so with charging electric vehicles a lot of different vehicles use the same type of receptacle and then there's teslas which have their own big tesla charging unit so this video is not about how to install a tesla charger this is how to install a receptacle that will work with pretty much every ev out there so receptacles that are used for evs you'll typically see a really large black receptacle that's got three straight blades and one kind of little dome circle shaped hole this is what we call a nema 14-50 so every receptacle out there everything has some sort of nema nomenclature kind of a part number i suppose but these specific receptacles are meant to have up to 250 volts run through them and they're rated at 50 amps of current to flow through them now you can install 50 amp receptacles and 50 amp wire and then put like a 30 amp breaker on it if you want to some people don't want to over feed too much current through to a load so they'll put a little bit smaller breaker that way if it gets up to like 35 amps that breaker could trip and actually save everything instead of feeding uh you know too much current and overloading that receptacle so in the case of the job that i had recently had a customer that wanted us to install one so i figured i would just talk about how i did it so first thing that you always want to do is uh if you're not an electrician step one is hire an electrician so i know i know everybody hates to hear that but like for real if you're doing this kind of stuff uh just be really careful but you should hire an electrician to have them do it if you're an electrician out there and you're installing it first thing obviously go and disconnect power to the panel that way you're not working in a live energized panel and you're not like feeding conductors down and you're up in an attic and you're feeding into a live panel and then you just short something out so it's silly uh in this job i actually had a main disconnect outside i just clicked that disconnect breaker off and it de-energized the entire panel so i wasn't working on anything live next thing that i did is i went over and figured out where this receptacle was gonna go the homeowner had a very specific spot that they wanted it to go so i took a two gang pop-in box and a pop-in box specifically has these little ears that flip out that once you stick the box in and you turn screws it actually folds these things out and it secures from the back onto the drywall so i had a box i put the box on the wall and i actually drew with a pencil not a marker because if you mess up that marker's there forever so i always take a pencil and i will mark around this box and where i'm going to cut it and in this instance i had a little bit of wood in front of the drywall so i actually used an oscillating saw these tools are my favorite i love these things we use them to cut out like receptacles in really nice cabinets and islands and stuff in the big houses that we do so i just used this it was really easy i could get a perfect line and get a perfect cut so i cut the the wood out cut the sheetrock out and that exposed the wall behind it and this was an interior wall it was in a garage but it did have insulation in it so normally what i would do is like take sticks we have these sticks that we can assemble electricians use them to like fish across ceilings or fish down walls we call them fish sticks but i'm using a number eight conductor so i'm using eight three which is a three conductor with a ground technically there's four conductors but when we say eight three we mean number eight conductors and there are three quote unquote current carrying conductors you've got two hots and a neutral you got a black red white and you have a bare ground inside of it so this is a pretty stout conductor type and so i just stuff this down the wall made sure it was really straight kind of stabbed it to get through the insulation but it's pretty much as rigid as a stick not quite as rigid as a stick if it were like 12 2 or something like that i you guarantee that the more you stab down the more that it's just gonna like roll up and coil up in the wall so using this number eight i was able to just kind of keep things straight stab it a little bit back it out a little bit keep it straight again back in and just keep doing that to get down the wall um it was just me by myself i didn't have a helper down there to like feed a stick up and try to tape on and pull it down but if you have somebody helping you that's obviously the easier method to go um so i was just doing this by myself and i didn't do that but you need to get all of uh that romex down and then go down below and reach up into that hole that you just made and grab onto the conductor and pull it out the wall once you get your a3 out of the wall you're gonna take that two gang pop-in box and you're gonna pop open one of the tabs so that you can get the conductor in it and then put the box into the wall you got to make sure that the tabs are folded down when you push it in that way when you start screwing it the tabs can fold up and hold it to the drywall so the next thing i did was just took a screwdriver i like to do it by hand so i can kind of feel how much tension i need to put on these you don't want to over tighten them people over tighten them all the time and then those little flaps on the back like end up falling off and breaking and stuff like that so just kind of be careful put pressure in there to make sure that it's not going to come off the wall but don't put too much on there where you break anything so once i got the box in the wall i had the romex sitting out so what i do is take and very gently score with a sharp utility knife i'm not pressing into this thing and cutting i'm just scoring it enough so that i can rip the sheathing off on the outside and i'm not damaging the conductors on the inside so once i get all that stripped out i take my receptacle strip out just enough conductor at the ends of each one of the conductors the black the red the white and then the bare ground and i put each one of those into the terminals tighten each one of the terminals down and then i fold that receptacle very carefully into that box and i have to make sure that the bare ground doesn't come around and is like touching one of the other terminals and is going to short this thing out so be very careful to make sure that there's no exposed metal parts of the conductor that are touching anything they're not supposed to be don't over strip your conductors either don't strip out like two inches of insulation at the end of this thing just strip out enough that it's going to go inside of the hole and you don't have any metal exposed on the outside so once i get all of that done i put the receptacle in its place i put screws so it'll stay into the box and then i put this nice trim plate i like to use these stainless steel like shiny ones i think they just look nicer so once i get the receptacle in i am completely done at that location now all i have to do is feed the other end of the conductors down into the panel so to do this you have to pull out the conductor all the way across the attic in my case this was probably about 20 feet away from the panel so i had about 10 feet going up 20 feet going over another 10 feet coming down the wall probably less than that but just like rounding i suppose is around 40 feet so i knew that if i just took my conductor and went all the way over the edge of the attic and then kind of pulled out enough to where i knew where i was getting down into the panel and then i cut it so i didn't have all this extra slack sticking up there you don't have to do that you could just pre-measure everything and get everything exact and know exactly how much conductor you have to put in but in my case i already knew from the ground like when i drop the wire out of the attic and put it across the ground over the panel it's the same measurement as if you brought it up the wall and went across the ceiling so that's how i was able to really easily measure this and then figure out how much length i needed inside of my panel to actually land it on a breaker so you don't ever want to cut your conductors too short if anything just leave a little bit extra a little bit of extra slack's not going to hurt you so what you have to do in a situation like this it's kind of weird but you you can't just knock out a knockout inside of one of these panels and then drop wire inside of it and just leave it like that you actually have to have it secured to that panel so a lot of people like well how do you do this you put like a little bushing in there after you take a romex connector and try to like somehow fish it put it in there best way that i've ever found to do this is put the romex connector on just sleeve it over probably like the last four feet of that romex so i'll take the romex connector i'll slide it over i'll get to about four feet and then i'll tighten it and i'll take the lock ring off and i'll just put that in my pocket and that way when i'm up in the attic all i have to do is fish this conductor down and hit the hole again if you have somebody helping you at the panel sticking a stick up through there depending on you know the situation uh you'll have a hole below and a hole on the top so sometimes it takes a little bit of expertise to try to fish one stick through two different holes but in my case it was i had a large enough hole up there that i could see the light from down below so when i looked down the hole up in the attic i could actually see the where the hole was down below and i just fished everything down in there i went back downstairs grabbed onto that wire pulled everything down and i pulled it to where the connector hit the top of the panel and i pulled it in so i could see the threads took that lock ring out of my pocket slid that over the conductor and put the lock ring on and it was tight and that was finished so now all i had to do was strip all the conductors out take that outer layer of the sheathing of that romex off to expose the actual conductors on the inside and then stripped out each one of those conductors at the ends i cut them to length put the ground on the ground bus put the neutral on the separate neutral bus you don't want to land neutrals and grounds together i've done several videos on isolating neutrals from grounds the only place that you ever want your neutrals and your grounds touching or out at the service what i did is i added a 30 amp breaker so you're asking probably like well why didn't you put a 50 amp breaker because you have 50 amp wire number eight is rated for 50 amps and you have a 50 amp receptacle so this was actually at the request of the customer they wanted me to put something in so that they didn't get too much current through whatever car they were buying there's a whole bunch of different cars volkswagen has their id4 the uh kia has the nero nissan has the leaf tesla you know like all these different things essentially use the same plug or they have adapters so that you can use this same type of plug but not all of them will draw up to 50 amps worth of current so if you put a 30 amp breaker at least you still have the up-sized wire so if you were to sell the house later on you can say like yeah there's a 50 amp wire in there there's a 50 receptacle you could always have an electrician come in and swap that 30 for a 50. but they just requested that we put a two pole 30 2 pole meaning like a 220 breaker two poles on it so we put a two pole 30 in now electricians a lot of times they're gonna look at me putting this two-pole breaker in and they're gonna notice why is it not gfci protected so in the 2020 national electrical code in 210.8 it was upgraded so that now anything in a home a dwelling that is 125 volts through 250 volts 50 amps or less has to be gfci protected in all of the normal areas that we gfci protect everything right so like garages bathrooms outside kitchens things like that utility rooms so before we never had to like gfci protect a dryer plug and a dryer plug is a huge plug that looks just like this 50 amp it's just a 30 amp so we never really had to gfci protect those but now we do range plugs if you're within uh six feet of a sink so anywhere that like there could be water essentially so that whole 2020 thing reason i'm bringing that up is that makes it so that these ev receptacles now have to be gfci protected if you're in a jurisdiction that is using the 2020 national electrical code fortunately for me in this area i was in an area where it was still on the 2017 code so there's no requirement for me to put a gfci breaker in there another thing to consider and another reason why i did this is there's still a lot of nuisance tripping issues with gfcis for specific loads so a lot of these electric vehicles people are plugging them in and then the breaker trips while they're sleeping and they don't even realize that the the gfci breaker tripped and their car is not charged it's been sitting there all night not charging this actually happens a lot so it's something manufacturers are trying to work out a lot of the tesla chargers actually have gfci protection inside of them so you don't have to put a gfci breaker because it's already within the device itself but it was my choice my jurisdiction everything i didn't have to use gfci protection so i didn't put a gfci breaker on this and that was again something that the homeowner did not want to have to put up with nuisance tripping in this situation so now that i got the new breaker put in the panel you always have to knock out more slots in your panel cover or if you have blanks in there take the blanks out but i had to knock out a couple more of the slots inside of this panel cover so that i could get it on with the new breaker in there put the panel cover back on and then i went outside and i hit my main disconnect turned it on and i re-energized that entire panel and then i took my multimeter and went over you always want to test everything don't ever walk away from an installation without testing with a multimeter i took my multimeter i made sure that i checked from the two side prongs that are supposed to be 240 volts i checked between them to make sure i had 240 and then i checked between one of them and the lower straight prong that's your neutral you should have 120 volts around there 120 120 518 somewhere around that range and then i go to the other hot uh slot and i go to the neutral just to make sure that one also has around 120 volts and then i always go from hot to ground as well so from the first hot to ground second hot to ground you should also have around 120 volts from each hot to ground and that's how you know that everything is good to go you don't have any problems so then you can take your receptacle plug it in plug your car in and then boom you're done and now you can charge your brand new fancy electric vehicle so before you leave if you are curious about like just receptacles in general and installing receptacles you should totally check this video out i go over how to install a receptacle if you want to know like how a receptacle works like kind of how the insides work how they pass current through and everything you should check this video out right here thank you guys so much for watching i love you crazy people and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 375,913

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, ev cars 2022 usa, electric cars 2022, install ev charger at home, install electric car charger in garage, tesla daily, tesla stock, Kia Niro EV, Volkswagen ID, Chevrolet Bolt EUV, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6

Id: JHzvcQ1lzmg

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022