Tesla Gen 3 Wall Connector Review

today we're going to review the gen 3 tesla wall connector we have here it's been available for a little less than a year now we're going to first explain the changes tesla made from the gen 2 wall connector we're going to give it our cable deep freeze test we'll then talk about some of the adapters you might want to get if you have the wall connector we'll offer our exclusive charger raider five-star rating based on the features it has to offer and then we're going to tell you why you might not even need one of these if you buy a new tesla but first don't forget click that subscribe button and tap the notification bell so you don't miss any content coming up here on state of charge tesla's gen 3 wall connector replaces the gen 2 high powered wall connector so we're going to go over some of the changes that tesla made some are good some aren't that good in my opinion first off the previous generation the gen 2 was called the high power wall connector because it could deliver 80 amps to the vehicle now the new wall connector can only deliver a maximum of 48 amps but that's not a problem because tesla no longer sells any vehicles that can accept more than 48 amps previously on tesla model s and tesla model x vehicles customers had the option of ordering the car with what they called dual onboard chargers and it could accept up to 80 amps so it made sense that tesla sold a wall connector that could deliver that much power but tesla discontinued that option and now none of their vehicles can accept more than 48 amps so when they came out with this gen 3 wall connector they lowered the maximum output to 48 amps now 48 amps can deliver 11.5 kilowatts to the vehicle and although every vehicle charges at a different rate the tesla model 3 that translates to 44 miles of range per hour for the tesla model 3. now tesla also provides this really neat graph on their website that shows depending on how the wall connector is configured what circuit it's on how many miles of range per hour it will deliver to each of the vehicles they sell it's it's a very nice offering and i urge people to take a look at that so you get a kind of an idea of how fast your car will charge depending on what circuit you have the high powered or the wall connector connected to now another change tesla made was and this is my biggest gripe with the new wall connector they reduced the length of the cable now previously you could order the high powered wall connector with either an eight and a half foot or a 24 foot cable now the new gen 3 wall connector you have the option of eight and a half feet and 18 feet 18 feet is the longest you can get on this cable in my opinion that's just not long enough and also i've had many comments on my site from other tesla owners that complain about it and say that that's a deal breaker they're not going to get it now because of that now i generally recommend that you should get a cable of at least 20 feet long now i know that is going to change from customer to customer i'm sure i'm going to get comments here that people are going to say oh i only need a 5 foot cable or an a4 cable and you're right some people only need a short cable but most people in my opinion need a longer cable now the average two-car garage in the us at least for new constructions is about 22 feet by 22 feet that's about the size of my garage here i can't charge my tesla model 3 if i don't back the car in if i pull it straight in and i'm on that side of the garage this cable won't reach it i think your cable should reach almost any corner of your garage because some days you might need to park on one side you might need to park on another side you shouldn't have to back into your garage so i think that was a really bad move on tesla's part and i hope that they change that in the future i'd like to see this go back to the 24 foot length that the gen 2 high power wall connector had at least as an option you don't have to force it on people but give us the option to get a longer cable if we want it now another change that tesla made was as you can see here it's got a sleek white tempered glass faceplate really nice look the only thing that i complain about a little bit is it's really hard to see the tesla name on that that should light up i think like the um the power lights do or at least have a little bit of a a brighter font so you could see it say tesla uh i'm proud that it's a tesla and i want people to know it's a tesla and i just want to see that it's a tesla wall connector you really can't see it with that it's it's it's not very bright at all so i think that's something that they can improve on super minor issue but i think they missed the mark just a little bit with that now this new uh white tempered glass face plate is really nice looks great but it probably won't be as durable as a plastic faceplate you might crack this if you if you hit with something or drop it somehow by accident so tesla does sell a replacement it's 90 and you can get it on their website just in case you do crack your faceplate you can order a new one if you want to drop the 90 bucks on it now another change tesla made for the better is now this is now a wi-fi connected smart charger now it's going to be a smart charger because while it still is wi-fi connected tesla hasn't really released any of the features yet kind of getting a little anxious about this because i've had this installed for about 10 months now and we still don't have any of the features tesla's promised that this is going to be able to load share to up to 16 units now load sharing is a very good feature to have in a smart charger now most people in your home you wouldn't need it to load share across 16 units why would anybody want that that'd be good for apartment buildings condo complexes areas where multiple residents live and you want to have a bunch of these set up and you don't want to run a circuit for each one because that gets very expensive so having the ability to load share across multiple units is definitely a good feature to have and it saves money but you might want two of these in your garage and having the ability to load share means you only have to run one circuit preferably a 60 amp circuit so you can get full power and then the two wall connectors will intelligently communicate with each other and distribute the power so you'll have one car will fully charge when that's done the other one will immediately start to charge by the morning you'll have two nicely charged cars so load sharing is a good feature i can't wait for it to be enabled they're also promising that we'll be able to have remote monitoring that there'll be firmware updates over the air and that this will also be able to communicate with other tesla products they haven't really said what products but we're assuming that would be a powerwall having the charger to be able to communicate with your powerwall definitely has its advantages however we don't really know yet because tesla hasn't allowed us to use any of these smart charging features so while it is a smart charger we don't get any of the smart charging features just yet hopefully they come soon when that happens i'll definitely either update this review or make an entirely new review to go over the smart charging features now another thing that's different about this unit is it's only available in a hardwired unit you'll see that this has a hard wire to it right now as opposed to all the other charges that we review here come in plug-in units tesla previously offered a wall connector in a plug-in unit now that wasn't the 80 amp high-powered wall connector they had one that was lower rated it was that could deliver 40 amps but they discontinued that so now the gen 3 wall connector only comes in a hard-wired unit now if you really wanted it to plug in you could install a nema 1460 plug on this and then a nema 1460 outlet and make it a plug-in unit so but that's on you and i always recommend people get a qualified license electrician to do any of their wiring especially if you're going to add a plug to it and plug it into an outlet i mean i think that might be a cool thing to do so you'd be able to remove it if you needed to but it certainly isn't necessary but you do have that options now if you want this to deliver the full 48 amps so you can charge your tesla at the full 48 amps it can accept you're gonna need to put this on a dedicated 60 amp circuit now that'll require at the minimum number six wire but i always like to recommend going a little bit higher and putting this on number four wire this is going to be a continuous load for many hours at a time overnight and a number four wire while it's going to cost a little more is a little bit of better it's a better choice it adds a little bit extra layer of security now one of the things you can do with this is de-rate the power if you don't have a 60 amp circuit let's say you only have a 40 amp circuit available on your pa on your uh service panel or even lower 32 amp 24 amp whatever you have available you can de-rate this unit so it won't exceed the maximum power supply that the circuit can handle now you do that when you commission the charger and you set up the wi-fi smart charging feature we're going to go over that next and explain how that gets done after we show you a little bit about how to install this on the wall so this is basically what the wall connector looks like when you have the wire box secured to the wall and you're ready to mount the face plate let's go over quickly how we got here tesla provides a nice template so that it helps you decide how to mount this to the wall now i say that because there are four different ways you can bring the wires into the wire box from the bottom as i've done here there's also two knockouts on the lower part of the back of the wall box one on the left side one on the right side or you can bring the wires into the top now depending on which way you bring the wires in tesla recommends or advises you how to mount it onto the wall where to mount the two screws to for it to not interfere with the wires or the knockout that you're going to need to bring the wires in i've selected the two screws in the center of the wall box worked fine for me here because i came up through the middle actually when you come up to the bottom you could use any of the of the screws it's just when you're coming in through the back then you don't want to have the screw on the side where you're trying to pull the wires through from so once you have this thing mounted on the wall you pull your wires through now you'll notice the neutral is capped like all ev charging equipment it doesn't use the neutral wire so you only have to land the two hot wires on these two terminal blocks here and your ground here on the left side once that's all connected what you're basically going to do is take the unit and you'll notice there's three connections here that the unit has to um snap into the wire box you're basically just going to take it fit it up against it put push it on nice and tight and then tesla provides you with four screws um these small screws here two go on the top of the unit and two go on the bottom of the unit and the unit's done it's installed now you want to turn on your circuit breaker but you're not completely finished because this is a wi-fi smart charger it still has to be commissioned in order to use it after you've completed the installation the next step is commissioning the wall connector first turn on the circuit breaker and energize the wall connector next use your wi-fi enabled device to connect to the ssid wi-fi signal sent out by the wall connector you then need to join the wall connector network by either selecting the network and entering the password found in the quick start guide that came with the wall connector or you can simply scan the qr code sticker provided in the quick start guide now the wall connector is only going to send out its network signal for five minutes so if you don't complete this step in five minutes you need to either turn the circuit breaker off and back on which will initiate the procedure again or you can press the button on the wall connectors connector hold it for more than five seconds and you'll see the green led start to blink again on the wall connector meaning it's ready to be conditioned commissioned you then either scan the qr code found on the commissioning procedure instructions or manually enter the url provided you follow up the on-screen directions to complete the commissioning and enter the amperage of the circuit that you installed the wall connector on remember in order for the wall connector to deliver the full 48 amps it's capable of you need to have installed it on a dedicated 60 amp circuit the wall connector can only deliver 80 percent of the circuit's maximum rating as per the national electric code now if you didn't have a 60 amp circuit available that's okay the car will just charge a little bit slower it's time for the cable deep freeze test for the tesla wall connector in this freezer i coiled up the cable for the tesla wall connector now typically we put the whole unit in the freezer but the wall connector is hardwired unlike the other chargers that we test here so i couldn't remove that and freeze it so i had to do was run the cable into the freezer down here and coil it up tightly like we always do but then i had to tape this freezer you'll notice there's some tape on it because i had to make sure i closed the seal on the freezer well so it stayed nice and cold in there let's remove the tape now [Applause] okay and we're first going to test the temperature so you know that it's nice and cold in there negative seven degrees fahrenheit which is negative 22 degrees celsius all right let's see how the cable does [Music] take slide this over there as you can see coiled it up into a nice loop just as we do with all the cables to make sure that they're in a small loop so that way we can now see when we unravel it if it bends and conforms to how we want it to go it's pretty stiff you can hear that cracking that's not what you want to hear all right let's see if we can get this to go into larger loops so the wall connector you always want to roll this counterclockwise around the unit so that way the connector can fit all right see it's fighting me and curling around all right i'm going to give up i'm going to do that and this so see that that's what you don't want you want it to kind of bend and conform to what you're trying to get it to do which in this case was nice long loops and it's just not doing it i can't get it to bend properly so we're just going to do this see how it wants to remain in those small loops that we provided and it won't even bend enough to hang here that's not what you want this is probably um i'd say like a d um maybe even d minus and it's going to lose a point in our charger radar for not having a very pliable cable one that's good for cold weather temperatures i wouldn't want to have this outs mounted outside in very cold temperatures to have to use this every day it doesn't perform nearly as well as some of the other cables we've tested so let's talk a little bit about connectors and adapters the tesla wall connector comes with the tesla connector no surprise there now tesla uses a proprietary connector no other electric vehicle manufacturers use this connector everybody else uses at least here in north america it's a little different in europe this connector here it's called the j1772 connector so any other electric vehicle has an inlet that this connector fits into while tesla's on the vehicle has an inlet that this connects into so what do you do if you have a tesla wall connector and you want to charge your electric vehicle made by another brand or if you have a a charging station like these behind me that has the j1772 connector and you want to charge your tesla it's not a problem because there are adapters available for either situation first off every tesla comes with this adapter here now this allows you to charge your tesla on a charging station made by any of these third-party brands and public charging stations which generally uh use the j1772 if they're not a tesla destination charger so what you basically do is take the the connector you stick the supplied adapter that comes with every tesla into that and then you plug this into your tesla and it works just fine now if it's the other way around and let's say you are thinking about getting the tesla wall connector but you also have an audi e-tron or a ford mustang mock e and and now you've got a tesla so now you've got an electric vehicle from both manufacturers from both that use both uh connectors what you do then is you can charge your non-tesla electric vehicle from the tesla wall connector but you then need to go out and buy one of these now these are made from by a couple different manufacturers this one's actually made by electron it's a pretty um good quality unit and what you basically do is you stick your connector for your tesla wall connector into this side and then this side here plugs into any electric vehicle in north america that's not a tesla now these these range in prices anywhere from 120 and 100 to 130 dollars to to up to like 220 to 250 depending on manufacturer and depending on the amperage now if you want to charge your electric vehicle at 48 amps for instance the full amount of power that the wall connector can provide now first of all there aren't a lot of electric vehicles on the market non-tesla electric vehicles that can accept 48 amps but if you do have one that can accept 48 amps and you want to charge your vehicle at the full amount that the wall connector can supply then you're going to want to make sure you order one of these that's a 50 amp a 50 amp one that can deliver up to 50 amps many of them on the market are 40 amp now you can use those with the tesla wall connector you would just need to either de-rate the connector so that it delivers less power or most electric vehicles allow you to get into their settings and limit the power that the car takes you don't want more than 40 amps passing through this if it's a 40 amp adapter so if you have an electric vehicle that can accept more than 48 amps it probably isn't a bad idea to get a higher power one of these so you won't make any mistakes and forget or forget to change the setting and all of a sudden you're sending more power through this than you should so now i'm going to tell you why you might not need to buy a tesla wall connector at all if you get a new tesla now one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they order their new electric car tesla and they're all excited and while they're waiting for the car to be delivered they call their electrician and they get an estimate on installing the charging equipment there's nothing wrong with that so it's good to know about how much it's going to cost to install whatever you're going to you're going to use to charge your electric car but then they go order a 500 tesla wall connector they don't realize that every electric car tesla's included come with charging equipment free with the car now some manufacturers supply better charging equipment than other companies tesla happens to provide excellent charging equipment with the car that most people don't have to buy another wall connector or any one of these chargers to charge their car because the supply charging equipment is excellent now i'm going to compare that to this charger here which is what bmw delivers with their i3s this is a level one charger it only works from a 120 volt regular household outlet charges the car very slowly you'll get about four maybe five miles of range per hour of charging with one of these it's good in a pinch and bmw calls it the occasional use charger even with the name is that's built into it they're telling you don't use this thing every day but it's different with the tesla mobile connector tesla provides a high powered 32 amp charger now the wall connectors remember will deliver 48 amps to the vehicle and all tesla vehicles except for the standard range plus model 3 can accept 48 inch amps the standard range plus model 3 can only accept 32 amps that's what this delivers so if you get a standard range plus model 3 if you get a wall connector it won't charge your car any faster than this will but even if you don't have the standard range plus if you have a model x or a model s or model 3 the dual motor long range this is still going to do a really good job charging your car now one thing i have to note is tesla designs this so that you can use different adapters for different plugs they used to include the 120 volt plug which this is the same as what comes on this so this is a actually a dual voltage charger you could charge at a regular household outlet albeit very slowly as i said before maybe four miles of range an hour or you get a different adapter and you can then charge from a 240 volt outlet like what we have back here tesla used to include a nema 1450 240 volt adapter with their mobile charging connector they don't anymore they only give you the 120 volt uh adapter which most people aren't going to use you'll use it in a pinch like i said but for most people this isn't going to be sufficient to charge your tesla up all night every day unless you really don't drive that much if you only drive 10 20 miles maybe 30 miles a day this might be enough but it still might be inconvenient so we kind of recommend installing a 240 volt outlet in your garage and then getting one of these adapters now tesla sells a bunch of different adapters they have like 10 different adapters they're all about 35 bucks each most people get the nema 1450 adapter which this is because the nema 1450 outlet is the most popular outlet for electric car chargers and electric car owners most chargers come with the nema 1450 plug one thing i will tell you is that um this round pin on the da on the connect on the adapter is the ground and some electricians if you just tell an electrician to install nema 1450 outlet in your garage and they don't ask you they might install it with the ground down they call it so you'd have to plug it in like this and then the this plugs into the um uh the unit here so imagine if this was plugged in like this this would kind of be draping over and hanging on the ground so you want to specify to your electrician if you're getting a nema 1450 outlet installed and you're plan on using it with the mobile connector tell him you need the ground up and he'll know what that means basically um it'll the the outlet will be installed like this where you'll plug it in this way not this way um the weird thing about it is some of the chargers come with the ground up some of them come with the ground down so on these outlets i have behind me i've installed them where some of them i have ground up some i have ground down i can't tell you how many tesla owners we see in the forums and on the facebook groups where you know they'll say like how come my my plug doesn't work it it it's upside down and we have to explain all your electrician you didn't specify so if you don't specify it they'll install it either way so make sure you tell them ground up if you're going to put in a nema 1450 outlet to use with your mobile connector in any event um the mobile connector will deliver 32 amps so it needs to be on a 40 amp circuit that's good enough for about 30 miles of range per hour for a tesla model 3. i said earlier the mobile connector can charge at a rate of about 44 miles an hour so yeah it is faster unless you have the standard range plus then it's the same but if you have the long-range model 3 or model y for instance uh it will charge the car a little bit quicker but for most people the cars in your garage eight ten hours a night and you don't fully deplete your battery every day so you don't need to recharge 300 miles of range every single day if you do get a higher power charger because you'll appreciate it but for most people i'd say as much as 75 to 80 percent of the people you don't need a higher powered unit than this um and so what i recommend is when you get your tesla don't go out and spend anything have it have them put in a nema 1450 outlet um see how that works most people are going to find that it works out fine now the only thing is some people say yeah but i just want to put this in my trunk and in case i need it on the road there is that but you can easily you know use this every day and when you're going on a long road trip or somewhere where you you think you might have to charge somewhere it coils up really quickly it unplugs you put it back in here you close it up and then you put it in the back you don't have to leave this in the back of your car very rarely are you going to just come across a situation where you've run out of charge and now you need to pull this thing out and find a nema 1450 outlet somewhere on the road they're not easy to find it's much easier to find a supercharger or a tesla destination charger than a 1450 plug to plug into now there are available campgrounds around the country so you could do that but there's different rules some campgrounds don't just little electric cars come in and plug in and pay for electricity they want you to buy the slot for half a day or something it gets really expensive you're better off finding a supercharger or a destination charger so my recommendation is if you're getting a new tesla if you're not sure if you need this or not don't invest the money in a tesla wall connector or any charging station for your house just install the outlet get the nema 1450 adapter use your mobile connector for a while and see how it works out if you find that it's being inconvenient later on then you can upgrade and do something you don't have to rush out all at once right when you're getting your car this will work just fine and you'll probably find that you don't need to even spend any more money because what they provide you with works that's it for the review it's now time to offer our ratings we always do our ratings in two parts here first up we use our charger rater point based charging system where we have five different categories and the charger starts out with 15 points in each category and then either adds or loses points depending on its performance and features the first category is cost and value now we base this on a five hundred dollar cost and the charger loses or gains one point for every fifty dollars it costs more or less the tesla wall connector costs five hundred dollars so it doesn't lose or gain any points next up is is it a good value we think the tesla wall connector isn't actually an excellent value for the price and the fact that it's a wi-fi connected smart charger now sure those features don't work yet but we are assuming that tesla is going to bring those features online sometime soon and in that case would make it an excellent value it gets two extra points the tesla wall connector finishes up the cost and value category with 17 points next up is power and weatherproofing the maximum kilowatt delivery the way we do that is we take the maximum kilowatt delivery and we minus 10 and then round it up or down in the case of the tesla wall connector it can deliver 11.5 kilowatt we minus 10 so it gets two extra points does it have an adjustable power delivery the tesla wall connector can adjust its power you can have it deliver the full 48 amps and you can go all the way down to a much lower rating if you're on a circuit that can't support that extra power gets an extra point for that the nema rating it's nema 3 rated so it doesn't get any points for that it doesn't get any extra points it doesn't lose any points is it energy star certified no the tesla wall connector is not energy star certified it does not get a point does it do automatic restart yes it does that is if you have a power outage in the middle of a charging session once power is restored will the charger immediately start to re-engage the vehicle and continue the charging session some chargers don't do that the tesla wall connector does it gets an extra point it finishes up the power and weatherproof rating category with a total of 19 points next up is construction and durability we gave the uh connector holster an excellent rating uh it it absolutely holsters the connector very easily you don't have to hunt for the opening you don't have to land the connector in there perfectly you just slide it in that slot and let it go and it connects and holds the connector the only uh if you want to call complaint that we have is if you're if the wall connector is located in a tight spot say in between your two garage doors having the side connector holster might be an issue i've seen people have it installed there and they don't seem to be complaining i think it would seem to be a problem but nobody seems to complain about it uh all the other charging stations have a front uh mounted connector holster the ones that have connector holsters at least uh the tesla's does it on the side it doesn't seem to be a problem uh but overall the holster works very well so it gets an extra two points next up is cable length talked about this earlier the maximum length you can get on your cable for the tesla wall connector is 18 feet that falls below our 20 foot minimum threshold before you start losing points it loses two points for that the cable pliability we all saw the cold weather cable test it did not perform very well it loses another point there a robust construction we give it an excellent so it gets an extra point there it's very well made item is it plugged in uh does it plug in or is it hardwired if this unit is hardwired only it loses two points we like to have the units offer both hardwire and plug in the tesla wall connector does not so it's going to lose two points there ease of installation even though this has to be hardwired we gave it a simple installation so it does not lose any points there it really is a very simple installation many of the hardwired items uh chargers lose two points in this category but the tesla wall connector is such a simple installation it doesn't lose any points it finishes up the construction and durability category with 13 points next up is smart and non-smart gets 15 points um to start the category as in all the categories and then because it's a smart charger it gets five more points however it doesn't get anything else um powershare capable uh the tesla's promised that this will be powershare cable but it's not yet um is it compatible with amazon alexa or google assistant uh we don't know if tesla's going to add that feature does it record charging uh charging session data we we have no idea can it participate in demand response programs we just don't know any of that yet tesla hasn't released any of the information so it's not going to get any points in that category any additional points except for the fact that it is a smart charger so it finishes up the smart non-smart category with 20 points next up is safety certified and warranty is the unit safety certified yes it is it's ul listed it doesn't get any points because we expect all of the home charging equipment to be safety certified if it wasn't it would lose five points charges that aren't safety certified get a big hit in that category next up is warranty the tesla wall connector has a very good four-year warranty that's better than the industry standard most of the chargers we review here have a three-year warranty which we think is very good to begin with but the tesla wall connector has a four-year warranty so it gets three extra points it finishes up the safety certified and warranty category with 18 points that gives the tesla wall connector a grand total of 87 points on our charger raider scale when you convert that to a four star a five-star rating the tesla wall connector gets 4.35 stars out of five very respectable score but we don't just offer the charger rater score i also then offer my own personal score how i feel about the charger because i don't think you can quantify all of these chargers just with points i think it's a good basis to work off of but then you also have to factor in some things that can't be quantified with plus and minus on points i really like the tesla wall connector i think it's a great option if you own a tesla if you don't own a tesla i would not recommend getting the tesla wall connector because then you have to use the adapter and it just adds complexity to your daily charging regimen for tesla owners i think it's a good choice i think it's a very good buy at five hundred dollars considering it's a high powered 48 amp charger um i probably wouldn't recommend it for outdoor installations in very cold weather areas because as you saw the the cable does not perform very well when it's very cold and frozen so my personal score is a 4.55 stars out of 5. and that's going to give the tesla wall connector an average score of 4.45 stars out of 5. very good score for a very good charger and honestly if you do own a tesla i think the tesla wall connector makes a lot of sense if you want to buy a permanently mounted wall charger if you don't want to use the supplied tesla mobile connector which as we talked about earlier is a very good option it delivers 32 amps it'll charge the car almost as quickly as the tesla wall connector will and it's free you just have to install the outlet to plug it into you don't have to buy anything on the unit and it'll deliver you know 32 amps to your tesla unless you drive a tremendous amount on your daily driving regimen the mobile connector is going to be more than enough to have your car fully charged by the next day but for those that do want a permanently mounted solution a higher powered solution the tesla wall connector is a very good choice

Channel: State Of Charge

Views: 256,168

Keywords: tesla, tesla wall connector, tesla gen 3 wall connector, tesla charger, ev chargers, electric vehicles

Id: o1rkZWtQalQ

Length: 38min 37sec (2317 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021