One drawback of charging on an 120v (or 230v) outlet is efficiency. While charging, the energy consumption of an electric car can easily reach 300-400 watts. When you're only charging with 1800-2400 watts, that's a sizeable amount of energy that never reaches the battery.
With a dedicated level 2 charger, you can charge with 10+ kW, making the percentage that is lost in the electronics of the vehicle much smaller.
That doesn't match my experience. At 9-10A (2100W) the efficiency is way above 90%, meaning the consumption of the rectifier inside the car is more in the 100-150W range.
> While charging, the energy consumption of an electric car can easily reach 300-400 watts
This is the first I'm hearing of this. Is this for real? Six modern desktop PCs worth of power, doing what? And that draw only occurs while charging, so it goes away when the car is "off"? Is this for heating the battery when it's cold? I'm not trying to jump on you, I'm just seriously surprised.
They say 100-300W for the onboard electronics, and 15-25% total loss when using a wall socket (other losers contribute as well, e.g. cables that weren't originally meant to run at peak current for hours on time).
If I'm reading that article/pictures right (using Doubleclick Translate), it's claiming that when charging at 2.3kW, 5-15% of the power is going to the 12V system. So assuming 90% efficiency for the main power converter and 80% efficiency for the 12V converter, that's at least 6-20 amps of draw on the 12V bus? That seems quite high.
Premises wiring seems like a red herring. At least in the US, conductors are sized based on a maximum percentage voltage drop at rated current, which means the branch circuit losses should be similar when using either one at full capacity. (A lower current circuit for a longer time is actually going to be slightly more efficient because the feeders are fixed sizes)
It's also even more of a problem in freezing temps. I've charged with both a wall outlet and a 240v at home and at 15amps it will really struggle to heat the battery enough to charge. It gets painfully slow.
I agree that it isn’t the most efficient manner, this is not an insurmountable issue for the vast majority of people. The cost will still be well under half the price of gas for most people driving electric sedans and crossovers.
Yes, those living in the Bay Area with a Hummer EV will find the economics problematic but this solution is fine for the vast majority of other situations throughout the US.
Only about 7000 of those are HPCs (150kW+)[1]. This proposed law mandates at least 150kw per charge point, so it would more than triple the amount of HPC charge points.
In general, it makes a lot of sense to differentiate between slow chargers (usually AC, 11-22kW, installed at home, at work, in parking lots), DC fast chargers (50-100kw, often installed at grocery stores and similar) and HPCs (150kw+, often installed along highway corridors, enabling longer trips). They all serve different purposes.
I wish Google Maps had an option to avoid small roads that are not made for transit traffic. I live next to such a road, and the amount of cars using it has grown considerably over the last few years, many with license plates from neighboring regions. Taking this narrow road saves them maybe two minutes compared with an adjacent, much wider road.
The problem is more that the Swiss Plateau (where most of these tunnels would be built) is very densely populated. There's just not enough room for a whole new road network to be built on the surface.
Yeah, I think this might have been one of the reasons why no one created an initiative to stop this. If instead they proposed a surface railway a few communities might have objected.
Well, he for sure pissed Garmin off with his review of the Garmin RCT715[0] (the bike camera/radar/light thingy). At least in my case, his review stopped me from upgrading from an RTL515.
Just yesterday I noticed that a device installed by the cable TV company in my house (a WISI VX 2030 amplifier, according to the sticker) was warm to the touch. Measuring its power consumption, it uses a constant 15 watt, so about 130kwh/year.
Cable Modems are notorious energy hogs. I'm pretty sure some of the ones I've seen run their CPU at 100% all of the time in busywait loops. They are always warm to the touch.
I have a networked all-in-one HP printer that can scan to a network share on my NAS. On the NAS, I set up a watcher script that runs OCRMyPDF [1] on any incoming PDFs. That gives me a super easy workflow, just feed documents into the
scanner and a minute or two later, I have a fully OCRd PDF in my network share.
https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap