My new Grizzlie car charger has only three connectors (hot hot ground). My outlet is a NEMA 14-50 outlet with four connectors (hot hot neutral ground).
Everything I am finding indicates I should just leave the neutral wire unconnected. This seems incredibly unwise to me. What should I do with the neutral wire?
Same here for my Tesla charger. I simply put a cap on the white lead. I believe that is because the charger only feeds the 240V pair (plus ground) to the car.
I used this to connect instead of direct-connecting the charger to the power line. (From Amazon) This also means I can use the portable charger on the NEMA14-50 plug if I have a problem with the wall charger. The lead you don’t see is (obviously) the black one. The neutral I capped, there was no connector for it in the Tesla wall charger.
Also note I set the charger to max 40A (80% of rated circuit and breaker) and later set the car to charge no more than 26A in case I’m using more appliances in my house with its 100A service. Set the car to charge at 1AM when it’s plugged in overnight, when most other power use is down.
Yeah, capping the neutral is exactly what you do.
When car chargers first came out, they equipped them with 14-50 plugs because being the standard outlet for electric ranges there were a lot more of them in residences than 6-50, even though car chargers have no need for a neutral. Now that we’re installing outlets for car chargers, we’re still installing 14-50s because car charges most often come with 14-50 plugs…
Yes, just to clarify - I capped that range cord inside the charger body so I can plug it into a 14-50 (Which I orifginally installed when all I had was the portable charger). If I were direct-connecting the Tesla charger to a wire fed from the panel, same deal - instructions say cap the neutral, it is not used.
I capped the neutral wire off. It turns out that was the easy part. Getting the hear wrap over the terminals required A LOT of cussing.
The charger is mounted and powered and works like a charm.
This wasn’t the question asked, but I’ll also point out that using “Home Depot” grade 14-50s for electric cars isn’t such a great idea. Some of them have been cheapened so that the metal parts that make contact only cover part of the plug. This is OK for a range where you’re cooking a chicken and have maybe a 50% duty cycle over an hour or two, but becomes an issue for an electric charger where you might draw the full allowed 40 amps from the outlet on a 100% duty cycle all night.
^^ That.
Home EVSEs should really be hard-wired if at all possible, especially if you’re running a new circuit. Trying to re-use a travel unit that has a 14-50 plug is silly. Most jurisdictions require now GFCI protection on 240V receptacles (NEC 2020), so by the time you buy a high-quality 14-50 receptacle (that won’t burn up after a few hours of continuous 40A load) and a 50A GFCI circuit breaker, you’re most of the way to the price of a brand new hard-wire EVSE anyway.
Plus then you can pick an EVSE that can be provisioned for any circuit size from 15A up to 50A or 60A, instead of being limited to the plugs that at travel unit offers (which may be only 120V/15A and 240V/50A). It’s fairly rare that panels legitimately have 240V/50A (9.6kW) capacity free, but 15A or 20A at 240V (3.6kW / 4.8kW) is pretty easy and still plenty to recharge most people’s daily use over night. And no, setting a soft charging limit on the car side does not help with the load calculation. Whatever the EVSE is provisioned at is what must be plugged into the load calculation.
I did in fact spend over $100 on a real NEMA 14-50 socket. Yes, you don’t want to go half-assed on high power electrical stuff. the charger alone was $600 (Canadian dollars) and 50A wire no be cheap either, so saving by buying a $10 socket is false economy.