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Nice and Tidy?

Martinonline

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Location
Sheffield
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MG4 Trophy LR
Seen at my local charging point. Of course they may well be not charging just using the parking place.
 

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This is really a good example of the argument against granny chargers. Yes, competent people can use them safely but the average person won't be competent, won't know anything about them, will use extension leads (as has been found in surveys), won't limit the current and will not uncoil the cable etc.... so taking that into account, they should probably be banned or restricted in some way.
 
This is really a good example of the argument against granny chargers. Yes, competent people can use them safely but the average person won't be competent, won't know anything about them, will use extension leads (as has been found in surveys), won't limit the current and will not uncoil the cable etc.... so taking that into account, they should probably be banned or restricted in some way.

That's a bit draconian. I will not use an extension lead, I will not plug in to a plastic socket, and the cable is always uncoiled. (In fact, given that the cable is only five metres long, I can't see how you'd coil it - my charging port is about 1.5 metres from the power point and there still isn't enough slack there to make coiling look like a plan.)

In any case, surely the thing in the picture is a type 2 charging lead, not a granny charger? (My type 2 lead is certainly long enough to coil like that.) Why use that behaviour as an argument against something entirely different?

I rely on my granny charger. What would you have me do instead? Mandate that everyone have a wall box installed? Or if they don't, they can only charge at public chargers? What about those occasions when the ability to plug into a 13A socket is the lifesaver in a genuine "emergency".
 
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That's a bit draconian. I will not use an extension lead, I will not plug in to a plastic socket, and the cable is always uncoiled. (In fact, given that the cable is only five metres long, I can't see how you'd coil it -my charging port is about 1.5 metres from the power point and there still isn't enough slack there to make coiling look like a plan.)
My point wasn't about you or people like you but the 'average' person (who would never be on an EV early adopter forum).
In any case, surely the thing in the picture is a type 2 charging lead, not a granny charger? (My type 2 lead is certainly long enough to coil like that.) Why use that behaviour as an argument against something entirely different?
It might be, that's true, it looked too thin to me for that but on closer inspection it could be a type 2 lead.

But either way, it is an argument for tethered chargers everywhere with thick cables so this kind of thing can't happen, whatever the charger type.

I rely on my granny charger. What would you have me do instead? Mandate that everyone have a wall box installed? Or if they don't, they can only charge at public chargers? What about those occasions when the ability to plug into a 13A socket is the lifesaver in a genuine "emergency".
I'd rather we had decent public charging infrastructure so you could charge anywhere anytime. Then a proper tethered Type 2 home charger would be an optional luxury and no need for granny chargers.

These things are symptoms of an inadequate infrastructure, after all nobody carries a petrol hose with them in their boot in case of an untethered pump, nor stores petrol in drums at home to fill up (legal or not, nobody's doing it).

Banning some of these solutions would increase the pressure to invest properly in the infrastructure.
 
I think my type 2 lead is thinner than my granny lead, but don't quote me on that. I do know that my granny lead is nowhere near that long.

I do have public charging available. I use it as part of my charging solutions along with the granny lead. (I was scolded earlier for using my nearby charge-point at all, because locals shouldn't be treating it as their "private property" so as to leave it for people passing through!) But the granny lead is handy for topping up when the battery isn't desperately low and for allowing the car to balance charge after a session on the public 50Kw charger to bring it to 85% or so. It's also going to be handy when the weather is bad enough that I don't fancy the five-minute walk to the charge-point, and back.

I agree with you that the infrastructure is poor, and that tethered cables are the way they should all be, but we ain't there yet. I don't however think that banning or severely restricting the means that people actually have of charging their cars is the way to pressurise investment in infrastructure. Rather, good infrastructure will encourage use of that infrastructure.

In my view the solution to the above problems is proper information given to purchasers of EVs. I had no idea that granny chargers were at all problematic until I read this forum. The advice to be careful is buried deep in the MG4 manual and the dealer said nothing about it. Ditto the advice not to coil cables. If the people who thought they were being ever so neat by taping their type 2 cable in a coil were simply told in words of one syllable that this wasn't advisable, they probably wouldn't do it.

It's not fair to demonise people for not knowing things you have to dig deep and read a lot to find out. Make it manadatory to tell them.
 
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In my view the solution to the above problems is proper information given to purchasers of EVs. I had no idea that granny chargers were at all problematic until I read this forum. The advice to be careful is buried deep in the MG4 manual and the dealer said nothing about it. Ditto the advice not to coil cables. If the people who thought they were being ever so neat by taping their type 2 cable in a coil were simply told in words of one syllable that this wasn't advisable, they probably wouldn't do it.

It's not fair to demonise people for not knowing things you have to dig deep and read a lot to find out. Make it manadatory to tell them.
I don't think we'll agree here.

The average person treats a car like an appliance and won't go anywhere near a manual nor listen to the dealer, so advice is likely to fall on deaf ears. I am not demonising anyone, this is a fact.

Moreover, I think they should be able to treat their car like an appliance (and EVs are better for this inherently), so we need very simple standardised infrastructure everywhere which all of the same type, with minimal choice. Misfuelling cases indicate that even navigating a choice of fuels is hard for some, so Tesla are right: no buttons, no screens, just plug in and charge is how simple it needs to be.
 
My car has been on the granny charger for well over 14 hours right now. I went into the garage to check it, and the plug is cool. No sign of any heating up whatsoever. Coiling up 5 metres of cable is not even on the radar. The car sits beside the power point and the cable simply drops to the floor then up again to the charging port.

This system suits me perfectly. It's perfectly capable of keeping up with my motoring needs, which do not require more mileage than I can charge for while I sleep - in fact nowhere near it. If I happen to want to charge up faster than that, I can use a nearby public rapid charger for an hour or so.

You want to ban this, purely because you think that some people will not read clear instructions even if they are provided to them. (Obviously some people will, I mean, come on.) I think this is draconian and oppressive.

You would require everyone with an EV who wants to charge at home to install a wall box (and then how are you going to stop them coiling the pretty long leads I see being used with these things?) or use a public charger. The former is expensive to install and the latter negates the huge advantage of an EV, that you mainly charge at home and seldom have to bother visiting the equivalent of a petrol station. It's also likely to be more expensive per unit than any sort of home charging.

You also overlook the fact that a granny charger can be a lifesaver on a long journey in the event of being caught out by a broken public charger or similar. Getting to another charger may be impossible. Getting to a 13A socket is a lot more doable, even though it might take a while before you get enough charge to let you get on your way. At least you're not stranded.

Yes the infrastructure needs to be better, but the solution is not to deprive drivers of an extremely useful piece of equipment in advance of any improvement happening.
 
I, too, only have a granny charger. As to the photo I submitted it was of the car's Type 2 cable. My car was in an adjacent charging space with my uncoiled Type 2 cable, taking advantage of 15 minutes of free charging whilst I popped in to the supermarket.

The real issue with uncoiling cables is one of continuous heating and, more than likely though not only, relates to the extension lead drums where the cables are, effectively, pressed together and they do not allow the heat generated by cable-resistance to escape. Heating increases the cable resistance which creates more heating. The insulation then melts and catches fire.

Induction heating effects can occur dependent on the the design of the system receiving the power but should be significantly less than the resistance heating effects. IET Documents set out the maximum currents allowed for various cable wire areas dependent on how much the cables are surrounded by insulation.

Thus best practice is to uncoil all current-carrying cables, particularly those with large currents and subject to continuous use - as is specified on all drum extension leads I've seen.

My granny charger cannot reach my outside socket which is protected by a 20A MCB in my 15 year-old house and thus I use an (non-drum) high-current rated extension lead. In case of rain The granny charger unit and the the extension lead socket is placed in a waterproof plastic container. So far I have not noticed any excessive heating but I always monitor the set-up.
 
I can hardly think of anywhere I could use a granny charger without an extension lead. I certainly don't have a 3-pin socket within reach of my off-street parking with the granny lead I have. The archetypal use case -- visiting Granny -- is likely to be the same for most people.

I've only tried it once, with an extension lead, and the extension lead's plug did get warm enough to the touch that I abandoned it. The lead's rated for that load (when uncoiled), but I wonder whether the fuse contact was a bit corroded (the heat was coming from where the fuse is).

BTW I have a mate who used to do the sound and lighting for his student union. He told me of an occasion where someone ran a stage light off a coiled lead. Someone picked it up and it literally melted over their work gloves.
 
I have to say I'm very grateful to everyone on this forum for educating me about electrical safety using these things. I am actually doing exactly what I intended to do when I first got the car, but I know what not to do and what to look out for to detect any problems before they've become critical. I realise how fortunate I am to have a robust metal-jacketed power point in my garage only 1.5 metres from the charging port in the car's normal garaged position, and that the house circuitry is very well designed with the garage lights and power points on a separate fused circuit. (The house fuses trip if a light bulb pops or you plug in a faulty appliance, which has always annoyed me, but maybe it's for the best.)

I had thought that I'd start looking at wall boxes, but right now I can't really afford that outlay, and the longer this goes on the less I want one. At least that's a solution if I do run into problems with the granny lead.

I haven't had to use an extension cable, but some people who have acquired suitably robust cables seem to be managing OK. I'm now seriously wondering what the guy up the street was doing when he had a (legally sanctioned) cable trailing across the pavement to his EV parked outside his mid-terrace house. (He's not doing it now, I suspect permission was revoked when they installed the village charge-point.) I had assumed he'd had a wall box fitted but for all I know he was using a granny cable and extension lead all the time.

I have a friend who has had a Leaf for two or three years. He told me he used the granny cable for a year when he first got it because of some delay with his wall box installation. I assumed that he'd also been using the village 50Kw charger to save leaving the car on the granny charger for a very long time. But no. The other day he started asking me about using public chargers as he's intending to drive up to Inverness and has never used one! He doesn't even have a garage and the Leaf sits in his driveway all the time. I don't know what power point he was using or if he was using an extension lead, but he didn't have any problems - he only got the wall box to speed things up.

So far I have only gone on one visit where I might have had to use the granny charger away from home. I could have got the car into my friend's garage all right, with a power point just there, but it was a plastic one and I was a little bit doubtful. However, the public type 2 chargers only 50 yards from her house worked fine, so I never needed to try it.

Anyway, as far as I can see, reports of serious consequences arising from using granny leads seem to be pretty rare, and I think their use is more widespread than people often realise. I don't accept that the majority of the public will ignore firm safety instructions if these are communicated to them clearly. The issue, as with the coiled lead in the OP photograph, is that these instructions are not communicated clearly. I have a number of appliances around the house and garage that came with pretty prominent safety instructions, including a 12v lead-acid battery jump-starting kit and a snow clearing machine with a small petrol engine. I read them, and I'd have been a raving idiot not to. But there wasn't a thing inside the case of my granny charger or the bag of my type 2 lead to alert me about any issues. Just some text buried deep in the MG4 manual, about the granny charger.

In l'esprit d'escalier, I think if I'd had the opportunity to talk to the owner of the coiled-and-taped lead, I'd have spoken to him in a friendly manner, pointed out the risk of over-heating, and suggested that he untaped the lead and made a habit of laying it out loose when in operation. We need more education, not banning things.
 
Ok - Prepares to be flamed.. or not

I charge mine on the Granny lead - Only as the wifes Leaf is using the 7kw Wall Socket ..
Next yes I'm running the granny lead from an Extension - BUT I hasten to Add its a HIGH rated MasterPlug Weatherproof Lead - No issues as ALL leads are run out and NOT Coiled.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far far away - I once took an normal extension lead and granny lead plugged in - in my first EV ... The breaker on the Extension cut out - Over heated - Lesson learnt.
 
I had thought that I'd start looking at wall boxes, but right now I can't really afford that outlay, and the longer this goes on the less I want one. At least that's a solution if I do run into problems with the granny lead.

I was in a similar situation, but I've decided to get a wallbox for a few reasons:
  • We've learned that we can get on perfectly well with a combination of work and public chargers. But it causes some very slight hassle and anxiety; I'm paying to get rid of that hassle and anxiety.
  • Peace of mind with regard to safety at home
  • Making best use of off-peak tariffs. It's no good having Octopus Go's 4 hours of 10p/unit electricity, if I can only get 8 units in that time. With a wallbox I can get 28 units every night.
  • Now I'm leasing, and I had some capital from selling my old car
  • A friend pointed out that I should treat it as a luxury spend. Some people spend their money on leather seats. Some spend it on a charger.
 
When I charged ERO at my cousin's it was via the granny lead plugged in to an extension lead ... but the wall socket was a new one with it's own feed and RCB, all leads were uncoiled, and the extension is an industrial grade unit that would be used typically for powering 4x Dell server PCs (which pull a mighty load, especially at start-up). :)
 

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