Recently we made plans to stay at an AirBnB house. Prior to arriving at the house, we asked whether the house has an EV charger. The owner said that while there was not an EV charger, there was a receptacle that the owner uses when she charges up her EV at the house.
It ended up being futile to try to get the owner to provide any further detail about said receptacle.
A next aspect of this travel was to make a reservation to rent an EV. The rental company had available a “manager’s special EV” category. The idea was that the rental company would promise to provide an EV, but would not say in advance what make or model of EV it would be. (The motivation to select the manager’s special EV category is that the cost per day is cheaper than for any particular make and model of EV.) We would need to be prepared for any EV that the rental company happened to give us at checkout time.
What this meant was that we needed to be prepared for just about anything. The rental car might turn out to have an NACS (Tesla-style) charging port. Or the rental car might turn out to have a J1772 (non-Tesla-style) charging port. (I was confident that we would not be given a Nissan Leaf with a CHAdeMO charging port.) The receptacle at the rental house might turn out to be any of the eight types shown at right.
Here is what we did to try to prepare for these uncertainties. First, we brought with us our Tesla Mobile Connector, shown at right.
The TMC has a 24-foot cord with an NACS (Tesla-style) plug. It can be used with any of the eight plug adapters shown above, to draw power from any of the eight receptacle types shown above. It can deliver up to 32 amps of charging current to an EV, at up to 240 VAC.
We also brought along with us a collection of the eight charging plugs shown above.
We also brought with us an adapter, shown at right, that can convert an NACS plug into a J1772 plug.
At the rental counter, we were given a Polestar EV. As of right now, all Polestar EVs have J1772 charging ports. So it became clear that we would need to use the just-mentioned adapter.
We arrived at the AirBnB house and searched the premises, looking for the charging receptacle. After a long hunt, we found the receptacle shown at right.
The alert reader will already have identified the exact receptacle type, and will have already slapped the buzzer on this. Of course this is a NEMA 6-20 receptacle, meaning that it provides two hot wires and a ground wire (but no neutral wire). It provides as much as 240 VAC and it provides as much as 20 Amps of current.
So we assembled our charging solution: the TMC and the 6-20 charging plug and the NACS-to-J1772 adapter. You can see at right how we ended up.
And the happy result is that we were able to charge up the EV. The charger delivered 15 Amps at 231 VAC to the EV, meaning that we were providing about 3½ kilowatts of power to the EV. For this particular EV, this worked out to about eleven miles of driving range delivered per hour of charging time.
This EV has a maximum driving range of about 250 miles, so if the battery had been run down all the way, it might have required as much as 23 hours to charge the car up again. Lucky for us, the needed amount of charging was not anywhere near to 250 miles, and the charging could easily be accomplished during a night of sleep.