Batjew said:
We got the car home yesterday and come to find out the trickle charger will not work unless the outlet in your home is grounded, good safety feature, very bad if you can't charge. We live in an older home in Atlanta that was renovated but apparently they never grounded the outlets, I confirmed. Any ideas on a possible temporary work around, right now we're trying to map out nearby charging stations until we speak to our landlord.
I am sorry that you cannot charge.
The only safe thing to do is work with the landlord to have a properly installed new outlet and cable from the service panel installed.
And it would be safer to put in 240V and either use evseupgrade to modify the 120V EVSE or buy a 240V EVSE.
Like many you also have failed to recognize that the 120V EVSE should only be for limited emergency use.
A restatement of what I have advised many times to others with this question:
Keep in mind that if your circuits do not have separate ground wire that the installation is very old.
I think the change in the code to separate ground wire was sometime in the 1950s or early 1960s.
I have experience from 1970 of attempting to work with the early Romex manufactured in the 1940s and it was an absolute fire hazard disaster in 1970. If the cable in your residence is that old every last piece of it needs to be replaced.
If it is 1950s or early 1960s cable it might be OK, but keep in mind that all plastic materials eventually become brittle. It might still be tolerable, but at some point it will become unsafe and should be replaced.
It would be better, smarter, and safer to go ahead and put in proper new cables for power and not even consider using such old cables for 120V EVSE charging.
A repeat of my input from previous questions on 120 V EVSE use:
Note that Nissan recommends the 120V EVSE for limited emergency use only.
Some people have used it for a long time without problems yet, but in general that is a bad idea unless you have a newly properly installed dedicated circuit with high grade receptacle using properly tightened screw connections.
Previous info from another thread:
mikelb said:
...
Trickle charging should be safe, though, right? I wouldn't necessarily need to have the circuit certified for it or anything, should I? If I were to go to a friend's house, would I be safe plugging into their outlet?
How safe 120V charging is depends on how lucky you are.
Very few garages have the correct properly installed high quality single outlet supplied by a single breaker.
Code only allows using 80% of the circuit rating for a long term continuous load.
So on a 15 amp circuit nothing else should be on the same circuit while the car is charging.
And a lot of 120V gets put in poorly using push in connections.
One person had a bad fire most likely from staples that had damaged the cable in the wall.
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