A peek at the Leaf's Charger

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I thought that the new Nissan QC was already on sale in Japan.
Buy there in Yen, getting a good price, possibly?

But, that might not be the UL version, but a slightly different product?

If one is going to modify the power parts anyway, it would no longer be "UL" here anyway.
 
No, I have not. At the meeting in earlier this month, they told us it had just passed UL testing but that it was not yet available in the US. I imagine it will be soon, but as several people have pointed out; this agreement with Aerovironment may add a bunch of delays and hindrances as it's in conflict with their existing product line.

-Phil
 
mksE55 said:
I am in the group that maybe we can have some external charger that uses the QC port for either 6.6 or greater with home wiring even if you dont get the max charge capacity and have to run 440V to your home. Couldnt cost much more than the standard L2 setup since most are going to do this any way and you can bring charge time down to 1-2 hrs.

I'd thought of that too. My L2 EVSE (Blink) is limited to 30A at 240V (7.2kW), and would comfortably handle a 6.6kW charger. But my home EVSE isn't my headache. Its my on-board charger....

About once a month, I make a 66mi (ea way) trip to the far side of town (Phoenix; Gilbert to Glendale and back). My leaf simply doesn't have the capacity to make that trip without at least one charge. There are very few L2 EVSE I'd care to spend several hours nearby - nothing to see/do, and no L3 chargers.

I wish there was ONE (1) L3 charger near the center of town. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be the only user.
 
brettcgb said:
I wish there was ONE (1) L3 charger near the center of town. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be the only user.
I think there is an L3 charger available at the downtown Ecotality headquarter. Check out the Phoenix thread for more details.
 
Ingineer said:
Did some nosing around to satisfy curiosity, and here's what I found:
pic

The Charger is made by Nichicon.
-Phil

Serial number 000000 ?!
 
Having reached the end of this thread, I feel it would be helpful to clear up two items.

>> 1. If the L1 charger is "this" big, then a 10 kW one should only be about "that" big.

The L1 box is not a charger. It's a safety connection relay. The actual charger is in the car. So you can't use the little EVSE as a reference if you are going to build something else such as an actual charger.

>> 2. The non-isolated chargers are not all that big. We can just drop an isolation transformer in ahead of it,and we're done.

Transformers work in a very specific way. More power, more transformer. I learned in college that one way to gauge the capacity of a transformer was to weigh it! A quick search turns up a range of numbers but a ballpark figure might be 1 pound per watt. See where this is going? I did a little more looking, and a nice example of a 10 or 20 kVA transformer is that one sitting at the top of a nearby telephone pole. If you think about putting a pole transformer under you hood, you will begin to appreciate the problem.

Now, the good news is that the foregoing is for 60Hz. That's your plug-and-play solution. If you up the frequency considerably, you can use smaller transformers and save a lot of weight. The price you pay is for all that fancy electronics to change 10kW of electricity into high frequency AC to go through the transformer. At that point you may as well finish the job with rectifying to DC and adding regulators. Now you have an idea of what they're putting inside those quick chargers, and why they're so costly, and that there really wasn't a free lunch, after all.
 
It's not so much the parts cost, it's the engineering, tooling, testing, certification, etc.

If you are producing a million chargers then these costs can be amortized across a large number and the per-unit cost will be low.

Even if they sold one QC to every Leaf owner so far, that's still a tiny number for an electronic product of any kind, let alone one that will likely weigh more than you!

Nissan/Sumitomo is obviously subsidizing the effort somewhat and bringing their supply chain muscle to bear.

-Phil
 
Does anybody know if the on-board charger accepts 50-60Hz or if it is only 60Hz? My wife and I are planning on moving back to Germany in a couple of years and that would be one of the points to consider before shipping the car over.
 
amtoro said:
Does anybody know if the on-board charger accepts 50-60Hz or if it is only 60Hz? My wife and I are planning on moving back to Germany in a couple of years and that would be one of the points to consider before shipping the car over.
It will operate from 100-250v AC at 50 or 60hz. Our upgraded EVSE's also will accept any global voltage standard with only a simple adapter needed for the plug type.

We've had several customers take their US-Spec Leafs to Europe, and a lot of US Leafs are being exported to Norway due to high demand there and a favorable import scenario.

Apparently the rear License plate area will accept a standard European-Union number plate as well. (I think the front bracket must be replaced)

-Phil
 
gbarry42 said:
>> 2. The non-isolated chargers are not all that big. We can just drop an isolation transformer in ahead of it,and we're done.

Anyone want to take a guess on how much a 60Hz 50kW transformer would weigh?.. probably waste quite a bit of power also. Cant be cheap.
 
Ingineer said:
It will operate from 100-250v AC at 50 or 60hz. Our upgraded EVSE's also will accept any global voltage standard with only a simple adapter needed for the plug type.

We've had several customers take their US-Spec Leafs to Europe, and a lot of US Leafs are being exported to Norway due to high demand there and a favorable import scenario.

Apparently the rear License plate area will accept a standard European-Union number plate as well. (I think the front bracket must be replaced)

-Phil

Thank you Phil :)
 
Just curious here. I came into this thread hoping to see tear-downs and details of the LEAF's onboard charger, but saw instead 11 pages of talking/whining about an illogical 6.6kw upgraded charger - which I'm pretty sure is not going to happen because it doesn't NEED to happen. I'm living on Level 1 right now, laying down a cable through an extension cord from my apartment's 2nd-floor balcony when I need an overnight charge, and picking it up before management gets to the office at 6am, and it works fine!

What I was interested in is the technology inside the charger... "techno-pr0n" to be exact. It's the "you don't own it unless you can take it apart" hacker mantra in me. Dying to know what's under that cover - what's actually beyond the "peek" at the Leaf's charger ;)

From a hacker's perspective, there's no reason the CHAdeMO port couldn't be used for at-home 6.6kw charging with third-party chargers separate from the car. Nothing in the spec says CHAdeMO *HAS* to pump 40kW into the battery. You don't need 440v wiring even for some quick-chargers today - as Ingineer linked but nobody seems to have noticed, there are quick chargers now that run on standard 3-phase 220v circuits. So that's one huge hurdle to EV quick-charge adoption gone "poof"!

Now, about that charger's guts!
 
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