[rnk]

If you have an accessible 120v outlet, it's extremely likely you can charge just with that. Evidence - had an ev since 2012, using only 120 volts. Only the most inefficient recent evs argue for higher voltage.

The reasons 120v garage charging won't work for you:

1. You commonly drive 200+ miles, need to come home, charge, driving 200 or 300 miles almost immediately.

When I need to do this I can go to a supercharger or fast dc charger, but that's rare. There's another alternative, I have used my house's dryer vent to charge at 30 amps, 220v maybe a dozen times in 10 years.

[Fatnino]

I was recently tasked with moving a chevy bolt what was parked on the street too long to save it from being impounded.

It had sat there for quite a long time and wasn't anywhere near full when it was parked. When I got it the battery was in the orange where it stops telling you how much range is left and just says find a charger. I belive this kicks in at the 15-20 miles remaining range.

I moved the car about 10 miles to a residential driveway that has a 120ac plug.

When I left, the car was indicating it would be fully charged in 60 hours.

That's two and a half days to do what a gas station can do in 5 minutes.

Bottom line is relying on 120 to keep your car charged up is a fantasy unless your car usage is so low you might as well have a bicycle instead of a car.

[mwint]

This is not true. Rule of thumb is 4-5mi per hour on 120AC. I drive a Leaf and charge exclusively at home on 120AC, zero problems keeping up with my non-bicycle-friendly commute.

If I needed to I could put in a 220 charger for a couple hundred bucks and a few hours of time, but I just don’t.

[Fatnino]

It is true, and your rule of thumb backs it up.

The chevy bolt has a range of ~260 miles. Divide by 4mi per hour charging and get ~60 hours of charging.

I'll allow that my bit about the bike was slightly hyperbolic.

[wffurr]

I was a little taken aback first time I charged my Bolt up with the 120V charger on an standard outdoor outlet. The time estimate said “9 AM” but I didn’t notice that it meant 9 AM two days from now.

I still only use the 120V outdoor outlet charger, since my usage is infrequent and adequately served by the 0.9 kW/hr charging, but it helps to know that a full charge does take something like 55 hours.

On the (hasn’t happened yet) occasion that I need more range than that, there’s a variety of level 2 and 3 chargers easily accessible in the area.

[ZeroGravitas]

Average commute is 40 mile round trip so 10 hours of charging.

A top up fast(-ish) charge then becomes something you need to do about as often as visiting a gas station in an ICE.

EVs generally shouldn't be run to 0 or charged to 100%, so this works out well if you have a suitable parking spot.

[Fatnino]

But that one fast charge takes 40 minutes, not the 5 minutes at a gas station.

It's totally workable, you can uausaly find something to do during that time, but I maintain that we are still one or two charging tech generations behind parity with gasoline.

[WorldMaker]

Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home.

Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise.

Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.

[News-Dog]

search '3-phase 220/240 volt EV charging USA' @Goo <https://www.google.com/search?q='3-phase 220/240 volt EV cha...>

[WorldMaker]

Search it for what? How is this a useful comment? Yes, the US has 3-phase 220/240 volt plugs. We call them "dryer plugs" out of habit and there aren't enough of them. Because they are "infrequent use"/"single use" plugs in the US most buildings don't have a lot of three phase circuits and expanding the number of three phase "dryer plugs" is relatively expensive. Expanding 120v plugs is much simpler in every class of US building today. That's exactly what I'm complaining about that we aren't doing more of, because it is much cheaper/easier and still a good start for the US. Level 1 charging is better than no charging.

[BenjiWiebe]

All the dryer plugs I've seen are single phase. I don't think I've ever seen a household with 3 phase service. Our farm has 3 phase service but the house is still wired up to a single phase.

Using both sides of split phase is still single phase.

[News-Dog]

Three-Phase Electric Power (3φ) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power