Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cesarb 733 days ago
> where if you plug in another appliance on the same breaker the car will decrease its draw to prevent triggering the breaker.

That's alarming. There's no way the car can know that there's another appliance on the same breaker. The only way it can know it should decrease its power draw, is by detecting that the voltage decreased on the circuit, but that voltage decrease will only be noticeable if the wiring is undersized for the load (in fact, that feature is probably designed to protect against overheating undersized wiring on the circuit feeding the car). That circuit is probably severely overloaded, which can be a fire risk.

1 comments

This feature doesn't exist. The Tesla home charger can share current with other Tesla chargers on the same branch. It can't share current with an electric water heater or some other non-Tesla load
I think the OP was just confusing a feature used by someone with a Tesla from a Tesla specific feature.

They might be using one of these: https://www.chargedfuture.com/240v-outlet-smart-splitter/

There’s also smart breaker boxes that again have nothing to do with Tesla specifically. The breaker box will preferentially shed EV charging first when someone would otherwise trip their whole homes’s connection to the grid. It’s not a perfect solution, but sometimes your local utility doesn’t want to upgrade your connection to the grid because their substation is fully provisioned or whatnot.