120v over night will add about 45 miles of range to your typical tesla. Most people drive less than 20 miles a day, so you always start out with a full tank. When I go skiing, I drive 120 miles, so I come back with a lot of range depleted, but it charges up the next few days. On the rare occasions over the past 8 years when I needed to go a long distance, I just use the super charger in my town, although once I went to a pay place that has 220v and 40 amps (so instead of ~3.5 miles of range per house, I added 20 miles of range per hour). What doesn't work with 120v regular power outlet charging? If you drive 250 miles and spend 5 minutes and then need to drive 200 more miles. That is pretty rare.
In 18 months of use, I’ve done all except three charges on my regular old 120v outlet in the garage. I just plug in at night when I go under 60% charge, usually every few days.
I ordered the adapter, outlet, and new wire to move an unused electric dryer service to the garage as soon as I got the car, but haven’t bothered to install them. It just isn’t necessary. (And I dislike taking the face cover off the main breaker box, nothing rational, I just don’t like being that close to the live circuits. If I need to charge a lot overnight, it’s a 30 minute job to install the service.)
For the upfront cost… I had been waiting for the little Jeep pickup truck, but when it came out and I got done adding the basic functional packages it was well up in the Tesla price range. (I’m keeping an elderly F250 out of the crushers for my occasional pickup truck needs, but I could just as easily rent one from the big box hardware store when I need it for less than I pay in insurance on the F250.)
> I ordered the adapter, outlet, and new wire to move an unused electric dryer service to the garage as soon as I got the car, but haven’t bothered to install them. It just isn’t necessary. (And I dislike taking the face cover off the main breaker box, nothing rational, I just don’t like being that close to the live circuits. If I need to charge a lot overnight, it’s a 30 minute job to install the service.
You could do all of the work except for landing the circuit and pay an electrician for an hour to terminate the circuit for you.
The main issue is that it's a single 120V circuit for everything in the garage, including the garage door opener. Assuming you open the garage door (say with a remote garage door opener) while the car is charging, it will trip the breaker in the basement. IIRC your average garage door opening motor uses 500W to 700W while in operation.
So at the least I need to install a second circuit. But the cost of installation is mostly tied into labor rather then material since it involves bringing out a trenching machine out. And the cost difference between just 1 extra 120V circuit and a full blown 240V service with subpanel is significant, but not bad enough for me to think it's makes sense to penny pinch there.
Edit: Well in theory you could also have a receiver and relay that cuts off the charging to the car before initiating powering the garage door motor. That said I don't think it's worth the hassle... at minimum that's two electrical mechanical relays for the 120V lines, some sort of RF receiver for the car, a controller for the relays and to probably some way to signal the garage door itself (replacement for the button inside maybe), and way for the controller to state of the door itself so that it doesn't cut power at the wrong time. Certainly hackable but I doubt I could build it reliable without way more money and time spent on it.
Will it? It’d depend on the breaker and load rating of the wire run to the garage.
I can draw 6kw from one 240v, breaker, so about 25 amps, for a few minutes before it trips from thermal overload.
I load tested a new outlet that was wired on the same circuit, with five devices plugged in, kettle, pressure cooker, slow cooker, fan heater, and hair drier for good measure.
The breaker should trip before the wire is damaged, it did.
