Charging at apartment with 110V at MAX rate

The half that switch on and off are wired in groups of duplex outlets. The individual ones that run off a breaker in each apartment are a duplex outlet, usually the only load on a breaker. Usually a 15 Amp breaker (my observation here is most breakers for "home use" are 15A, some are ground fault - and outdoor ones are almost always ground fault unless someone was going against code). We don't see air conditioning outlets here. Though that is slowly changing, as it seems to be getting hotter each year. Would that be "global warming"?
I could tell stories of strange electrical installations. Such as the old Physics building at UBC, which had 50A breakers for the lab classroom bench outlets. Gone now, but we used it for a few months waiting for Triumf's building to be constructed. The benches were removed and the breakers were just turned off, not disconnected. The wires were folded over the conduit, and when people rested their feet on the wires they cut through the insulation, shorting the line. That won't trip a 50A breaker! Nor will an electric kettle when the cord shorts. The breakers were turned on by people wanting to make coffee and tea. Great fun watching the flashes and cord jumping! Oh, and several people ended up with holes in their shoes from the arc.

 

I'm willing to bet that the A/C also uses 15A, so you aren't going to break anything by charging your car at 15A as long as you don't use both at the same time.

If your circuit breaker trips, then you did overload the circuit somehow (maybe something else on the circuit?) Otherwise, you are good to go.

If you are charging your car off a 120V plug, then you are already slow-charging your battery, so I wouldn't worry about reducing the battery life with the 15A charge.

 

That emphasized sentence is not actually true. Just because the breaker does not trip, doesn't really mean that the circuit is not overloaded.

Breakers are sized according to the short term circuit capacity. NEC (National Electric Code) requires long term current loads to be limited to 80% of that capacity. That is why the chargers are designed pull only 12A, not 15A.

 

sorry to hijack, didn't want to make a separate thread for this. Anyone have a rough estimate of how much they pay to charge at home at 110v and LOWEST rate?

 

Is 1 hour of charging=1 KWH? | Page 2 | PriusChat

Left column has your electric rate (kW per hour) , middle is 120v cost to full charge the battery from empty.