Texaco Fire-Chief Electric Car Charging Station: DIY Electric Car EVSE

Hello, I'm Jack Rickard. I no longer really trust my car to the man who wears the star, but I can still remember from my early childhood in the 1950s, the Texaco Fire Chief pump. We're using it for a slightly different purpose here with the electric Porsche.

I'll plug us in and turn us on with our Texaco Fire Chief charging station. The actual charger to charge your batteries is in almost all cases in your car. This is so you can charge your batteries wherever you go.

And you'll have some form of plug on the car to make a connection to AC voltage, either 120 volts AC or 240 volts AC. People use different kinds of plugs, automobile manufacturers use different kinds of plugs. The closest thing we had to a standard was called an Avcon plug, and it was fairly successful.

No one seems to be using it at this turn. Right now, the Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE, are in the balloting process for our new electrical connector for electric vehicles called J1772. We use just a 15 amp, 120 volt AC receptacle on our Porsche.

That gives us the widest flexibility, but it's not really the best connector. It's a little lightweight for some of these things with a 24 kilowatt package. We're only drawing about 10 amps at 240 volts, so we pretty much get away with it.

But as the battery packs get larger, we're going to need a little heavier duty current. That brings us to the charge station. It's not a charger, it's simply an AC connection.

But when you're hooking up that kind of power for convenience, there's some niceties that you can include in it, and we'll talk about those a little bit. What I've done is instead of the brushed aluminum charge station that the BMW Mini E and the Tesla use, is I've picked up a replica, a reproduction of an old 1950s style, what they used to call a computer face. This one is now, but they used to call it a computer face because it had these digits.

It's a vintage gas pump. We found a fella in Hickory, North Carolina, who was making these and selling them. They're not the original pumps, and I wouldn't probably do this to an actual vintage pump.

But since these were a replica, I didn't have any problems doing modifications to it. We bought it from these guys for $939. It's got a lit globe, and it looks just like an old Texaco Fire Chief gas pump.

But for our purposes, it's actually a charging station. A charging station basically provides AC power to your car, and as I said, the charger itself is in the car, so it's simply an AC transfer situation. But there's some things you can do with a charging station that are a little safer and a little easier to use than simply plugging into a NEMA 1430 connector on the wall, or as we did in the garage there for quite a while, a little L6-30 NEMA connector.

When you do that with your charger, you kind of draw a little bit of arc. It'd be nice to have some switching circuitry and so forth. And so we basically built this charge station out of that.

One of the features we incorporated was we simply cut a hole in the side and put an actual NEMA 14-50 connector here on the side. That's the standard heavy connector that you'll find at RV parks. And a lot of guys that are driving electric cars these days are using RV parks for overnight charges, and so they have to carry a cord that'll plug into a NEMA 14-50 connector.

The AC power in your house comes in in two phases, each are 120 volts AC and a neutral. And in your circuit box, you alternate circuit breakers between one phase and the other to get 240 volts AC. You simply get a two-pole circuit breaker that covers two adjacent slots in the box, and that gives you two different phases of 120 volts.

By doing so, you get 240 volts AC, or the difference between the two phases, really. You'll often have a third conductor, a white wire that's the neutral. The two phases are red and black traditionally, and then a bare copper wire.

We added a 100-amp circuit breaker to our square D panel in the back of the garage and brought a conduit down the west side of the building here that we buried and ran some 10-3 electrical wire, 10-gauge, three conductor plus ground electrical wire, which should be able to handle those kind of current levels for that length of 30 or 40 feet in conduit and buried in the ground. So it's a much better circuit for charging because we're not running it through the walls. If it did, for some reason, get hot, it's going to be buried in the ground.

It's in a conduit, and it won't cause a fire. One of the other things we added to this was actually two of the little Tyco Kilovac contactor switches. We often use in electric cars to switch a battery power to the controller, and we've hooked each of our two 120-volt AC phases to their own essentially relay, and those relays are activated by 12 volts.

I've probably got 100 of these little 12-volt black bricks that you plug into the wall for every camcorder, camera, wireless access point, anything computerized in the last 15 years had these little plugs, so I wired that to one of the legs in ground for 120 volts AC and switched it through this switch to activate those two relays. Now what does this do for me? Well, I can, with it off, I have no power at all of any kind to this connector or to this cable. A normal switch in your house is usually switching one leg, either the neutral or the hot wire, but it still has power on the other one, but by not completing the circuit, you turn off the light.

In this case, I want to completely remove power from this cable and from this connector, and so we've used these two relays to do that. So I can plug in the car, and there's no spark or sudden start to it. I'm simply plugging in a dead cord and come over here to my Texaco Fire Chief, flip the switch on, and the charger starts charging.

We have an eVision system in the Porsche that'll tell me fairly precisely how many amp hours and kilowatt hours I'm putting into the batteries. But what that's actually measuring is the DC charge current and voltage going into the batteries and totalizing that to keep a running track of how many amp hours or kilowatt hours I've put in. Unfortunately, the chargers are not 100% efficient.

And so that's not actually the kilowatt hours I'm getting to pay AmerenUE for. That's the AC kilowatt hours that appears on your meter on your house. In this case, we've added a meter, a little Conserve model 6433 from Optimum Energy up in Calgary, Alberta.

It's a little meter that displays a number of things, but among them kilowatt hours and run time. You can program it with some little switches on it, and I've got them behind glass. And we've simply set it up to alternate between run time and watt hours.

And so it gives me a watt hour reading and then a run time reading. I can't reset it without taking the front of this off, but it operates a lot like your meter. If you come in, you can simply take a reading of what it's showing for run time.

Right now it's at 48 minutes and, well, let's see here, 46 seconds, seven hours, 48 minutes and 50 seconds and about 4,051 watt hours. If I take a note of that, plug in the car and come back after it's charged, I can pretty easily calculate how many kilowatt hours I've actually put in the car and how long it took to charge. A lot of people want to know how long it takes to charge our battery pack.

We've tested it, I can calculate it, but most of the time I'm plugging the car in and going into bed. I come out in the morning after and I can kind of tell what happened and that'll give me a good idea if I've actually put in a substantial amount of electricity and how long it took to do that. So we put a meter on this.

Along the way, we added this cord that again is wired in parallel with the plug to that relay. This is actually some 10-4 service cord. And again, it has a ground wire, it's green, a white neutral wire and our two phases, red and black.

It's some very flexible cord. It's covered with black. I really like those yellow cords, but they get dirty pretty easily and they show a lot of dirt.

So to go with the Fire Chief theme, we went with a black cord, cut a hole in the side and used one of our glad hand. That grommet is pretty handy to keep prevent chafing and that cable goes in there. I've also added a 110 volt weatherproof receptacle that's wired to one leg, just one of the relays to allow us to plug in for 120 volts AC.

So for the same device, I can plug in 120 volt AC, a NEMA 1450 plug for 240 volts AC or use this custom cord that we have here for the Porsche for 240 volts AC and get a running total of my power and the ability to switch it off and on. Finally, we added a little photo cell to the far side that turns on the globe at night and turns it off at dawn. So that's pretty much all we have here at the moment is the ability to turn off and on power, monitor power and have various connections to it in kind of an Art Deco type of nostalgic 1950s Texaco Fire Chief pump.

But it's essentially a homemade charging station and one you can build yourself. Future improvements we've got planned on this, I simply haven't got them done yet, is the inclusion of a ground fault interrupt circuit. Ground fault interrupts have kind of got a bad name because of the cheap units they use in the bathroom that trip too easily and on too many false occasions, you wind up with a circuit out in your house and are calling electricians and everything else and find out it's just a little reset button on a bathroom GFI outlet.

But ground fault interrupt is actually a great idea. The way it works is they compare the current levels in the two phases or in one phase in the neutral wire in the case of 120 volts AC and the current should be identical in the two of them. If it's more than about 6 to 10 milliamps different, that means that you have a leak usually the ground somewhere in the circuit and they typically use that detection to disconnect power immediately.

And that way if you drop something in the water or otherwise make contact with the ground, it can simply disconnect the power from the circuit instead of electrocuting somebody. This is not a bad idea on electric cars. An automobile like anything else ages, we have a lot of wiring in it.

The car moves and it's possible that you could have a wire chafe or rub through the insulation otherwise and make contact with the frame of the car. If you did so and had 240 volts AC and walked over and touched the car, you could conceivably be electrocuted. It's a little bit of a stretch but it's okay to be a little safe in that situation.

So we want to build some sort of ground fault interrupt into our station here. We're probably not going to use a little bathroom receptacle but actually get a quality ground fault interrupt monitoring circuit and wire it in through our relays to disconnect power. The other planned improvement and that's that SAE J1772 connector I was talking about.

As soon as that's out, we're going to replace this cable probably with a five wire cable and that connector and that'll bring us up to speed to the standard and safe with the ground fault interrupt and our ability to turn on and off the circuit and monitor how much power we're using. That's pretty much the functions you want in a charging station. As far as UL listed, did we pass inspections? We've probably broken 15 to 17 federal, state, and local laws and perhaps a couple ordinances of the local churches.

But by following this procedure, we're a lot safer than simply plugging it into a receptacle on the wall and I think we'll have a pretty good charge station here. Again, you can trust your car to the man who wears the star except he doesn't work on cars anymore and it's not certain that the oil companies really have your interests at heart. So we're going to electric drive but it's nice to have kind of a fun looking charging station instead of the plain vanilla brushed aluminum units that we're seeing out there.

So we thought we'd share it with you a little bit. Again, I'm Jack Rickard. We'll see you next time.