Low Power Chargers

[Tony]

Can anyone tell me what limits the current draw at a charging station? If a Lightning with extended range batteries plugs into a 40 amp charger will it trip the 50 amp circuit breaker protecting the charger?

The purpose of the question is whether I have to install a new 100 amp circuit to utilize the extended range option.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[frunk]

This what I have read and figured out so for what it is worth. When you buy the extended battery it comes with two 40 amp chargers build in the truck or battery, they split the battery pack in half using one charger for each half with each pulling 40 amps that give you 80 amp draw so you need to have a 100 amp circuit for the battery charge and that is why you can charge the battery in 40 min. I believe on the smaller battery you only get one 48 amp charger that part that we look at and hing on the wall is just to hold the power cord when not in use and for the connections. The extended battery also comes with inverters to convert the DC current to AC for supply to your house and maybe to the motors in the truck because I read the motors ar 3 phase AC motor.



A truck the size of the Ford F-150 requires a lot of energy because it is heavy and must push a lot of air aside as it drives. That’s why pickups get poor-to-middling gas mileage, and it is why the F-150 Lightning EV’s 300-mile extended-range battery will be a bear to recharge quickly using a Level 2 AC home charger.

Recognizing that overnight charging to 100 percent is a requirement for EV drivers, Ford has developed its own home EV-charging wall box, and that device is included with the selection of the optional extended-range battery when buying a Lightning.



“The battery, we can provide a bigger one,” observed F-150 Lightning chief engineer Linda Zhang, “But if you can’t charge it overnight, what’s the point?”

After all, customers will want to start their day with a fully charged battery, not already in the hole and looking for DC fast-charging opportunities or hoping to finish topping the battery off while at work. If the owner uses the truck for work, that is an especially unhelpful scenario!


It takes a lot of power to quickly recharge a big battery; more power than can be delivered by today’s regular wall boxes or vehicles’ onboard chargers. Ford’s solution was to install dual parallel on-board chargers that can handle the avalanche of electrons needed to quickly charge the battery pack.

Then, Ford needed a suitable wall box to deliver that avalanche. Most 240-volt Level 2 AC chargers top out at 40 amps. The ChargePoint HomeFlex is available in a 50-amp model that charges even faster, but that still isn’t enough for the Lightning’s battery.


“In order to get the overnight charging we needed, we installed dual chargers as well as upped the amperage of that wall box to be able to deliver 80 amps of service and get a lot more power through there so we can charge the battery quicker and get overnight to full,” Zhang explained.

The dual onboard chargers are wired together through the single plug from the wall box, so it is not like the days of the classic dual-fuel tank Jaguar XJ sedans that could take a fuel filler hose in each of its two fuel fillers. “We still have just the one plug that you would plug in from the wall box to the vehicle, but it goes through two chargers,” she said. “It is basically twin inverters in the vehicle that go to the battery.”

Jaguar Land Rover

The classic Jaguar XJ luxury sedan had a gas cap atop each rear fender, letting drivers fill the car's dual fuel tanks simultaneously.
To power this beast of a wall box, the owner will need to have an electrician wire it to a 100-amp circuit in the home’s breaker box. Some people are even connecting the wall box to its own power meter, Zhang said. While the box is 80 amps, using a 100-amp circuit to power it provides some breathing room. “The electrician would need to run 100-amp service to the wall box,” Zhang said. “That is usually what ends up needing to happen just to provide a little bit of buffer.”

The robust power connection works both ways, so the truck can send more power to the house through the wall box in the event of a power failure. And solar panels are more effective when they have a bank of batteries to even out power delivery. Using the Lightning in concert with rooftop solar makes the truck a mobile equivalent of Tesla’s PowerWall home battery bank.

The result of this powerful connection through the Ford Charge Station Pro 80-amp wall box and the dual onboard chargers of the extended-range battery Lightning trucks is the ability to charge the truck’s pack from 15 charge to 100 percent in eight hours. Using the 48-amp Ford Connected Charge Station would take 13 hours, and using the 32-amp Ford Mobile Charger that comes with each Lightning, plugged into a dryer outlet or the equivalent, would take 19 hours.


The smaller standard-range, 230-mile battery pack will charge in 14 hours using the dryer plug and Mobile Charger and takes ten hours to charge using the 48-amp Connected Charge Station wall box. The standard battery still needs ten hours to charge with the 80-amp Charge Station Pro because that vehicle doesn’t have to dual onboard chargers necessary to exploit the extra power available.