[Caevlist] Bought an EV! Need a home charger...

[Shawn Tucker]

There's a couple things going here.

1) You can't charge your EV on the same circuit as your freezer. The garage
outlets are going to be limited to 15 or 20 amps, and the EVSE for the car
will pull around 12 amps, leaving essentially nothing left on the circuit
for additional loads. I learned that my garage circuit is also shared with
my hallway circuit when I was charging on 120v and tried to vacuum at the
same time. Popped the circuit.

2) your freezer should be on its own, separate, non-GFCI circuit. Freezers
can often trip GFCI circuits, so it's best to have them on a separate
single circuit that isn't GFCI. It's (normally, often) allowed as the plug
is usually behind the unit, not used by anything else, and a single outlet
for the freezer only so exception to the "everything in the garage needs to
be GFCI".

3) HARD WIRE your L2 EVSE. Period. The NEMA 14-50 plugs can all too often
be the cause of melting or fires with EVSEs. Whatever you get, hardwire it.

4) When you get the EVSE installed, use an electrician, and have the
electrician install a second circuit for the freezer. Win-win.

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 11:01 AM Justin <justinclose at comcast.net> wrote:

> My wife and I finally bit the bullet and bought an EV!  We are excited...
> Hyundai 2023 Ioniq 5 SEL.  Really liking the car.
>
> But now I need to work on all the ancillary stuff... most notably charging
> at home.  It came with a 120v Level 1 charger...  it looked like it was
> working in our first attempt at using it, but it later tripped the GFCI
> outlet, which cause the rest of the garage circuit to cut out, of course.
> There is a freezer on that same circuit - don't want to have that go out!
> :)  (Not sure if it is the charger, the car, or the freezer... if the
> freezer kicked on while charging, it seems like it would have tripped the
> breaker, not the GFCI.  Car and outlet are all inside the garage, no
> moisture or water in the neighborhood.)
>
> I have a NEMA 6-20 outlet that I was planning on using in the short
> term... but no adapter for the current charge cable (which is standard
> 3-prong 120v, NEMA 5-15 or 5-20).  Are there places locally to source an
> adapter?
>
> And then I plan on installing a Level 2 charger in the (near?) future.  I
> saw some Eaton ones on Facebook... person had stacks of them, new in box.
> These appear to be more commercially oriented - but seem like they could
> work in a home setting.
>
> Saw a Juicebox one, for fairly cheap - but that company went out of
> business (in the US).  There seems to be an after-market OpenSource kit you
> can buy (for certain Juiceboxes anyway - not sure it would fit on this
> particular model).
>
> I hope to (again, at some point in the future) supply this via solar
> panels, also.  Do I need to take that into account when settling on a
> charger?  Or are all those issues handled by upstream equipment?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> *-- Justin*
>
>
>
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