Comment by sugarkjube
4 hours ago
> 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
4 hours ago
> 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.