Bonus hummer video this week. If you've been around for a minute, you know that I'm taking
this military humvee and turning it into an electric vehicle. And like anything electric,
it has batteries inside. And those batteries need to be charged up, just like an electric
toothbrush or a cellphone. And there are quite a few different ways to charge up an electric
vehicle, and it might seem a little overwhelming and confusing, but today I'm going to explain
it very simply. Flo saw this project of mine and noticed that I didn't have a charger so
they sent over a brand new, top of the line FLO X5 that I can install in my garage. This
Flo X5 is compatible with every single electric vehicle. More on that in a second. Huge thanks
to Flo for sponsoring this video. Let's get started.
[Intro]
Inside the United States there are three types of electric vehicle charging plugs. Of course
we have the Tesla plug, then we have the J1772, and the CHAdeMO. The Tesla and the J1772 are
the most popular in the United States. Tesla is used for the Tesla vehicles and is proprietary,
while the J1772 is basically used on all of the rest of them. The CHAdeMO connector is
actually super cool. It's not one of the main players inside the United States and I'll
probably make a video on that one later. Today we're just going to focus on the top two.
Now that we know the three connectors of charging, let's talk about the levels of charging. You
might have heard someone talk about level 1 charging or level 2 charging. Level 1 is
where you're sticking the plug into just a normal regular wall outlet and charging your
vehicle up that way. The problem with level 1 is that it's kind of slow. It usually gets
about 2-3 miles per hour of range which means that you have to be plugged in pretty much
the entire day to get a usable amount inside of your battery. Level 2 charging speeds things
up considerably. You can get anywhere from 20-30 miles of range an hour while charging
on a level 2 charger and that's what we're installing today. There are level 3 chargers
- DC fast chargers are sometimes called superchargers that can add 200-500 miles per hour of range,
but you would mostly only use those for road trips, or if you drive more than, like, 200
miles a day. The rest of the time I'll just be charging up at night like I do with my
cellphone. There are portable car chargers that plug into a dryer outlet, or in my case
a welding outlet. But having a dedicated smart home charging system like the Flo X5, makes
things a lot easier and gives you more control over when your vehicle charges.
And, of course, you don't need to build your own EV in order to use these chargers. These
are standard across the board for everybody. But I'm going to show you what happens internally
inside the vehicle while it's charging. So this is my charging port right here. This
is the J1772, and it's the most common, best option for me while building an electric vehicle.
I can't use the Tesla charger because that's proprietary. Teslas can use the J1772, but
as of right now, the J1772 users can not use Tesla. Elon has promised that he's going to
open his charging network to everybody, but he's been saying that for a while.
So this charging port is going to sit right inside of here where the old diesel filler
upper used to be. And it'll just head down there to the charger underneath the vehicle.
And my batteries are just going to sit in these compartments. And this right here is
the charger, and if you notice, it has two water cooling inlets. So this thing does get
water cooled while it's charging up the batteries. I'll explain way more about that in a future
video. Now let's get the charger on the wall. So inside of a normal control panel we have
two lines coming in through the top. And when you're looking at, say, a normal wall outlet,
it's only using one of those lines to get 120 volts of power. That's how much is coming
out of this one outlet. However, our charger is 240 volts, which means that we have to
use both of the lines coming in, bring them into one breaker, and because we're running
this inside of an already existing building, we have to use metal conduit which protects
the wires and makes sure they never get damaged. Like always, life is a do it yourself project
but sometimes in order to stay alive you have to pass off the do it yourself project to
an expert. Because we're dealing with so much power and it is connected to my house, which
is connected to the grid, I do have a licensed and certified electrician here and he's been
nice enough to let us film so we can see what's going on.
With the Flo X5 home charger disassembled, the first thing I notice is that it has a
waterproof rubber ring running around the outside to keep moisture out. Same thing we've
seen inside of some underwater drones. This rubber gasket and the nema 4X casing allows
the charger to be installed indoors or outdoors. With temperatures ranging from negative 40
degrees all the way to 122. But if you're outside in those temperatures, you probably
have more things to worry about than your car charging. Second thing I see is that there
are two entry points for the wires that we're running - here through the bottom or here
through the back. Good to know. The wires will just come in, both the hot wires plug
in here and here, and the ground wire comes in here. And then we also have two LEDs which
is kind of interesting. I assume that the LEDs are going to light up these two portions
here because we have the clear plastics on the back just like other gaming phones. LEDs
shine up in through the bottom, refracts around inside the plastic and gives us a state of
charge or a charging status right here. We'll have to see what it actually looks like once
it's on the wall and plugged in.
And finally, if we flip it over onto the back, we can see the wall mounting plate which I
assume just screws into a stud, and this whole charger slides down on top of it. Now the
metal plate is installed. We've got three screws going straight into the stud and we
can clip the charger into place. The breaker is still flipped off. Now we have both of
the hot wires coming into the charger and we have the ground wire just screwed into
this ground box.
And there it is. We have the Flo X5 charger now mounted on my wall, and I would use it
to charge the hummer if the hummer was done, but luckily it also works with Teslas. My
mom has one of those and she's been kind enough to let us borrow it. Since it comes with a
25 foot charging cable, we can kind of plug in any car in the whole garage. It also has
the ability, though, to put two chargers on the same breaker. I just added a little adapter
that goes into the J1772 that works with the Teslas. Moment of truth. We have the blinking
green light - always good news. And let's see how much charging we're actually getting.
Right now it's at 30amps and it'll take 5 hours for us to get the rest of the way full.
So while it's charging, this is lit up up here, as well as some underglow inside of
where the charger sits. That's pretty cool.
I'd say that's a success. The charger is currently working, and will work great with my humvee
as well as any other electric vehicle we bring in here, as long as it has the adapter. Luckily
everything worked on the first try for my installation, but Flo does have 24/7 customer
support if you have any issues with yours, along with a 5 year warranty. Fun fact, this
is a Model Y behind me with 75 kilowatt hours worth of battery life. And the batteries that
I'm putting into the military humvee is 100 kilowatt hours - 25% more than what the Model
Y has. But since it's bigger and slightly less aerodynamic we kind of need the extra
capacity.
Huge thanks to Flo for sponsoring this video and donating a charger to the project. We
definitely needed one. Leave any questions you have down in the comments. Come hang out
with me on Instagram and Twitter. And I'll see you on Wednesday for the next Hummer update.
Thanks a ton for watching and I'll see you around.