Do block heater poles work for electric plug-in vehicles?
Friday, May 1st, 2009 at
7:56 pm
In cold weather climates, electric poles are commonly found in parking lots so that people can plug in their block heaters. When electric plug-in vehicles become more popular, can you plug into the same outlets to charge your vehicle? So in essence, you could recharge your vehicle every day at work rather than using your own electricity at home. Feasible?
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Tagged with: block heaters • cold weather • electric poles • electricity • parking lots • weather climates
Filed under: Electric Vehicles
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The answer to your question is a matter of current draw for the device and what is available from the outlets.
One example of a block heater says that the "element is 600W and uses 120VAC."1 by way of comparison many desktop computers come with a 400 watt power supply. One rule of thumb is that you want your constant wiring load to be no more than 75% of the rated capacity of the wiring. Practically speaking you might have one 20 amp breaker (2400 watts at 120 volts) for every 3 outlets. It is unlikely that you would have one breaker for each outlet. But it is possible. You might even have up to 13 outlets for one breaker. 2
The charger for an electric vehicle is likely to have a higher draw. One site(3) lists a range of chargers (you would have to have installed onboard) as having a draw from 1.6kw (1600 watts or about 13 amps to a low of 500 watts and therefore slightly less then the expample of the block heater.
So it is possible but you would either have to have a low wattage charger to be sure you would not blow a fuse. Now how much of the battery capacity you might be able to fill is entirely another question. It would depend upon the size of the battery pack.
One battery pack capacity for a home built electrical powered van is listed at 20kwh. The van is equiped with a solar cell and a wind turbine that together can produce 600 watts at peak capacity. The owner says this would take a day to top off the batteries.4
The figures here make a lot of assumptions that would need to be verrified under actual conditions. For example it is unlikely that this much power would be constantly being provided to a parking lot full of cars.
No, Those outlets are laid out on the assumption that each car would only plug in a 50 W block heater per car. Quite often, someone gets greedy and plugs in one of those 1200 W interior heaters and they blow the breaker for the entire row of cars, makes for a lot of grumpy drivers.
Some apartment buildings will have assigned parking and there the outlet would be wired into the respective apartment's breaker panel so that the power is charged directly to the tenant, with those, the outlet may be useful for charging a vehicle. Of course, in those apartments, there's plenty of people plugging into their neighbours outlets just to steal a little bit of electricity.
It depents on how much power you draw from the system, if you didn't draw more power then a block heater then yea it could work, after all it would sit there for 8 hours so you would have lots of time to re-charge.
As an employer you can count on it that I would make you pay for the electricity. We're talking about way more electricity consumption than a block heater.
From the technical side the whole lot would have to be rewired to handle the load.
We'd also need a lot more power generation.
Most of the block heater outlets are thermostatically controlled to only allow power to be supplied when the temperature gets down to 20 degrees. My employer would not supply free power for my electric car or buy gas for the car I now have.