Hawaii-House with Nissan Leaf was in a fire

shot home video of the blaze.
Three vehicles also were burned in the fire, including an electric vehicle and a high-end exotic sports car.
"The flames were going really high up in the area and that car was on fire here, and everybody was saying, 'Stay back, stay back,' because they thought it was going to explode," said Messier's mother, Beverly Messier.
The fire department said none of the cars started the blaze.

So the fire department said the cars didn't start the blaze. So where's the story here then?

Because the owner had an electric car and the house caught fire it had to have been caused by the car? I blame the exotic sports car. Actually I wonder if it was the owners PV system that caused the fire? What are the legal requirements of installing such a system in the USA? Here they have to be installed and signed off by an approved and registered installer.

 

This is usually regulated at state level. You can have up to 50 different ways of doing it, but many states inspire their laws on other states'. What I have seen in many places is that, if you are paying the provider must be qualified. But, if you DIY, you don't. You just need to pass an inspection, if the state has them. Maybe Hawaii didn't at the time of the construction.

 

Because there's lots of hoo-hah about garage fires with electric cars and people mistaking publicity for correlation and mistaking correlation for causation. (There's an xkcd for every occasion: xkcd: Correlation)

An electric car is a very expensive way to test your garage wiring.

 

it doesn't matter if they follow up and say what caused the fire, they most likely will be wrong anyway.

 

But doesn't the wiring at least have to be upto the job? There was a big fuss over here when the UK Leaf charging has been reduced to 10 amp when charged via a traditional house plug, despite the wiring system supposedly being 13 amp. The reason given was for safety and to avoid the situation where someone has old or even dodgy wiring in their garage.

Fit a new, designed for the job, correctly installed charge station then that can be certified upto 32amp and be worry free (or at least the full 13 amp available to the Leaf). I believe UK Leaf owners have to sign a waver stating that they won't use an extension lead when charging - even though a lot probably do.

 

...sometimes you are correct. My daughter once had a summer camp cabin burn down, no one hurt, but they blamed it on the girls and immediately bull-dozed the cabin.

 

it's an inexact science, but i think politicians and insurance companies and special interest groups have applied a lot of pressure over the years on the fire department to always find the 'exact cause'.

 

Side note, I see HI has nice state tax credit for EV.
This did not make sense to me due to oil-based power, but I guess if you have PV, then it starts to make sense.

 

Oil, coal, trash, wind, PV, and geothermal all power the state pretty much in the order I listed. Wind and PV will continue to move up to as additional generating capacity is built.


Posted from my iPhone via the Tapatalk app.

 

Need to be careful about starting a thread like this with no information.

Fire engulfs two homes overnight | KHON2 Hawaii's News Leader

Now, this thread started the only record I was able to find on Google about the Nissan Leaf and fire.

Google

 

The EV was probably irrelevant and collateral damage. Good thing it was a leaf and not a volt. if it was a Volt Faux would be running the headline about it and the fire as they have in the past.

 

Moderators, could we please change the title of this thread to something more appropriate? Perhaps remove the car reference entirely since this is a random story about a house fire with an undetermined cause likely not related to the vehicles parked in the garage? Thanks!

 

No, and no. The plugs are not necessarily the same, and the guts are almost certainly not the same.

Unrelated to the fire, electrical circuits fail from heating. Heating is caused by the flow of electrical current through the conductors. Since it takes a bit for things to heat up, you are allowed to run higher currents for short durations. For example, a 20 amp circuit can deliver 20 amps for three hours. After three hours you are required by code to derate the circuit by 20%. This is why chargers do not draw the full capacity of a circuit.

Tom

 

Wiring is meant to be up to the job, which is why it's inspected, but given the rubbish my colleague (licensed for home electrical work) and another friend (master electrician) have encountered I'd be wary. There isn't much that has the sustained draw that charging an EV has.

If there's anything good about this story it's that it could help finish off any Volt hysteria.

 

The story's of interest because of the presence of the Nissan LEAF and I don't think the title's in any way misleading.

 

I believe it is misleading because it suggests an association between the fire and a particular car. Otherwise, why call out the car in the title when the story is really about the fire and not the car? If a house with a swimming pool burns down, you wouldn't see news reports that read "Hawaii-House with a pool was in a fire". That's because a pool is not relevant to the house fire. Pools do not cause fires.

IMHO, there is already too much FUD being generated out there, and we do not need to add to it with suggestive (misleading) titles that are picked up in Internet searches and then spread. Ever play the telephone game? It's amplified by the Internet.