Home 240v Charging Station

Yes, you may never see a difference in a PHEV, but a BEV will need a bigger EVSE to charge all those batteries in a reasonable time.

A home EVSE for a tesla may use a 60 Amp circuit. Silver Wall Connector

 

Here's an example of a 30A motor switch with enclosure that's pretty inexpensive and not huge.

This is similar to the one I installed on our water heater in Honduras. The house had an electric water heater and electricity was 50 cents/kWh. When we moved in, we were switching off the water heater with the breaker. That soon killed the breaker, so I put this on. It's meant for switching under load. However, you do NOT want to be switching the EVSE under load. Proper procedure is to disconnect it from the car first. So this switch will have an easy life in this use.

A safety switch would be much bigger and would be overkill in this case.

Just remember to have the switch turned on before you plug in the car.

 

Yep I’ve been unplugging and plugging my 6-50 for the same amount of time every time we have a thunderstorm. Still as tight as when new. Spent extra for a quality receptacle up front, but I still expect it to wear out sometime. The receptacle is cheaper and easy to replace when the time comes. FYI, my receptacle is on a dual breaker BTW.


Unsupervised!

 

I thought about a 240V charging station for about 1 minute. IMHO, it's a waste with the Prime. BEVs generally need rapid charging to fully charge their massible battery packs overnight, the Prime doesn't. The stock charger provides a full charge in 5 hours. I plug mine in each night for at least 9 hours. Secondly, battery life is negatively impacted as the charging rate increases due to increased internal heating, so I can't see spending money to wear out my battery pack faster.

 

If there's no need to make multiple trips in the same day with short turnaround times, L1 is fine. L2 would be a waste as you said.

But L2 is not one bit harmful. The car will not let it charge to the point where it overheats the battery. For one thing, that would cost too much in warranty replacements. Also, L2 charging current and power is still only a small fraction of those used in driving. Charging is a couple kW while driving is 20-40 kW. Driving generates a ton more heat than charging.

Edit to add: Also, the Japanese models have CHAdeMO charging which charges the Prime up to 80% in just 20 minutes. Toyota Prius Prime Options/Specs: Solar Panels, Fast Charging (regionally), Heat Pump And More

 

Also, the speed from Charge-Mode (7.2 kW) is double that of L2 (3.6 kW).

 

So I built an adapter and can now charge at twice the speed with the standard OEM charger from Toyota. The sockets on the left are 120 Volts (one for each leg) and on the right is a twist-lock 240 Volt socket. I took a standard power cord, cut off the socket and most of the cable, and attached a twist-lock plug, appropriately yellow as a warning. Works fine, charges at twice the rate (2.8 kW instead of 1.4 kW) and that is provided by the 3 kW that my solar panels produce mid-day.