[HN Gopher] Putting a Wet Towel on a Tesla Supercharger Handle G...
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Putting a Wet Towel on a Tesla Supercharger Handle Gets Faster
Charging Speeds
Author : peutetre
Score : 9 points
Date : 2024-05-08 01:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (insideevs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (insideevs.com)
| advisedwang wrote:
| Is this just tricking a sensor into thinking it is cooler, or
| actually keeping the parts that matter cooler? If its the latter
| this is a great trick. If its the former, it's a hazard.
| malfist wrote:
| Considering the super chargers only have the single temperature
| sensor in the termination point, this is certainly a fire
| hazard.
|
| However, it does raise the question if a shaded plugin spot, or
| rain could also present a similar fire hazard.
| vipa123 wrote:
| Next week the article will be "Tesla battery fires linked to use
| of wet towel during charging"
| seanhunter wrote:
| That classic combination of water with electric current, and
| tricking a safety sensor to boot. What could possibly go wrong?
| TheTxT wrote:
| It's only 250 kilowatts of energy, so nothing really.
| s0rce wrote:
| pedantically, 250 kW of power
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Methinks safety sensors shouldn't be designed to be so easily
| fooled.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| That's an excellent Darwin Award acceptance speech! Short and
| to the point.
| ericswpark wrote:
| Don't like to see comments like these. I think it violates
| several HN guidelines, including this one:
|
| > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at
| the rest of the community.
|
| Unfortunately there is no report button.
| ndjxhshgf wrote:
| Fire alarms are easily fooled-- just cover them with a wet
| towel. Does that make them bad safety sensors?
| brewtide wrote:
| Not in their use case, which is the entire "perhaps this is
| a bad idea" take.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| The fire alarm _IS_ the senor, it 's an alarm, it's in the
| name, it's pretty obvious to most people what happens if
| you fuck with it and what the consequences are, and people
| still do to combat false positive alarms.
|
| But most people have no idea about the senor(s) in tesla
| charger plugs, since it's a plug, not an alarm. How should
| it be obvious for the average layman without open
| disclaimers? People always tend to fuck with stuff they
| don't fully understand.
|
| And forget about people putting towels on it, what about
| rain or wet debris falling on it? Seems like edge cases
| that should have been covered during the design phase.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are we confusing smoke detectors with fire alarms? Most
| people screw with the detectors. A fire alarm is usually
| triggered when a sprinkler head is set off. And despite
| what Hollywood shows us, just because one head starts
| does not mean all of the heads in the system open up.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| If the point of the sensor is to keep the handle cool, and the
| wet towel cools the handle, does it really count as tricking
| it?
| epistasis wrote:
| Depends on whether the important part to keep cool is the
| part of the handle that the towel dissipates heat from, or if
| that temperature reading is used as a proxy for the
| temperature of the entire cable.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, but since it's charging faster, it'll be done before
| the inaccurate temp readings allow the actual cable to
| melt. Or, if it's not the charger in your home and you're
| using someone else's charger, who cares if it melts. That's
| someone else's problem as long you get your batts topped
| off. At least, that's my cynical internal dialog for the
| world's mentality today.
| encom wrote:
| Not a lot. As mentioned in TFA, the chargers are designed to
| operate in the rain.
| TomatoCo wrote:
| The article makes it sound like this sensor is only to avoid the
| handle itself heating up to the point that it would burn the
| user.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It might be. Often the most restrictive thermal limit most
| products face is for touch safety (50 ~ 80 C, depending on the
| material's thermal conductivity and the extent of contact). For
| a handle that will be quite restrictive, because you'll be
| firmly gripping it. The materials themselves would probably
| survive substantially higher temperatures before failure. I'd
| guess that the first to fail would probably be adhesives and
| plastics, but they'd be engineered to survive hot days in
| direct sun, even if the handle gets too hot to touch safely.
|
| (Disclaimer: I don't work for Tesla, and did not design the
| supercharger cabling, this is educated speculation).
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'd be seriously concerned about the risk of water ingress, but I
| figure it would be much safer to just have a little fan blasting
| the thing.
| recursive wrote:
| These things have to run in downpours of rain. A wet towel is
| nothing.
| OJFord wrote:
| It's different, it's sort of very shallow submersion. IPX2 is
| the rating for angular rainfall; immersion (admittedly up to
| a meter of pressure, as it were, not just a towel wrap) is
| IPX7. I think certainly you could have a 'rainproof' product
| not withstand a wet towel.
| outop wrote:
| A fan wouldn't cool down a dry plastic handle. Fans cool you
| down because you are wet and the air flow makes the water on
| you evaporate a bit quicker.
| pfdietz wrote:
| All these people being wet blankets on this idea. I'm shocked,
| shocked.
| mark242 wrote:
| Do you think it's possible to get the placement of the towel
| correct if you've gotten your finger chopped off by your
| Cybertruck?
| trsohmers wrote:
| This is a lesson that like all good Hitchhikers, you should
| always carry a towel.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| OP should have posted this on Towel Day
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting that the V3 superchargers use a liquid-cooled cable.
| Without knowing anything specific, this implies that maintaining
| cable temperature is the objective, not just the handle. That
| means that the handle sensor proxies the temperature of the
| entire cable. I would imagine they measured the heat-dissipation
| site where the coolant flows to to be where they measure the
| temperature for regulation, rather than the handle.
|
| All quite interesting.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| The handle is probably the hottest point. There's a mechanical
| connection there, so more resistance. At least, I think that's
| the case.
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(page generated 2024-05-09 23:00 UTC)