There has been lots of discussion on the Facebook groups with regards the requirements for charging our Atto 3 (when it arrives). And what is most helpful it the fact the I know very little about what we will need so I posed the question to the user group.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions and what will it all cost?

There were lots of responses, many of which included the purchase of an expensive EVSE to running a granny cable from a 10 amp plug found on most walls. We decided to take the advice which seemed most sensible to us. This included a 32A breaker in the switch box running to a weather proof 15A socket on the wall of the car port.  This will allow us to run a granny cable to the car to charge up while at home and will allow for upgrade to an expensive EVSE in the future if needed.  

The local sparkies did a good job installing the equipment, better than I expected.  As can be seen from the photos, instead of running the cable along the wall in some tubing, they went to some trouble to ensure that it was hidden firstly under the house and then coming up the inside the wall to the outlet.  

While it will probably cost a bit more, (we haven’t got the bill yet) the finished job looks much better than I imagined it would.  So thanks to the sparkies.  

We plan to charge, at least initially with the “granny” charger we believe that will be supplied with the car. This is a cable with a male 15 amp plug on one end and a type 2 plug suitable for the car at the other end. This will not charge the car very fast but will be able to get a good amount of charge into the car’s battery in the afternoon after the solar panels have charged the Tesla Battery.

If we purchased an expensive EVSE, many of then are smart enough to charge the car only when the Tesla battery is charged. We will just need to be smart enough to plug the car in after the Tesla battery is charged. We suspect that the granny cable is all we need for charging at home. Most of the driving we will do will be in within the small community of Gayndah so I suspect that we will only have to charge the car once a week, if that.

There are no fast chargers in town and the nearest one is more than 100K away. So we will have to keep the car at least 50% state of charge in case of an emergency. Our doctor is a 45 minute drive away so we will need the char charged to cover that drive at all times.