The Roadster has arrived!

Finally, after waiting for a long time, the Roadster has arrived!

It’s not my car, but my colleagues car, but I think I’m just as excited about it as he is, what a great car!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the charging infrastructure we realized at our office. After one day, we already used 64kWh. Yes, we have been flooring the accelerator to the bottom 🙂

On the pictures above you see how the Roadster is charging. For now, 32A really seems to be enough at home/office, we have been flooring it all day and haven’t been able to drain the battery. Between our short drives it has been connected to the 32A connector, just charging for 1.5 hours gives you enough range to have fun!

Preparing the charging infrastructure for the Tesla Roadster

As you might have read, a friend of mine (also my colleaugue) has ordered a Tesla Roadster, so we had to do some preparations for the charging infrastructure.

We live in The Netherlands (Middelburg, Zeeland) where we have two offices. Our main office is at the city center, but we also have second office which is outside the city and has a private parking deck, ideal for charging your Roadster!

One of the problems you have in Holland is that our whole infrastructure is based on 3-phases, while the Roadster only supports 1-phase charging. A lot of offices are connected to one or more phases with a 25A or 35A breaker (one breaker per phase ofcourse). Yes, we have 230V, so 35A should give you around 8kW of power, but it would still take 6.6 hours to fully charge the Roadster. But that is the situation here, you can’t use more than 32A (breaker is at 35A) on one phase. The 3-phase system has to be balanced, so when you want to use more then 32A, the load should be spreaded over the 3-phases.

Our office had one breaker of 35A, which was enough for just the office (5 desks and some servers), but it wouldn’t be enough for charging a Roadster. After contacting the utility company they told me that the first step was to go from 1x35A to 3x40A, so that is what we did.

That was our old main breaker, as you can see, there are two (Black and Grey) unused phases, the utility company came over and they connected the two extra phases and installed a 3-phase kWh meter.

After that was done we contacted a local electrician who could expand our fusebox. Since I made a reservation for a Model S, we choose to use both extra phases for charging EV’s.

This resulted in two charging stations of 230V 32A at the parkingdeck, both connected to their own 32A breaker. After there work was done, our fusebox looked like:

At the parking deck we installed two 32A single phase sockets, we have two parking places next to each other


The connector which we will be using to charge the Roadster is a CEE Form 32A Single Phase connector:

Compare that to the 16A connector:

While charging stations are being installed more and more, they are not everywhere. Every outlet in the wall is a charging station, so why not use it? I created some converters which would enable him to charge his Roadster anywhere:

I’m still waiting for some connectors to create a 3×32 to 1x32A converter, but it’s the same as the 3x16A to 1x16A converter showed above, but then a bit bigger.

For now, we only have to charge this Roadster:

To be continued!

Tesla Roadster coming soon!

While I’m waiting for my Tesla Model S a friend of mine just bought his Tesla Roadster 2.5, cool!

He choose the Fusion Red color with the executive interior, what a gorgeous! A few pictures below.

While it’s a beautiful machine, it’s also fast and eco-friendly! If you read my blog you might notice that I’m into EV’s, not because I’m such a “environment hippie”, but I simply like the technique behind it.

Right now we are working on getting the fuses at our office upgraded from 1x 35A (230V) to 3x 35A, so that we can use 32A’s charging the roadster.

One of the interesting things is that we live in the Southern part of Holland (Zeeland, Walcheren to be exact) and we need to travel to Amsterdam quite often. While the roadster should get there (220km) with it’s 350km range, we are curious how much energy we will be using, since it’s all highway (120km/h) driving.

In Amsterdam we will also create a 32A socket for charging the roadster, so that we can make the round-trip without problems!

I’ll keep you updated!