Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 4 has a big 4,100 mAh battery and a tiny price tag | 220v Contactor Relay

PHEV is a lousy name for a class of cars, but what a good class they are. Most everything you say here could be said of my 2017 Ford C-Max Energi. It gets almost twice the MPG as my control car, a 2014 C-Max Hybrid. PHEV MPGs vary wildly according to your use patterns, but FWIW, mine is stuck on 65 cumulative MPG for its first 20,00 miles. At least half these days, I drove beyond the 20 mile EV range, and I drove over 100 miles on two or three days of the week, so I didn’t restrict my use to inflate my mileage.

You can also see the top of the mechanism for the tilt / swivel LCD panel, peeking out on either side of the electronic viewfinder. The viewfinder itself projects quite a bit from the rear of the camera, a decision that was apparently necessitated by the tight packaging of components in front, including the AF module, popup flash, hot shoe, and microphones.

The standard in UK is 230 V not 240 V, like the the rest of the EU. The continent was mainly using 220 V until 1986 and UK 240 V until 1986. The 230 VAC was choosen by the IEC as a compromise between the 220, 230 and 240 system. So actually main voltage in EU should be 230V +/-6% at distribution panel, and equipement should support 230V +/-10%. (voltage drop in the internal house distribution should be less than 4%) But a transition period of 20~25 years was used, during the transition period main voltage at distribution panel in UK should be in the 230 VAC +10%/-6% range, and in the rest of EU it should be in the 230 VAC +6%/-10% range. (Other 240 VAC country like Australia and NZ switch to 230 VAC at least officialy)

I have used a setup like this using two back-to-back “door-bell” transformers (220V to 9V) to play with neon tubes when I was a kid. The current was so low that even a lightbulb wouldn’t turn on. However, it was enough to teach me about electric shock from mains voltage when I have carelessly put my finger across the output terminals …

Step 4:  Use the V-I curve (Fig. 3) in the MOV’s datasheet to verify that leak voltage will be less than the 300-V ceiling.

And it’s is a bad advice from ESD protection standpoint as well because nothing else, like your table where the new components are laying on, isn’t grounded so you’ve just created a potential well.

Technically it depends on the amount of resistance, effectively proportional to the amount of the conductor the electricity is able to pass through. With AC that means the skin effect comes into play but that’s a whole other bundle of fun math. With DC it’s essentially amps times volts.

Might be safer your way, since you’re transforming down, then back up again. Using a microwave oven transformer means horribly high voltages in the middle of the thing, and should, by chance, some insulation fail, or a bit of an arc, or whatever…

Add in the approx. 75 cents of AC shore power I pump in every night, and it works out in my head to about 5 cents per mile. Takes a lot of words and numbers to explain that figure, but the practical impact is that every day I drove over two hours, the car bought me lunch. I feel like I’ve patched a hole in my money pocket. This is half the running cost of any other car I’ve owned, including the TDI.

They call those death sticks in the electrical trade. Those are just the first step in making sure it’s safe.

The issue with using NEMA 5-15 receptacles is that people will use them stupidly. They will attach extension cords without knowing to properly check them for heat build up at the outlet and along their length. It just encourages bad use, modern EVSEs with heat sensors in the plug won’t work appropriately with an extension cord.

Solar charging becomes more cost effective, however, if you’re tapping into a full-house power system. Sources suggest a properly sized whole-house solar system can pay for itself in around seven years, depending on the size of the installation, local labor rates, component costs, and other variables. The national average for a 6-kW home solar power system is reportedly close to $19,000. Fortunately there’s a 30 percent federal tax credit with no limit available to help offset the costs. Unfortunately, the solar-power credit is scheduled to drop to 26 percent in 2020, 22 percent in 2021, and will be discontinued altogether in 2022.