Charging from 120v wall outlet

[Joe schmoe]

Ok, so I know it’s not recommended, and even Rivian’s official guidance seems to discourage it, but I haven’t seen it reported on the forums, except in the context of freezing temps and unable to keep up with vampire drain.

last night, with my R1S at about 66%, I set the charge limit to 85% and plugged into a 120v/20 amp wall outlet, on a circuit shared with a refrigerator and a couple of surveillance cameras but nothing else turned on.

the car hadn’t been driven in a few hours, I have gear guard off at home, and the temps in the garage average low to mid 60s over night. I did ‘t try to put the truck to sleep or do anything special.

I just updated to the latest software as of 3/7/2023 (2023.6.2)

i checked after almost 10 hours, and it had added 19 miles. I think that’s useful in a pinch, as we have a vacation home that is 133 miles from the nearest DCFC.

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[pathfinder2]

This is good info and I hope I am successful also. I will be installing a wall charger but the schedule is very delayed so I will have to make due until I get an appointment. Receiving the truck early is a welcome surprise but no delivery time yet. The wait is really hard now haha...

 

[twieland]

We are taking delivery of our R1T this Friday, and plan to just use 120V charging at home initially. Wife and I both work from home, so will average less than 20 miles daily driven so should be able to maintain for the time being. We will likely (this spring) have our electrician wire a wall charger to the garage, but unfortunately is a bit of a mess to run wiring with the location of the breaker box and a finished basement.

 

[Dublin ‘Eer]

I don’t have my Rivian yet but have charged my Model S on 110 several times. It only adds 4 MPH but helps each year at the remote cabin where we have our annual family Christmas party. The 110 charging allows us to make the round trip without charging otherwise as the car adds 80-100 miles of range over the weekend.

 

[VSG]

I have done a couple of long-term tests of 120V charging with the Rivian portable charger, because one place I go to often only has 120V for charging ... I charge for 100 hours, as that is long enough for me to get from ~10% to ~80% and that is a way to factor out the rounding of the charging numbers that are displayed on-screen. *Roughly* 2 miles of range gained per hour, if you need a number, and *roughly* 88% of the power delivered from the outlet goes to charging the battery.

Note that Level 1 also has a charging curve, and charging rate drops off significantly after about 85% charge.

240V charging is much more efficient, and faster, and you will be glad to have faster charging even if it's only really needed for special occasions, but yes you can get by on 120V if you're only driving 20 miles a day.

 

[DTown3011]

We are taking delivery of our R1T this Friday, and plan to just use 120V charging at home initially. Wife and I both work from home, so will average less than 20 miles daily driven so should be able to maintain for the time being. We will likely (this spring) have our electrician wire a wall charger to the garage, but unfortunately is a bit of a mess to run wiring with the location of the breaker box and a finished basement.

Plan on literally 1 mile of range per hour using the 120V.

I don’t have my Rivian yet but have charged my Model S on 110 several times. It only adds 4 MPH but helps each year at the remote cabin where we have our annual family Christmas party. The 110 charging allows us to make the round trip without charging otherwise as the car adds 80-100 miles of range over the weekend.

Teslas are significantly more efficient than the Rivian and also have much smaller battery packs. I charged my Model 3 extensively using a 120V outlet, and would typically get 3-4 miles per hour so adding 30-40 miles in an overnight 10 hour session was pretty good to keep up with a minimal commute. At ~1 mph for the Rivian, you are really only going to add ~10 miles per day in an overnight session - will be hard to keep up if you don't add in other charging options.

 

[Joe schmoe]

It’s about what I expected, but I wanted to test before I found out the hard way that it didn’t work.

A good friend of mine has one of the first Tesla model 3s, and went 3-4 years using only wall outlets and superchargers. He recently installed a Tesla HPWC, but only because Tesla mailed it to him as part of their (discontinued) referral program.

in 8 years with my Model S, I never once tried a 120volt charge, and for the 5 or so years haven’t even bothered to carry the portable charger since superchargers are so prevalent.

 

[VSG]

Plan on literally 1 mile of range per hour using the 120V.

No. As I said above, I've tested this many times and averaged over a long time, and it's really much more like 2 miles per hour. Which makes much more sense than 1, because 2 miles is about 1 kWh and you should be getting 1.5 kW out of the 120V.

The APP will say "Charging at 1 mi/hr", but the APP is rounding down - you're really charging at about twice that rate. The APP also says "Current speed 2 kW", which is clearly rounding up because a 120V 15A circuit can't delivery 2 kW.

The effects of the rounding are obvious if, like me, you test this over 100 hours rather than just reading the rounded numbers ...

 

[DTown3011]

No. As I said above, I've tested this many times and averaged over a long time, and it's really much more like 2 miles per hour. Which makes much more sense that 1, because 2 miles is about 1 kWh and you should be getting 1.5 kW out of the 120V.

The APP will say "Charging at 1 mi/hr", but the APP is rounding down - you're really charging at about twice that rate. Which is something you can see if, like me, you test this over 100 hours ...

Okay, lets split the difference at 1.5. That's still 15 miles of range per 10-hour overnight charging session. That can be rough to keep up with. Even 20 would be difficult to keep up with if you are driving the truck at all during the weekends...either way, the 120V charger is very very slow.

 

[emoore]

I've found it really depends on the ambient temperature. I get close to 1 mile per hour when its below freezing and closer to 2 mph when it's 50s or so.

 

[VSG]

Okay, lets split the difference at 1.5. That's still 15 miles of range per 10-hour overnight charging session.

According to the original post:

i checked after almost 10 hours, and it had added 19 miles.

Which totally agrees with my measurements. I posted a screenshot of one of my sessions at https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/...sucking-30-of-total-charge.12320/#post-279056, which also shows a rate of > 1.1 kW over a period of time, and a range gain of 200 miles in 90.5 hours.

 

[MIG]

If we follow the laws of physics (and my anecdotal experience) the it is indeed 2 miles of reported charge in an hour. Whether you get 2 miles of actual range on that charge is subject to different laws of physics.

We were surprised by our slightly early delivery so we did not yet have our wall charger installed. We used 120V charging (combined with EA DC chargers) for several days until I purchased an adapter for our dryer outlet. That took us from 2 mi/hr to 14 mi/hr. With our wall charger we now get 20-22mi/hr depending on whether the electrons partied too hard the night before.

 

[Dark-Fx]

In extreme temps it can actually end up draining the battery instead of putting energy in since fighting against the heat loss is a losing battle.

 

[MrMetlHed]

I live in a condo and basically can't have a 240v outlet. I do have a 120v outlet near my parking spot that we've used for the past year on our Jeep 4xe without any problems. Oddly, the Rivian keeps tripping the GFCI on the outlet while the Jeep never has. I'm not sure why that is, I've tried lowering the amperage to 10 and it still does it, usually when I'm sleeping and so I miss out on a bunch of charge. I guess the next step is to lower it to 8 amps, which appears to be as low as it can go and won't charge much at all. The Jeep charging brick (which the Rivian also errors out on) draws 12 amps without trouble. Has anyone had a similar problem?

When working it's between 1-2 miles of charge an hour, which is fine since I work from home. On some days I can pick up my kid from school and leave it plugged in until I have to go pick her up again. That's like 30 miles of charge. Unfortunately it usually faults sometime overnight and I lose a bunch of that. Very, very annoying.

Otherwise I just take it to a free level 2 charger at a restaurant nearby and let it go for a few hours and haven't had any trouble.

 

[R1z]

Just a reminder that all you *need* is a wired plug for the R1, as the “charger” is built into the truck. The “wall chargers” are just EV Supply Equipment (EVSE) devices.

A 30A 110v (Travel Trailer plug) or a 50A 220v (NEMA 14-50) is fairly trivial to add to a nearby breaker box and is better & light-years better (respectively) than 110v household plug.

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