Chevy Volt Involved in Second House Fire

[Marc Lee]

A Chevy Volt has been involved in a second house fire. There is no evidence yet that the Volt or its EVSE was the cause, but the fire did start near the charging station, according to...

http://fordfocuselectric.com/forums/....php?f=9&t=948

[Ron C]

... and when there is evidence, it will either point at the EVSE running hot OR the house wiring being faulty. The former will be displayed above the fold on the front page in large point font just below the masthead and the latter will appear silently as a 2 liner on some inside page, just like the last time.

Wasn't the first case ultimately due to aluminum wiring failing?

[mike1]

Even the overheating 120V EVSE would get nowhere near hot enough to start a fire. The article mentions it was a 240V charging station and that, among others, representatives from Siemens would be investigating. I think that implies it was a Siemens EVSE and not a Voltec/SPX unit. My bet would be on poor wiring, likely insufficient current capacity due to wrong gauge used. I can't think of any defect in an EVSE that would start a fire.

[bonaire]

$800K in damage. I wonder if they used aluminum or copper in this house (presumably a really nice one at that price).

They denote "other things plugged in at the time". They'd be on different circuits.

Let's see what the investigation says. Was the first fire entirely solved and was aluminum wiring overload the final cause?

If Cavuto says what I think he'll say about this - I hope GM sues Newscorp and Fox Business over the libel.

Having a Volt is one thing and bad wiring is another and not a problem with the Volt itself.

[black88mx6]

My question would be how long the charger was in place. Where they using it for the last year, or last week.

[Ron C]

The article says the EVSE was made by Siemens. I'm not familiar with a Siemens L2 EVSE. Is Siemens OEM'ing something for someone (GM? SPX?) or do they sell one under their own name?

[tboult]

They denote "other things plugged in at the time". They'd be on different circuits.

Should be on different circuits is not the same is were on different circuits. Some people view the advice for install as optional. I can see people thinking I got a plug, might was put that extra fridge on it to chill stuff for football party.

[voltage692]

If it's a dedicated circuit for the charger, they would have run cooper for the charger. I have aluminum wiring in my house, and any new lines from the breaker box are cooper.

$800K in damage. I wonder if they used aluminum or copper in this house (presumably a really nice one at that price).

They denote "other things plugged in at the time". They'd be on different circuits.

Let's see what the investigation says. Was the first fire entirely solved and was aluminum wiring overload the final cause?

If Cavuto says what I think he'll say about this - I hope GM sues Newscorp and Fox Business over the libel.

[scottf200]

This was discussed at MNL too as you could imagine.

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6683

Article referenced there: http://www.wsoctv.com/news/29687054/detail.html

[Ron C]

Should be on different circuits is not the same is were on different circuits. Some people view the advice for install as optional. I can see people thinking I got a plug, might was put that extra fridge on it to chill stuff for football party.

That reminds me of something that happened when I first started at Bell Labs right after college (mid-80's). We were working on a project with a VERY prototype board - engineering samples of this new thing called an "Ethernet controller" chip (that ran hot, so we had to spray coolant onto it every so often while we were working) and some EPROMs and PALs all on a wire-wrapped board with an external power supply. This lab was pretty well equipped, 3 phase power running around the benches to which you would hook on a box to get to 120V supply. You could choose which phase(s) to attach to with these boxes. It was all pretty cool, until the system would randomly crash.

We spent WEEKS working on these random crashes, and we finally found the correlating event - there was a dorm-sized fridge in the lab as well, used by people to store their lunches. One day we finally heard the compressor kick on in the fridge WHILE we were debugging the random crash and voilà, random crash. Must have been on the same phase as our bench power supplies, and the iffy nature of the whole system seemed to make it suspect to power variations.

The fridge was removed and no more random crashes (until the new firmware release, but that's an unrelated story about arrogance).