Hello everyone:
Been having a time with my charger.
IN my Ideal world. I have a charging cable, that cable has it's control box on it, and the plug that goes into the bike, and on the other side,a plug that goes into your 240 volt outlet to power the thing.
In my ideal world, this may have 2 or 3 pigtails that have slightly different plug configurations so in case the 240 volt plug is different, say you got a 50 amp dryer outlet, but now are at a 30 amp water heater outlet, you just plug your charger cable plug into the pigtail , the pigtrail into the wall and viola, it plugs into the proper hole configuration and charges.
in my ideal world, you Also have a pigtail that you plug in, and it has the 3 prong plug that allows you to plug the SAME CABLE AND CONTROL BOX into 115 volts and it works too. The standard 115 volt wall outlet in the USA.
What I have been finding is, in the real world, this does NOT WORK !!
The 115 volt pigtails are all wired wrong and won't power up the control box / charging cable.
I have tried 4 different 'converter pigtails' to go from bla bla 240 volt to a male 15 amp 125 volt USA wall outlet plug.
NONE of them worked.
Even though the charger control box, and your vehicle charger may accept from lets say 100 volt to 300 volt as an input, when you drop to 115 volt on this 'multi cable' it does not work ! It will not power up.
After tinkering around I have found the reason being.
240 volt power has Hot Hot Neutral and Ground. Ideally N and G are the same.
OR
240 volt power has Hot Hot Neutral/Ground. Depending if you are running a 3 or 4 wire cable.
Whereas
115 volt has Hot Neutral or Hot Neutral and Ground if you are running a 3 cable hookup.
Meaning.
One of the hot legs is missing.
and
The way they wire these 115 pig tails. They are bonding the Ground / Neutral together, BUT putting the hot on either just one leg of the 240 female plug OR, putting the SAME hot on BOTH female legs.
It puts power TO the charger but gives it no path to RETURN. The charger is looking across BOTH HOT legs to operate, but at best, only ONE SIDE is in the power circuit. No complete path, no charging.
What I have had to do is, make my own pigtail that puts the Hot (Black) 115 volt on one Power stab, and the Neutral (White) 115 volt on the other Power stab. The green Neutral /Ground cable hook up to the Neutral - Neutral/ground on the connector.
This way there IS a complete circuit across the power stabs (115 volts) and the thing turns on, sees it, and charges properly.
The whole reason for all of this is, I only want ONE charging cable, controller box, bike plug etc and not have to carry around a bunch of extra stuff to be able to charge my bike essentially anywhere.
Has anyone seen similar issues or am I just ordering the wrong pigtail and do I need somehow to specify 'Car Charger' or something on the pigtail and I didn't know any better or what?
Thank you
Aaron
at very least, hopefully this may be helpful for someone else wanting to make their own conversion pigtails as well.
