Mel had done the homework. An electrician had already run an 80 amp circuit into his garage on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and terminated it in a metal junction box for a future EV charger. About eight months ago, he says, he finished the job himself, buying quality connectors, using the correct wire, and torquing the connections. Then he smelled smoke from the kitchen and found the junction box on fire. In the latest Recharge Rescue episode, Tom Moloughney of State of Charge flies out with an electrician to work out what went wrong. The short version, according to the video, is that the failure was not the charger, not the wire size and not the 80 amp breaker. It was one splice.
Anyone planning a home install should understand why the numbers in this story do not line up. Under the US National Electrical Code, EV charging counts as a continuous load, so the branch circuit has to be rated at 125 percent of the charger's continuous output. That is the arithmetic behind the 60 amp breaker the electrician fitted for a 48 amp charger, and it is also why Keyser says the original arrangement would not have passed an inspection: an 80 amp breaker feeding a spliced-in smaller conductor means the breaker is no longer protecting the weakest part of the run. The video is careful to note the oversized breaker did not cause the fire, since the car was only drawing 48 amps. It did remove a layer of protection. Pulling a permit and having the work inspected is the cheap version of catching this, and it is worth doing even where a jurisdiction is relaxed about enforcement.
Tyler Keyser of Switch Electric, who appears in the video as part of the Qmerit network, says his assessment is that the splice inside the junction box was not torqued correctly, that the loose connection generated heat, and that the eventual trip happened only because the insulation on an unused neutral melted through and touched a hot conductor. Moloughney's point is that a breaker is not a fire detector, and that without that accidental short the circuit would have kept feeding the fire. The fix skipped the like-for-like repair: the technician removed the junction box entirely, installed a load center in its place fed by the existing wire, and ran a new circuit to the charger on a 60 amp breaker. The video also reports that six gauge NM cable is not rated for this continuous load even on a two foot run, while six gauge SEU is.
During reinstallation the crew found a second, separate problem. The video reports that the wire retention tab inside the existing charger would no longer hold, with Keyser saying in the episode that connectors of that type are not intended for repeated disconnection and reconnection, and that it had nothing to do with the thermal event. A replacement unit from the truck went in instead. For transparency, the Recharge Rescue series is sponsored by Qmerit and the episode carries a separate sponsor read.
Bottom line: The useful takeaway is not that DIY is always wrong, it is that this particular circuit has no tolerance for a job done 90 percent right. Nothing else in a house pulls this much current for this many hours, so a slightly loose screw that would sit harmlessly behind a light switch for twenty years turns into a fire here. Moloughney's second piece of advice is the one most people can act on tonight: if your car and charger can both do 48 amps but you do not actually need that speed overnight, dial it down. A slower overnight charge costs you nothing and takes stress off every connection between the panel and the plug.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.