Good afternoon, all this is a type 2 connector uh. Strictly speaking, it's an iec, 62196 type, 2 connector often called a manicures connector, because i think manicures, the company were originally involved in the design of this connector, but now it's used typically for charging electric vehicles. Now, as you can see, i've taken this connector apart, because i want to use it not for charging my electric vehicle, but for discharging it. Yes, i want to turn my electric car into a giant power bank and attempt to pull power out of the battery to power, something else.

So how am i going to do this? Well, the electric vehicle that i bought has a system called v2l which stands for vehicle to load and it allows you to take energy back out of the battery and drive appliances up to 2.2 kilowatts. But you do need a special connector or cable or something. The point is, we, don't actually have access to those cables here in the uk. I understand that they're starting to appear in europe, but of course, at the other end of the cable, you wouldn't have a uk three pin.

Connector you'd have a shuco, it just so happens on this one. I've got a terminal block, but i'll come back to that. A bit later, what's important at the moment is the resistor that goes across these two wires. So there was a resistor in here.

I cut it out, but we'll have a look at it. It's this one here and i don't know whether you can see the colors there, but it's six eight zero zero. So this is 680 ohms. So why does this connector have a 680 ohm resistor in it? Well, this is from the wikipedia article on the j1772 spec, and you can see here that the resistor indicates to the car what current um the cable can handle.

Not the electric vehicle supply equipment, not the charge, that's not the best way to describe it. So the evse, the supply equipment may be saying you can have 30 amps and the car is certainly capable of pulling 30 amps at mains voltage. But if the cable can only support 13 amps, then it will have a 1.5 k, ohm resistor across these two wires, and that says: don't pull more than 13 amps, because you'll melt the cable or the connectors at each end of the cable. So the 680 ohm resistor that was in here says that this cable can take up to 20 amps.

In fact, this cable came off my granny charger evse, that's actually rated at 16 amps, but these ranges are not very finely gradated fine granulation. That sort of thing. So we can either have a 1.5 km resistor a 680 ohm resistor or a 220 ohm resistor, which says you can pull up to 32 amps. Oh 100, ohm resistor says you can pull up to 70 amps, so i've taken the 680 ohm resistor out now.

If you're thinking, i'm going to put a different resistor in to tell the car that this cable can actually take a different current to what it was. Originally intended to take, no, that would be pretty crazy. If i put 100 ohm resistor in here, then i'm effectively telling the car that this cable can take 70 amps, and that would be a bad idea. No i'm going to put a different resistor in here, because it has come to pass that by putting a slightly different value resistor in here.

In fact, in fact, a resistor somewhere between 680 ohms and 220 ohms that you can tell my car the mg zs to treat this cable, not as a charging cable but as a discharging cable. And so that's what i'm doing. I'm stripping these wires back and i'm going to put a resistor across these two connections. Now the black wire is actually commoned into protective earth.

This uh, big, green and yellow cable here has that black wire added in with it and this gray wire is actually pp. Proximity pilot, so this german chap has put on um a german language, electric vehicle forum and i'll put a link in the description below um that if you put 440 ohms across here, then the mg recognizes this resistance. As this is a discharging cable. So i've found some low value resistors here they are and in amongst this lot there isn't a 440 because it's not a standard resistance value, but there is a 430 ohm resistor.

So i'm going to put that in and see if my car recognizes this as a v2l, cable, so 430 ohms, that's, yellow orange black black and i've got some way. Go style, commoning blocks here. So let's put the black, which is, as i say, protective earth into one of those commoning blocks, lift the levers - oh god they're. Quite tough.

These levers on another commoning block and put the pp cable into there, and now i've just got to put this 430 ohm resistor. Let's put it in this and one across those two connectors like so: okay not beautifully done, but i think that will do the job now. If the car does recognize this as a discharge cable, then i should be able to switch on um the discharging function of the car which will put mains out here and that's why i'm holding a light bulb holder with a couple of spade terminals, which i'm going To put across, live and neutral and see if i can get this lamp to light up so screw these terminals across live and neutral like so right, let's plug it into the car and see what happens step, one will be to plug the cable into the car. So there it goes uh the whole led indicator has lit up now.

That means it can see the cable almost certainly because it can see that resistor, okay, oh the car's locked itself, but that's fine! Let's go inside and see what we can see inside ah. Well! That's already a good sign because on the dashboard it says discharger 159 miles 61. This display is blank at the moment, but i'll switch the car on by pressing this switch and yes also displayed on here discharge connector connected. So let's go into the um charging display and that's saying it can't operate, and that's because i haven't turned on the accessories to the second position, so i need to press that again get the green light to come on and then hopefully right now.

This is on the charging display, it says. Currently the discharge function is in use, which is very promising. So if i press discharge now, it's saying that the battery is at 61 percent, that's 159 miles of range, and then you set this thing to say how low you want the battery to discharge to before it switches off the discharge function. But there's now a start.

Discharging button and outside the car i've got my lamp connected to the other side of the cable. So let's press that button and see if the lamp comes on. Okay start discharging i've pressed the button. Oh, i had a clunk from the underside of the car, which i believe is the main contactors coming on right.

Let's have a look at the light bulb out here. Well, that's not come on, but it might because this is switched off. Let's have a try, yay and there's the light bulb. A 100 watt light bulb connected to the car vehicle to load.

So that's connected over here. Mains power is coming out of the front of the car, and the indicator is now pulsating just to show that the battery is discharging into a load, which is the 100 watt light bulb, and the car recognizes this cable as a discharge. Cable, courtesy of that resistor not being 680 ohms but being 430 ohms vehicle to load now the other thing i've noticed um, the german guy on the german forum. I don't know his name, unfortunately, but he goes by the uh, the handle um diy v2l.

He said he tied cp, i'm not going to get too close to this, because it's got 240 volts on it. He said he tied cp to ground. Well, i haven't done that. I've got cp just floating and it still seems to work.

So yes, it doesn't look like cp needs to be tied to ground. All that's required is that you put a 400 and something ohm resistor across pp and protective earth. The car recognizes the cable. You then have to go a few through steps on the infotainment display and you can switch on vehicle to load and the car can act as a huge power supply.

So the next thing i want to do is try some of these other resistor values. Um 470. Ohms i'm interested in trying, but i've also got resistors going up to well there's the 680 ohm. Now it shouldn't recognize that as v2l i can smell that lamp getting hot, because that's a resistor which says it's one of the resistors for the rating.

The current of the cable at the other end, i've got 200 ohms, but i think 200, or maybe it was 220 - was the other rating. Wasn't it so the point is it's going to be a range of resistors um somewhere between 680 and 200, and i need to find out what that range is. So, let's hit the stop, discharging button, a relay click and then i heard a clunk from the underside of the car. Oh and there's the message you just saw hv battery shut off, so the contactors in the battery pack have disconnected and discharging has ceased right, not sure if this is going to be in focus, but i've now replaced the 430 ohm resistor with a 470 ohm.

So, let's see if that works for vehicle to load. Well, it looks promising discharger a discharge. Connector connected start discharging heard a click from the relay box. Yep heard the clunks from the main battery pack and if we look over here, the light bulb is once again on so i'm now going to go through a whole set of these resistors to see which ones work and which ones don't so that we get an Idea of the range of resistor values that make that cable seen as a discharge, cable and then the ones that don't work where i presume it will see it as a charge, cable and then we'll go back into the office and take a look at the results.

So i've been through um all the resistors, either side of 430 and actually um it looks like 470 is in about the middle. Now i know these are on a log scale. Um, but 560 worked as a discharge. Cable, 620 didn't 390 ohms worked as a discharge.

Cable 330 didn't now. We know that 220 ohms definitely won't work, because that's um the indicator for a cable that can take up to 32 amps and at the other range at the scale. 6 80 ohms is not going to work because that clearly indicates that it's a charging cable that can run up to 20 amps. But if you go for these values in between - and i think if we were to make a permanent cable for this i'd plump for 470, then this is the range of resistor values that the mg.

Now i'm only talking about the mg zs car here recognizes that the cable is a discharge cable. So there we are. If you want to turn your mg zs ev into an enormous power bank, simply put a 470 ohm resistor across pp and protective earth. The car will see this cable, then as a discharge, cable and then you can drive any load.

Well now, here's another thing: we don't really know what the maximum load is. Some people say 2.2 kilowatt, some people say 2.5 kilowatts, that's another test that i'm gon na have to perform, but yeah make your own v2l, cable, cheerio.