40 Amp EVSE Review – Topdon PulseQ Home Charger

You have topped on for a review, so this is our look at the product out of the box. How it performs on initial charges and general feel so lets jump into the review of the top Dawn pulse Q, home charger, okay, so opening up the top Don charger here lets jump in see what we get in the Box. You see topped on pulse AC, home pulse Q, okay, so all well packaged very neatly, tucked in Swift housing, just uh protective bag, lift that out how it feels fairly solid, well built very thick cables here, full length of the cable again pretty thick, the j1772 plug At the end and the Nema 1450 right there, my wall, please with some mounting equipment so fairly standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. Well take a look at uh. What it all feels like right here, okay, so from the box. Clearly, labeled topped on with all the contact information, see the UL listing right here. Move on to the main unit again feels fairly solidly put together from what we can tell just right out of the box. That was only in a plastic covering, but the housing in the Box itself was very secure. Youve got your J plug right here, the box with the standby power, presumably fault and Wi Fi, which well get into as we test and youve got your holster connector. Some guides here to position it. The sticky guides some mounting equipment again for the holster mounting guide for The holster a manual another quick start user guide and the product inspection report, so all pretty standard stuff, but good full look at whats in the box, Music.

Okay. So lets start off logically enough with the quick user guide thats, why people will start to take a look see what weve got. Youve got a few pages, plugin installation, giving you distances using the template here, to figure out the install with Drilling and attaching it to the wall. Four comparisons here in size. This is uh. How am I in laws currently charged? They just use the mobile connector from the Tesla through to a 1450 outlet and then thats the size of the wire, so you can kind of see the difference there. This is much more like a standard extension cord, and this is your heavy duty getting up to the higher amperage gauge wire, so youll probably get similar reach youll have to measure them out, but this is the Tesla connector, as you can see well practice with the Tesla, first, seeing as thats what it might be charging more often, but we have the j1772 to Tesla connector, they have one and we have one from electron. I believe it was that we tested a while back Ill link the uh product description for that up. In the corner, but we will get this plugged into the Tesla first and see how it does compared to the usual connector, so thats the unboxing uh little background on the unit itself. So it has the standard cable which is uh 16.5 feet. Uh thats, coming in at a 599 dollar price point so right in line with a lot of the 40 amp the prices at the moment.

Sometimes there are 50 100 discounts on those, but by and large that 500 600 price point is where youre starting for this kind of equipment um, they do have a slightly longer extended version of the cable which is 24.6 feet and thats closer to a lot of The standards that come usually youre, looking at this level between 20 and 25 feet of a cable. Obviously that depends in some cases, thatll be uh required for you in others. You may just be right in the garage there and dont need to worry too much about it. So thatll come down to individual preference uh. There is a promotion at the moment on through to the 31st of December 2022, where you pay the normal price and theres a link which Ill put down in the description here. That gives you a hundred dollars off once youve shown the installation in your home, so thats one thing that would reduce the price for anyone looking to buy immediately as a unit itself. It is uh UL certified, so thats, something a lot of people look for for the safety certification, thats a good sign that its a solid unit and well manufactured to certain levels. Nema 4, which is uh suitable for outdoor use and protection for intrusion of water, and a lot of things that you dont want in the unit itself to the working temperature outside is 22 to 131 degrees, Fahrenheit, so youre, pretty all set there thats going to cover Pretty much everyone in terms of weight, pretty solid unit 15 pounds, seven kilograms, a decent uh chunk, and then you can adjust the current from the maximum 40 amps all the way down to 6 amps.

If you wish so theres a lot of variability there nice. If you need that kind of customization and to reduce the power, if youre taking it other places or if youre home, maybe can only do so much at one point and then you want to Future proof it to ramp up to 40 amps. When you get the ability to do so, it has protection for under voltage over voltage short circuiting leakage. So theres a bunch of things there that just give you a little peace of mind, does have a three year warranty with top Don youd, have to dig into the various pieces of that to see what it covers and whether its right for your use case. But you know, it seems to be coming from a manufacturer, has a presence in the USA who has contact points who is obviously in the auto repair space and the diagnostic space. So they have that going for them lets jump in and see how it did on the Tesla and ioniq 5 when we were over in Cleveland okay, so the Tesla connector is going to reach all the way down to the back of the car. Here its pretty straight run so well see how long that is and thats how much weve got distance wise. Then we go to our charging screen maximum on this is 32 amps. There we go were at a fairly High stage of charge: 75. So 32 amps 236 volts.

This is going to give you 7.7 kilowatts in terms of power, so this should be another couple of kilowatts faster if we can pull out the full 40 amps so well plug in the top Don and see what we get by comparison. So, for the sake of this Ill, just crank it up to the top and thats just under three hours, so remember that number two hours 55 minutes and well see how much faster the top done would be done. If this is what were trying to do get to full charge, not something you want to be doing super often unplugging and replugging, these higher power plugs its. Why they uh talk about you know having it mounted and just kind of put it in once and leave it, but this is your Nema 1450 more Modern Standard drier Outlet. This is more of a useful thing here when we frequently come in charge. Take a look so immediately get your power on light. Thicker cable! Well, talk about that in a sec just to see what we get out of the charging here, its limiting it there to 30. No there it goes ramping up, and that is because weve got the 40 amps add this there. We are successful from the pulse Q, home charger, its not a huge amount, but we shave off about 30 minutes with that extra couple of kilowatts and if thats the case over 25 of the pack, you can see if we were coming from a very low state Of charge and trying to get the full pack in there, you can multiply that out to save an hour or two of charging, depending on your status charge.

The ioniq 5 as well test has a 10.9 kilowatt Max, so it wont max out the ionic 5 either. Obviously, Tesla can go higher than this too if you get a suitably powerful charger and have the amperage at home. But this is a nice amount if we can thats a good amount for it to be at right now, 25, taking two and a half hours. Ninja can multiply that out by four and get your 10 hour charge overnight um if you were going from almost dead empty to 100, which most people do not. So if we take this down to lets, say 90 there we go so a charge. Setting of 90 youd have that done in just over an hour. So pretty nice thats a good amount of power to be shoving in there and lets see what it looks like on the unit itself. Let me see it: charging youll have this successful, blinking green light red fault light. If something is going wrong and then the connectivity which well have to try out in the app next Im charging happily at 85 percent on the other side of this, we have this. Stop press that nice, solid click and you have the blue, which seems to indicate its not charging anymore, confirm that in the car correct charging stopped it got to 86. So, if you need to for whatever reason you can stop it via the charger unit itself. So, overall, thoughts on the top Dawn pulse Q, home charger, nice solid unit.

Obviously the packaging there was very robust and out of the box, you feel the solidity of the unit itself very well housed solid, Cable, cable itself. Doesnt need to be a bit longer. I think for a lot of people, youre um, you know we can move it around in that garage that you see there and it gave us enough length. But if you were trying to reach over to a second space like we had there or out of the garage charger second DV or when you just wanted to be outside, then that would need some extra length, but something to note that a lot of them come With 20 to 25 feet of cable right out of the box, but this is a 16.5 as the standard, so as they come out of the box, obviously you have them all coiled up. It did feel very stiff, cable at first um. So that could be something that people in colder climates would want to test. So well, come back as we get into the colder months here and test how it holds up to Colder Weather, use the cable being frozen. That kind of thing, but uh right off the bat, is just something to consider along with the cable length, but in terms of build quality and just taking it out of the box, plugging it in and getting a charge right away. No problems at all felt good. Build quality of the housing and the uh, the kind of installation guide is really good theres, a lot of stuff that you get you set up and if youre putting that in as a permanent charger, then its going to be uh with the mounting kits that youve Got its going to be very solid, I think in terms of capability.

Obviously you know essentially youre looking at the 40 amps Max and thats pretty common across that price point of 600 700 now, but it did all that it needed to do. You can adjust the amperage as youd like in the ionic 5. We cant do that so thats a nice little feature to have via the app um the Tesla. Obviously you could see that we could redial the amperage up or down from the car. So maybe thats not quite such a big deal but thats where the software ability really kind of ends in terms of our using it uh we did get set up with the Wi Fi, so it was useful to be able to see the charge, monitor the charge, But the the app itself wasnt anything special to be honest, you can kind of see the design needs some work. It was not limited so much as a little bit clunky. You know just not a modern user interface and some of the features didnt quite get going for us thats, something again that we can test as we use it more and more, but right out the box, just wasnt uh super impressed theres some of the stuff that You can use if your EV doesnt have that. That would be handy and, as I say, the setting the amperage is not something that we have in this car. So that was a benefit, but at the same time, stuff like scheduled charging most DVS can do that.

Already we had it in the Bold TV we have it in the ioniq 5 and the apps are a little better, changing the charge limit, setting up your scheduled charging and a bunch of different things that probably will be a little more user friendly in the vehicle Manufacturers app than the uh topped on pulse queue app. At this point and in terms of performance, you can see from the brief tests that we did on both the Tesla and the ioniq 5 plugs in Works. No problem at all uh hits that 40 amp tax gives you a nice little extra between that 32 and 40 amp level, as other units will do. But um you know we can easily say Hardware is very solid. Company is respected its a good, solid addition to the charging Market. The software and app side can be improved, so that may be something to monitor As you move into 2023. You know this is being recorded at the end of 2022, so worth noting that software can improve. They can release new versions of the app and start to build on the functionality. Theyve already got so I like the uh the product overall and having it as an option in Cleveland, will be nice to uh to add to that Tesla mobile connector that our in laws use already so thats our review of the top Don pulse Q home charger. Do you have this unit? Do you have another 40 amp unit that you like and recommend? Are you shopping for an evse in the New Year? How do you feel about this 32 amps, um, 40, amps and then future proofing? Obviously, we go all the way up to 80 amps and there are some pretty beefy, almost commercial grade Chargers out there.

Let us know down in the comments or its interesting to hear from owners. So if you do have the pulse queue already, let us know how its performing or what youre looking to get as you enter the kind of holiday season here and uh, just a reminder that it does have that 100 off post purchase. So once you buy that, if you use the link below in the video here, its not an affiliate link its just one of the offers theyre running through to the end of 2022, so make sure you take a look at that.