I appreciate your conservative approach, using the 60° column, even when you could be pushing to 75. Not only do you gain thermal margin, but you gain a little bit of an efficiency improvement, which, for people with long commutes, good, over some years, pay for the heavier wire. I agree with using copper for wiring an EVSE or 14-50R. In addition to the other considerations, the terminals in those are almost never rated for aluminum. For a subpanel, I think aluminum is fine, but you would need a whole nother section of the video on how to do that properly, so that might be better left to professionals. Assuming the professional actually uses a torque wrench, which many don't. But in your case, I don't think your conduit would have been big enough to fit the bigger aluminum wire, so you really had no choice. Speaking of conduit code requires gluing your PVC conduit (352.48) even indoors. That's one reason that I think EMT is easier to work with.
Thanks for the comment. I agree on the copper front. I didn't have room for aluminum in that conduit, and frankly, I barely had room for the 4 gauge. As for the conduit, I was expecting a comment on the code. Leaving it unglued has allowed me to make some modifications over the years, which would have been considerably more difficult if it had been glued (not an excuse, but a reason). I should look into EMT. I've used it for some internal runs, but for these indoor/outdoor runs, running PVC the whole way has allowed me to not make a transition at the wall.
I used a 120 volt outlet for almost a year. It was slow but my car is parked almost 22 hours a day so it didn't really matter. I heard that's pretty average.
People with commutes less than 40 miles can plug in for 10 hours on L1 and be fine--no L2 required. That said, L2 is nice (even if it's just 15A @ 220V) and does indeed give you peace of mind. But hardly required for many folks.
It will depend somewhat on the vehicle. If you have a small car/battery 120V is easier. One of my friends was doing this with a Leaf and then a Bolt, while having a 180 mile commute twice a week. Still, they were so happy to finally get a L2 outlet.
120 volt charging can often suffice. It all depends on the use case and the vehicle. When I tiptoed into electric vehicle ownership via plug-in hybrid, 120 volt was adequate as long as the circuit was dedicated.
