Charge from solar???

[RichR]

Point 2 is exactly what I'm looking at. I don't use the car that much most of the time at the moment (working from home), so it can go a couple of weeks without actually needing to be charged. But we will be topping up our house batteries on off-peak grid electricity overnight (at least in winter/spring), so that the solar can replace what's depleted by normal household usage during the day.

Our main reason for fitting solar was because we're changing from heating the house with coal to electricity (via air source heat pump). So the electricity demand will be higher than before, hence it makes sense to generate some of our own to offset that. There's no mains gas here, so our reasons for changing to a heat pump are mainly to get off a messy, polluting fuel rather than the cost of fuel (although coal has doubled in price in the last couple of years).

As I've said before, how you set things up is very dependent on how you use your car and home. Read the manuals for your car charger and solar system to see what they're capable of, analyse the usage figures they produce, and read up on what other people are doing to see if you can come up with a plan that works well for your pattern of usage.

[ComicGeek]

The Project EV charger is pretty useless [ ...]

[ ... ] so fairly pointless.

[ ...] it would constantly loss Wi-Fi connection and the pre set charging wouldn't work. Also wouldn't communicate well with the Enyaq [ ... ]

Wow. Thanks for the damning verdicts on my choice of charger. I hadn't realised what a useless, pointless device it is. (OK - add in the pretty and fairly modifiers).
I'll stop using it immediately as it's so bad.

No need to be so prickly and rude. I was just describing the issues that I had with the Project EV charger. No problem if it works for you, I had asked at the end if you had similar problems to me or not.

I had 6 months of it working well, and then 12 months of nothing but problems that Project EV couldn't resolve despite multiple call outs, resets, replacements etc.

I'm sure there's at least one person out there with major problems on each EV charger available - it's always a case of trying to figure out whether you've got the single rogue one or there is a wider issue.

[FatOldSun]

With Ovo Charge Anytime and the Indra Smart Pro charger, Ovo actually pay me to charge the car from solar. The trouble is, I've not been able to make it consistently charge. A couple of times I've charged at full power on a sunny day, so that half is coming from the grid, but that's still cheaper than not charging at all. I pay 10p per kWh from the grid and get a rebate of 23p per kWh from solar, so even at 50:50 I get a net rebate of 13p per kWh. I just wish it were more stable. I don't know if it's the car or the charger which is causing the charge to stop.

[G_F]

I posted this some time ago,, but didn't get a photo of what I actually meant. This led the subject to go off into the ability to charge using solar, Zapping chargers etc...

Today I got a photo of what I meant in the original post.

[Stripy]

I've tried charging from solar on my Hypervolt charger, but the iV80 senses the on/off of the charger and declares it a fault and stops charging.

Has anyone tried solar charging (Zappi/Hypervolt etc) with V3 software?

Yeah, just use the eco future in the Hypervolt app

[Panagon]

I just use the charge immediately and a zappi charger. Seems to work ok.

[Stepmb]

I've tried charging from solar on my Hypervolt charger, but the iV80 senses the on/off of the charger and declares it a fault and stops charging.

Has anyone tried solar charging (Zappi/Hypervolt etc) with V3 software?

I've tried using my Smappee charger which is able to charger from just excess solar. However, it doesn't work as the car or the charger switches off when solar excess drops below 1.4kw.

[Stepmb]

When people talk about charging from solar, what exactly is the configuration they are referring to?

A cool sunny day might give you 3-4kW peak from PV panels.
Are you somehow able to route this directly to the vehicle?
Can you prevent other sources - grid, battery storage - chipping in as well as the solar?
And if you can charge directly and solely from solar, why would you want to charge so slowly?

I suspect I'm missing something here.
I've got solar PV, storage batteries, and grid as power sources.
I've configured the inverter to prioritise supplying the house load, charging the batteries, and exporting to the grid. It simply sees the car as part of the house load. So if I had, say 3kW solar being generated and a wholly imaginary 0kW house load. If I then switched on a dishwasher, no problem - my 3kW should cover that. But if I also switch the car charger on that's way over the solar supply. So I start drawing from batteries and/or grid. How can you separate the solar electrons from the rest?

I have the same system + a solar diverter to immersion heater. The car and charger work together until solar drops then either stop or draw from the battery. All in all it just doesn't seem to be possible to select priority order for solar

[RichR]

This is where a micro generation aware charger comes in. For example Zappi. This has a current clamp so it can detect when you’re exporting, and once that’s over 1.4kW (the minimum cars can be charged at), it starts charging the car. On Zappi you can set a timeout so if you put the kettle on for instance it doesn’t immediately stop charging (as this can make the car decide the charger is unreliable and refuse to take charge). This also means you can handle the odd cloud causing a bit of a dip, and allow you to use a little grid power (only the minimum needed to get 1.4kW). Today, my Zappi was putting a good 3.2kW into the car for most of the day

[benlye]

I've had my Enyaq for a little over a month, and apart from one charge at work, it has only been charged at home with my Zappi, exclusively using excess solar generation.

We have solar and DC-coupled battery and, once properly configured, the Zappi works great, neither draining the batteries nor upsetting the car.