Home charge points (purchase/problems/questions) (See mod note post#1)

It's a tethered unit, and when I turn off load balancing the car charges at 7kwh.

I killed power to the house and still only got 3.5kwh, which suggests the load balancing isn't working correctly.

The current unit is a replacement unit for the same issue, either the units are **** or there is something else at play with the install.

If you put the unit into installer mode you can disable Load Balancing.

Mainly aesthetic reasons.

If the consumer unit is in an awkward place in the house and you dont want trunking and drilling going through your inside walls its neater to install outside in some cases.

If you can run a cable to your consumer unit (via attic) and have it all hidden its neater to do it that way.

Once its in, there isn't any difference from the perspective of operating the charge point.

Installing it at the meter box will also have some ugly items installed on your outside wall.

So, its a decision you have to come to between you and your electrician.

Any recommendations for an installer in the Limerick region? probably looking at a Zappi as would need built in load balancing.

Pros are you don't have to drill walls or mount trunking/have cable clipped to walls.

Cons are you have another small board beside your ESB cabinet.

If it's awkward to get to your board and your charger will be mounted close to your ESB cabinet it's probably the best option

You'd need a few more bits of info to answer it accurately as it depends on a few other variables.

What mileage do you do per year?

How many units of electricity do you use right now per year?

And, if possible, how much of it is by day/night? If you already have a day/night meter you should be able to press the buttons on the meter and it will give you that breakdown.

Once you have that info it is then easy to calculate if you would be quids in or not with a day/night tariff.... my bet is that you would be and even more so with the addition of the PHEV.

I had an outlander (10kW battery) and the house had night rate when I moved in. I did the sums after a year and it worked out cheaper on the night rate. We did run the dishwasher at night too. I probably did similar milage as you, but the outlander was heavier on the juice. It’s probably a close run thing with the smaller battery.

What PHEV do you have? I’m wondering if you have the charge rate and capacity confused as 7kW seems quite small.

Edit: I found the spreadsheet. It was only over a couple of months (Nov-Dec 2018), but a good yardstick

Yeah, but you can only do it if you already have the day/night figures. If you can estimate how often you do a full charge and subtract it from your 24hr usage then you should be able to approximate it yourself. Remember that the standing charge is more for day/night.

Amazing how many big houses in the country built over the last few years all with air to water heat pumps but no solar panels. 100% of their energy coming from electricity (no gas or oil etc.) yet they decided against solar.

Another one of my gripes is that why no one is installing air to air heat pumps is beyond me as those same houses are like sweat boxes in the summer with no way of cooling them down.

Is it easy enough to get heat pump heating water at night ? Never fiddled with it too much but maybe I should

It should be easy but I dont know what make/model you have. I could only attest to my own. You need to pull out the manual and figure it out. It should be as simple as going into a hot water menu and setting up a schedule that tells it to only heat water between, say 3am-8am.

Its possibly (likely even) that your installer just left the default settings which will have it heating water as soon as it drops below a certain temp which means it will start heating during the day rate (likely after a shower).

Talking to a friend yesterday who is starting out on a major renovation - asked why he wasn't putting in solar and the response was capital costs - said he simply didn't have the extra 10K that he had priced it at. Obvious solution here is government providing 0% interest loans for Solar. PS he is not retarded