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

Best of luck with the car!

1. 22KW chargers is for 3 phase power, the vast vast majority of houses only have single phase. So 7KW is probably all you can get

2. Tethered is generally considered a lot more convenient, You just hop out of the car, grab the cable and plug it in. Untethered would involve un-furling the cable out of the boot and then plugging it in, and the reverse when finished. Definitely a pain in the arse when raining! I have a tethered charger at home and there are unthetered ones at work, the tethered is a lot less hassle.

But Untethered has some advantages. It removes the cable from the equation when not in use. so it might be useful if your tight for space or the cable would otherwise be in the way. Also aesthetically Untethered is nicer, like that post one in the pic @Gumbo shared a few posts up looks fantastic, definitely wouldn't look as nice with 3Meters of cable hanging off it.

There is also an potential advantage of being able to use older type cars with it like the old style Nissan leaf as they use a Type 1 charging cable (Basically all other cars use Type 2), unless you plan to buy one of these cars its probably an advantage that will never be realised

I had a couple of thoughts around chargers recently.

Do any of the home ones have knowledge of the car battery's SoC? DC Chargers seem to, and I assume that is being communicated back through the Type 2 portion of the port, so I would have thought home chargers could in theory, but Zappi dont, and either does the one in work.

Do any of the chargers support charging by power delivered rather than time? The zappi scheduled charging is pretty basic, I seem to be able to set it to charge for X number of hours at a certain time and selected days of the week. So for the EV rate we set it to come on at 2am every day for 3 hours. It seems very limited to me but it works most of the time. But last night I needed to charge for 4 hours, so I had to change the schedule for every day to 4 hours, and need to change it back this morning.

But I was thinking that time might not always be the most reliable way of doing it, especially as the charger will back off if the load in the house is too big (not sure we've had this yet, but its possible). So if someone schedules too many devices to come on at the EV rate , the 3 hours might not be enough anymore. Ideally having a SoC target would be nice, but if it didn't have access to that, a power delivered would be a more reliable stat than time.

Basically tell the charger to charge at 2AM til 5AM or extend til at least 21Kw has been delivered (even better if it was at least 70% soc, but maybe not possible). It feel like the charger should have access to everything needed to do something like this.

Do any of the other chargers have more comprehensive options? Or do most people use their car to schedule the charging?

Hi, looking to install an EV charger. Aiming for one where I can fully disconnect the cable.
Any recommendations for one where the warranty is the longest one?
Am I getting this right or the 300 euro grant is available too?

~Thanks

I see the setting for the power there now, unless im missing something it can be used with a schedule. You can set it to "fast" and it will stop when it hits x Kwh, but it doesn't allow you to start charging at any particular time.

I have home assitant and im after setting up the myenergi integration and can see the zappi, so i might tinker around with what I can do with it. I've set up one feature to message me if someone plugs in the car and the zappi is set to "stop" (ie, will not charge), because that has happened twice since we got it, and fortunately hasn't been a big deal, but that could really ruin your day if you did wrong!

In theory you could setup a bluelink integration and read the battery level from there and have the best of both worlds, but im afraid of the additional load of HA pinging the car impacting the 12v!

Is there any RCBO rating specified in the manual? Normally it's a 40A rated RCBO on a 32A charger. Is it a Garo RCBO by any chance? If it's a 'normal' Garo RCBO, they don't handle chargers very well and the Garo 'EVS' model RCBO should be used, or another make.

Bought a Tesla Model Y 2 weeks ago

looking at getting a charger

2-6 am charging , so nobody will be using a shower etc

just want a basic charger that will activate at 2 and stop at 6 based on the cars schedule

@Gumbo kindly gave me a good price for a Tesla charger , but just seeing if anything else around €400 mark

@RonTon posted what I think is probably the cheapest SEAI grant compliant new charger I've seen available to the public back in post #8337 for around €400.

https://solarwholesaler.ie/collections/ev-charger/products/bpe-amstel-ev-charger-7-4kw-t2-socket-std-with-dlb

@buffman The manual seems to say 32amp, But I had one installer of the same unit say they would recommend a 40amp...

It's a Garo alright, my brother doesn't install these in the normal run of things so I've asked a neighbour who has a zappi, he's using a 40amp. Thanks for the feedback, will double check the manual and will try an EVS Garo before going nuclear 😂

Probably 4 weeks driving in a petrol car.

Yip. I got one. Seems okay so far. I'm just using it to charge between 2 and 4am. Which is does. Beyond that, not sure what it can do. It claims to have solar integration but when I click the firmware update nothing seems to happen in the app. So no idea if it works or not.

I had the €600 grant. And the install, as you probably know, was €1,100 with tether so for €500 it is grand as a 7.4kw outdoor socket with a timer. It also has, in terms of being tethered, a 7.5m cable which I needed as well. So doing the job fine.

But your limited to what, 2.2kw max an hour? Was worth it here to get an actual charger as it means I can limit charging to the very cheap EV window and the charger will pay for itself in less than 12 months.