Talk me through getting an EV

[Yuff]

Ideally you would be better having the Zappi on a dedicated consumer unit; the reason being if you fit PV and a hybrid inverter and battery in future the inverter current transformer ,which senses when your main consumer unit's load is satisfied and the home battery is full, is before the Zappi. Otherwise the Zappi looks like another household load and can discharge the house battery. There are work rounds but they can be a faff.

Well, the deposit is paid so our new EV adventure will soon begin. Is it best to get a tethered or un-tethered Zappi? The car does come with a cable but it lives under the floor in the boot. Will chat to the sparky about a separate consumer unit to future-proof the system.

I’d go tethered!

You don’t want to be getting the dirty cable in and out of your car every day. Best to leave the cable in the boot for use at hotels/holiday homes or other public AC charging points.

I’ll second that, definitely tethered…..

[nowty]

Plus 1 for tethered.

[Andy]

Tethered and if you have more than one position possible on the drive. ie multi cars I'd also highly recommend go for the longest cable option available.

[richbee]

[

I will get a 7.5 kWh charging point as plenty of mentions of people having regular plugs overheating. Also, Zappi seems a safe bet and easy to use with PV which we hope to add to in the medium term. It's dead easy to wire straight to the consumer unit as it would only need 2 meters of cable to get to a good spot for the wall box. Going to keep plugging away at Octopus on the smart meter.

Ideally you would be better having the Zappi on a dedicated consumer unit; the reason being if you fit PV and a hybrid inverter and battery in future the inverter current transformer ,which senses when your main consumer unit's load is satisfied and the home battery is full, is before the Zappi. Otherwise the Zappi looks like another household load and can discharge the house battery. There are work rounds but they can be a faff.

That sounds a bit pants - having to fit a separate consumer unit - what if you sometimes actually want to charge it from the battery? Is it OK if you set the timers on the Zappi & the inverter to charge the car and not discharge the battery at the same time? But then not sure how you would make it only use the surplus export solar.......

[richbee]

Sorry to hijack slightly - does anyone have a bi-directional charger, for using V2H? If so, which one

[openspaceman]

That sounds a bit pants - having to fit a separate consumer unit - what if you sometimes actually want to charge it from the battery? Is it OK if you set the timers on the Zappi & the inverter to charge the car and not discharge the battery at the same time? But then not sure how you would make it only use the surplus export solar.......

You don't have to have a separate consumer unit, my daughter doesn't so she has to set and " export margin" on the Zappi of 100W to prevent the battery discharging, this means the solar PV must be exporting 100W before the Zappi will divert to the car, this 100W is never reached until the home battery is full. Trouble is that if the car is still charging as the sun goes down it can still discharge the home battery and in summer that 100W can add up to about 1kWh of export to grid.

I guess most hybrid inverters can be set to force discharge, so if the car was still demanding a charge the force discharge could supply up to the inverter's limits to do so, I cannot see a scenario where one might want to do that.

In the current situation with intelligent Octopus it doesn't pay to charge an EV with solar PV generation as selling it on export pays better.

[Joeboy]

Sorry to hijack slightly - does anyone have a bi-directional charger, for using V2H? If so, which one

I didn't know there were such things? On our EV I plug in an adapter to the charging port of the EV. That has a 3 pin receptacle on it.

I plug in an extension reel to it to bring the power into the house. It does seem logical to have an interface (wall charger) that can act as a hybrid inverter using the EV batteries as a source of home power. Is there an example out there?

[richbee]

Sorry to hijack slightly - does anyone have a bi-directional charger, for using V2H? If so, which one

I didn't know there were such things? On our EV I plug in an adapter to the charging port of the EV. That has a 3 pin receptacle on it.

I plug in an extension reel to it to bring the power into the house. It does seem logical to have an interface (wall charger) that can act as a hybrid inverter using the EV batteries as a source of home power. Is there an example out there?

https://wallbox.com/en_uk/quasar-2-bidi ... ev-charger
Maybe they are not as common as I thought, with all of the cars starting to have V2H capability. eg. Nissan Leaf has had it since 2013 - so how has anyone accessed the battery capacity without a special charger?
Joeboy I have seen the Ioniq 5 brochure which mentions the output plug for charging things.

[Moxi]

I have the same plug in system as JB for my EV6

Moxi

[dan_b]

There's a huge difference between DC-based V2G systems (like is possible with the OG Leaf), which require a compatible and expensive DC converter in your home, and the more recent AC-based "Vehicle to Load" systems which we're seeing with the recent Ioniq 5 and a few others, which can push power through a Type 2 AC adapter.

Sorry to hijack slightly - does anyone have a bi-directional charger, for using V2H? If so, which one

I didn't know there were such things? On our EV I plug in an adapter to the charging port of the EV. That has a 3 pin receptacle on it.

I plug in an extension reel to it to bring the power into the house. It does seem logical to have an interface (wall charger) that can act as a hybrid inverter using the EV batteries as a source of home power. Is there an example out there?

https://wallbox.com/en_uk/quasar-2-bidi ... ev-charger
Maybe they are not as common as I thought, with all of the cars starting to have V2H capability. eg. Nissan Leaf has had it since 2013 - so how has anyone accessed the battery capacity without a special charger?
Joeboy I have seen the Ioniq 5 brochure which mentions the output plug for charging things.