Electric Car Charger With Solar Divert! (2 EV Charger Household)
Earlier this year we moved from an electric and a petrol car to two full electric ones which means we now have to regularly charge two EVS but not only that I can only charge them up in a 6-hour window when I say can only I’m too tight to do otherwise that 6-hour
Window is off peak it’s at night and it’s about 7 and2 P per kilowatt hour at the current prices and the other 18 hours are about 30 P per kilow hour so it’s a quarter of the price to charge during that window so of course me being
Me I’m going to do that I can’t just charge the car during the day and then charge the other one at night because again I’m too tight then have the fact that we on a semi-regular basis probably maybe a third of the year over the 12-
Month period have a press car as well which is always full electric of course then we could theoretically have three full electric vehicles thinking I could do with at least some charge it is every now and then coming up to the point where we do have to charge two cats and
We’ve been relying on this three pin plug socket for now it can add about 40 50 miles of range to any any EV the main charger can do the other one so that’s duners but again when you factor in that the Press car which might have to be
Fully charged for the guy to pick it up the next day or whatever it’s time to get another EV charger to get two EVS charging at the proper 7 kilow is rate we have 100 amp fuse everything’s checked out so yes we can have two Chargers alongside our heat pump and
Everything else that’s not a problem we want it to be as cheap as possible so looking at the cheaper end of the market I found a charger that made sense for us and then realized that this charger was actually well better than my main charger it had more features and it was
One of the cheaper ones again that you can buy so I’ve swapped my M charger out for this one which I’ll show you in a second and then the other old charger can be be the secondary one which will get installed over there at some point
In the near future so let me show you what is effectively I suppose my charger of choice and if you’ve been watching in the background of a few other videos recently you’ve probably already spotted it and here she is it’s the give energy EV battery now there’s two reasons I
Went for this one is again because it was at at the cheaper end of the scale but two I have these the give energy home Battery Systems and I’ve as I’ve been saying in those videos people now are wanting one ecosystem that that’s the Battleground for current batteries
And solar diver options and various other things it’s not so much the hardware although that’s a big deal it’s the fact that people like everything to be under under one app to talk to each other to integrate into the system so this gives me one app for my charger for
My home battery system for my smart plugs for my solar panels it’s all Under One Roof also has other features which I don’t really need certainly given the price of xort at the moment but that could flip-flop I guess uh it can do solar divert so very briefly if you’re
Unaware of what that is if you have solar panels on your roof and they’re generating in sunny and months anyway let’s say 2 Kow of energy and your house is using Kow of energy that gives you 1.5 KW of excess solar now that could be just exported to the grid and you get
Paid for that that’s a green option I guess or you could if you have one of these export that excess solar not exort but put it into your car essentially you could charge your car up with energy you generate in on your own roof or in this
Case because I have the single ecosystem the batteries that can talk to the charger I could make it so well I’ve got excess solar I want that to charge up my home battery system when that home battery is full I then want the car to get the excess solar if the is still
Some to go I could make it so the excess solar goes into the car straight away not the home battery or a mixture of the two I can make it so the charger doesn’t dep complete the home battery so for example if I want to do a an during the
Day emergency top up for whatever reason and charge this up or that other car up then I can do that without it depleting the home battery because I may want to store that uh energy in the home battery for a saving session or an export session later on for peak times so
Having again this integration is exactly why I chose to give energy Battery Systems several years ago because I knew that eventually these will be around it’s taken them longer than I thought if I’m honest but they were always planning the solar diver options and the home Chargers and various other stuff and
Long term that was the best option for me especially consider the price compared to other solar diver options out there there are other things as well that it can do that I don’t use these for example um RFID tags so you can make it so you have to click one of these on
To start the charge to secure it if you will if you’re bothered about that for me that’s not a a d really in a residential environment but you can install maybe a raft of these you know half a dozen a dozen in a business a car
Pack so then only employees can use the charger and I believe you can even make it so you know how much employee has charged and can build them accordingly as like a perk of the job um so there’s other stuff as well that I won’t use
That um it can do have a look on their website if you want the full details but essentially for me now this is the one that I I’ve not under the gone for of course but I would probably recommend because it does a solar divert if that’s
What you like and a lot of people have have wanted that with solar panels it can make a lot of sense you can do charging from the Grid in terms of the the uh tariff integration it doesn’t support yet or rather octopus don’t support the intelligent tariff but they
Are of course among others on the list so it will eventually be part of the octopus intelligent tariff but I don’t know when that’s up to octopus not even give energy can control that as far as I understand it um but of course you can get things like octopus go and whatnot
My car supports intelligent so that’s how we use this um and yeah it it it just works I mean I’ve had a look inside a lot of evv chargers over the years including these and let’s face it they’re just a PCB board with a big cable on it they’re not complicated so I
Don’t know how some of them are approaching four figures in terms of the cost it’s it’s I’m obviously missing some something here and from my non-engineering point of view but yeah so if you want in effectively a decent price with essentially all the features I think any other charger gives you this
For me is it and contrary to what a few people on Twitter seem to think I am not being paid by give energy I am not in their pockets as someone seems to suggest but a lot of people have seen this in the background of previous videos that I’ve done over the last
Couple of months and said oh you’ve got one can you tell tell us about it there are other EV Chargers that do the solar diver and whatnot at a similar price so by all means I’m not saying go out and get one of these but for me certainly if
You’re going down the home battery route because I really would go for a give energy battery system over anything else then again it makes sense to have the same thing doesn’t it again one ecosystem integration is exactly why people use home assistant and things like that because they’re getting things
That don’t talk to each other talking through home assistant well now I don’t need to bother with that because that talks to that which talks to that which talks to that and so forth I believe the plan is to eventually build these in the UK as well I mean all the
Support and give energy themselves are a UK company if that’s something that you look for um and I do like the fact that they listen I mean don’t get me wrong if give anyer just say something’s coming out in a month it’ll be six but when I
First got one of these you can see these blue LED light it’s not as uh obvious at the moment in here but when that light goes off it’s like a Christmas tree all you can see is blue flashing lights and if that was on the outside of my house
It would be doing my heading because it would be it like a a beacon there’d be planes landing on my driveway because of these things so I said can we not have a button somewhere in the app or the the dashboard to turn these LEDs off yeah
Sure and they did and I like that I like the fact that you can say how about this does this make sense yes okay let’s build that into the next firmware or the next software update and here we are I quite like the fact that I’ve got that
Uh that that UK phone line that that support the email the dashboard the app all sorts of things built here there are a couple of things that I think I’d like to change the cable is 5 m long personally I could do with an extra meter there it’s just not quite long
Enough it seems to be even though the both 5 met slightly shorter than the Omi that I’ve just removed I don’t know why um it would be nice at some point as well to have a non-tethered option for me personally Al because then you could use any cable length you want but yeah
It’s all right I don’t mind that at all you can put the cable around the end here oopsie oh no the tag I never use I can’t find where’s he gone so there we have it it’s a charger uh it doesn’t do three phase again yet I don’t know if
There’s another one coming out you’d have to ask give energy that um and I’m looking forward to the summer when I can actually have enough excess solar to try the divert out because that’s something which will be well it’s quite cool isn’t it to to drive around on something that
You’ve generated yourself even though financially it makes more sense to actually export that excess solar now that it does use it yourself not sure what more to tell you to be honest other than thank you for watching uh support the channel by making a comment clicking the like buttons all the usual stuff
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Easiest way to support a channel if you want to support this channel a bit further than that then I’ve got a members only um section which is 99p for a month and you can cancel at any time and you get videos on Sunday instead of Friday and occasional live streams and
Of course don’t forget about the second Channel which I sort of have done at the moment because I haven’t had any spare videos uh driving home that’s where the podcast occasionally turns up and behind the scenes sort of stuff everything is linked in the description below so thank
You for watching and um yeah I’m done
After looking around for a ‘cheap as chips’ charger to go in as the 2nd one, I realised you can go budget and get all the features!
2nd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@drivingohm
Website: https://www.ev-man.co.uk
Tesla Referral: https://ts.la/andrew31112
Twitter: https://twitter.com/evmanuk
Octopus Referral: https://share.octopus.energy/ore-cobra-425
