Hi I have over 7Kw PV supply during today and wanted to charge the car using it. When I look into the session history under the power tag it shows that the charger is drawing most of the power from the grid - How is that possible as I have solar diversion turned on. The PV system is 3 Phase and the Evnex is and E 2 single phase charger on one of he phases - is that where to isssue is?
Hi Jon.
From the graphs and logs it looks like maybe the charger was in “Charge Now” mode for this session? This would have been activated either by pressing the button on the charger, or else tapping “Charge Now” in the app.
With your solar settings as they are, you should be able to plug the car in and it will automatically start to use solar diversion once it has satisfied itself that there is sufficient generation. This means seeing at least 1500W of export for 60s (i.e. it will take at least a minute after plugging in before charging starts, to ensure that there is consistent energy available).
The E2 just looks at the phase that it is wired into in order to decide how much power to offer (effectively it is unaware that it is part of a 3-phase system). Ideally it would be wired into the phase which typically has the most excess available.
Regards,
Tom
Hi, I was about to purchase an E2 charger before coming across this forum post. I have 3 phase power at my home too.
This sounds like a major limitation with the E2. I wonder how many other people have installed the E2 on a 3 phase system, only to discover that the solar diversion feature doesn’t work.
I had two installers quote me on the cost of supply/installation of an E2 and neither of them seemed to be aware of this.
This seems like a real shame, as it looks like an otherwise excellent product. The solar diversion feature was my main reason for selecting the E2 over other chargers. With net metering you should be able to charge using the excess across all 3 phases without having to import power from the grid.
Is there a workaround for this? It sounds like similar products can receive information from all three phases through additional CT Clamps.
I already have full usage monitoring available through Solar Analytics. Is there some way that the E2 could receive solar/usage data from the Solar Analytics API?
I guess this relates to another forum post : API access to power sensor data
If I could somehow get the E2 to work in my scenario, I would be very keen to get one installed.
The E 2 single phase is fine, the issue is with a 3 phase so that the phase the e 2 is on (blue, red or white) ideally would have little other loads on it - that means your phases need to be balanced. Now without much else on the phase my E 2 is on it works fine. As to solar diversion - your solar, if its also a 3 phase should be feeding PV into each of you house phases equally - so solar diversion will apply to the phase your E 2 is on, not ALL of the pv outputs, just a third if its wired corrrectly at your main fuse panel. The CT clamp simply tells the E 2 the amount of PV current on your E 2 phase and uses that for the diversion settings - it works fine too. To read the other 2 solar PV phases, two more CT clamps need to be installed but their combined generation may not be accessible to the single phase E 2. If this can’t be done, (Evnex please advise) then use the “top up” function to use low night tarrifs. My honest opinion would be to install a three phase charger from the outset - accepting that you car may not be able to utilise its maximum capacity. (My BYD is limited to 7.3Kw AC charging, Teslas can do 11kwH etc, very few get to 22Kwh AC.)
Unfortunately at this stage the E2 can’t read those other two phases. Our X7 (or X22) chargers can read all three phases and therefore more effectively maximise solar diversion in a net metering scenario.
The closest thing to a workaround for the E2 would be to use the third party python library that one of our other drivers published to control it based on output from your Solar Analytics. However I obviously can’t guarantee that this would be a permanent solution (it’s possible that we’ll make changes to the way the app talks to the charger which is what the python library relies on). Also it would take some development effort to configure for your exact situation.
Regards,
Tom