Hi
I am just wondering if it will be possible to schedule a window of time from the Evnex app in the “Charging Schedule” option when “Solar Diversion” is set to ‘Always Active’?
I do not have my BYD Seal as yet but have both a work and home X22 charger set up and ready to go? My preference in the home scenario would be to only ask the charger to ‘top up’ the car from solar between hours of say 10.30am to 2.30pm?
Appreciate any advice on how this could be done?
Cheers
Ben
Hi Ben.
Unfortunately at the moment that’s not possible. The charger assumes that you either want to charge at full speed (taking energy from the grid if necessary), or to charge using just excess solar, so there’s no way to tell it not to charge at all at certain times of day.
What are you looking to achieve by avoiding charging from excess solar outside of the middle of the day? It might be that there’s a different way to get the same outcome if I know what that is?
Regards,
Tom
Hi Tom
From responses from Pedro – it may have worked out anyway. My aim only charging in the ‘heat’ of the day during those times was based on fact we receive a FIT of $0.12 for first 16kWh per day then $0.05 afterwards – so based on running pool pump etc in mornings and afternoons – thought it would be good to just have this charge time range set up?
You can probably confirm though – the Evnex charger will only supply to the car as long as there is over 1.5kWh being generated in excess anyway – is that right?
The Home charger is the one I really want to avoid having to top up the car from the grid. Work Charger I really don’t care – but – in a way I wanted to see how long I could go with this new car just using solar?
I can tell based on weather today it would be working….
Anyway thanks for the response and appreciate any further insights you can offer
Cheers
Ben
It’s actually configurable what the “start trigger” is for solar diversion, so you could set it to something a bit larger to ensure that you’ve exported a bit more before it kicks in. For example if you made it 3kW then there would be a decent amount of energy exported before solar diversion started (once it’s going it will use as much of the outgoing energy as possible so you won’t export much at all until the car gets full).
When set to Solar Diversion only it does a pretty decent job of importing nothing so you could use that at home and just never set a topup schedule.
Regards,
Tom
Thanks Tom
One last thing on this topic. We have the 3-phase X22 Evnex units installed but interested to know if we configure the start to the 3kW do you have to be getting at least 3kw on ‘each’ of the phases or just on 1 of the phases at least before it will start topping up the car? - Noting the BYD Seal only takes single phase up to 7kWh charging anyway so we have a bit of overkill or ‘Future Proofing’ installed.
Thanks Ben
Good question 
We’re actually part way through changing it to allow you to choose from a couple of options here. However the current behaviour is that all three phases need to reach the target - which can be quite limiting hence the new behaviour options we are working on. They aren’t completely nailed down yet, but expect an update from us in a month or two (there’s a lot of background testing to do).
Regards,
Tom
Thanks Tom - so until this update comes through best to keep at the 1.5kWh?
Thanks again for your response and look forward to any updates that make your chargers even better - great stuff!
Cheers
Ben
**PS: Taking delivery of my EV this morning but wet and cloudy day here in Brisbane - so wont be getting much of a chance to fire up the charger I feel today…
Yes I think that should be best for you for now.
Good luck for some sun over the weekend!
Tom
HI Tom
I thought I’d give you some further feedback on the solar only option at my HOME charger. To preface this - In the Solar Diversion tab I have the “Start Charging” set to 1kW and even though my inverter says that we were generating over 6.5kW - the charger was still in “waiting for more Sun” mode. This was 1.30pm in full sunlight?? We do have an old central air con unit running as well so presume this must be preventing the charger from starting in solar only mode? Really hope this can be looked at as a priority on 3 phase systems like ours as I know a lot of this will just be getting exported when in reality I should be directing to the car.
I have started a “Charge Now Session” as well from 1.31pm and seems to be just taking power from the gris and not utilising any of the solar excess?
Any ideas please??
I’ll need to speak further about the WORK charger as well - hoping we can get this up and running by Monday as well - as I’ll need to top the car up soon.
Cheers
Ben
Hi Ben.
The home charger looks to be doing what I’d expect with the existing firmware behaviour.
What happened on Saturday and Sunday will hopefully help to explain this. Here is the graph for Saturday:
The purple, orange and red lines show the house power consumption for each of the three phases. They go negative during the day indicating export (note times on the x-axis are NZ time because I’m viewing from NZ).
The green line is the power supplied to your car, which consumes phase L1 only. You can see that the two times it was plugged in, the purple line hovers around zero, to indicate that everything you generated on L1 was being consumed by the car.
Here is the same graph for Sunday:
This time something was using quite a bit of power just before you plugged in (see at about 4:30pm on the graph all three phases jump up from export to import). I assume this would be the air con unit. At that point there wouldn’t be any export which is why solar diversion did not start.
Just before the air con turned on you were exporting just under 6kW (almost 2kW each phase), but afterwards that jumped to importing a few hundred watts each phase (4:30-4:45). Then at 4:45 your car begins charging after you pressed Charge Now, but since the purple line was already positive you were already drawing from the grid.
In cases like that, we consider the car to be consuming 100% grid energy, since you could stop charging and still be consuming from the grid. This is really just a matter of interpretation; you could say that if you were generating 6kW then half each goes to the air con and the car and the rest comes from the grid. However, we always interpret it as if the car is the last device to be given any solar power. Therefore if the load in the house is already enough to be drawing from the grid before charging begins, then all of the energy going into the car is “coming from the grid”.
I hope that makes sense!
As for your work charger, we will call you about that later today.
Regards,
Tom
OK thanks Tom
I am no expert in this area and unfortunately at home I do not have an app or device to look at consumption for each phase. The inverter just seems to show a ‘total’ power output in real time. As soon as we can rectify what’s going on with the charger at the office - my preference for the HOME charger is of course to have this to ‘Solar Diversion’ - so just wondering if leaving this at 1kW to start charging and 0.75kW to stop charging will be an OK setting for me to hopefully get some top ups? I presume then I just plug the cable in once I come home and it will just automatically start charging when there’s enough power exporting? Speak soon re work charger - thanks again, Ben
Hi Tom
Just wondering if you guys were any further down this track of changing min solar generation across 3-phase systems such that not ALL phases need to be operating above a set threshold in order to divert solar to the charger? Hope this makes sense in line with your comments from 12th Jan on this post/questions?? Cheers, Ben
Hi Ben.
We’re deep in field trials and likely to complete the formal release next month. If you like I can add you to the field trial now so you can start to use it before it gets released (there were one or two niggles early on but those have been ironed out so we’re expecting no further changes).
Regards,
Tom
Hi Tom, YES - would be good to see if we can get the solar only charging to work more effectively at the Work Charger as part of this trial. As you may remember - due to our upstairs tennants, phase 1 is often running well over 3kW so be good if the X22 charger could be set to draw from other 2 phases? Please let me know what you need me to do in order to test?? Cheers Ben
Hi Ben.
I’ve installed the latest firmware on your work charger which will use the net generation across all phases instead of checking each phase individually.
To enable solar you’ll need to go to that charger in the app and open Solar Diversion and turn it on. It’s possible that it will already show up as being on, in which case turn it off and on again and then hit “Apply”.
For now I would leave the other settings at their default values. Depending on the results we can then decide if they need to change. You can always use Charge Now to get it to ignore the solar and just do an ordinary full speed charge.
Kind regards,
Tom
Thanks Tom
I’ll be back at office later this week. Weather has been sunny here in QLD so will be a great test to see what sort of solar only charge we can get with this revised set up.
Cheers
Ben