I was hoping to get some help on this, as myself and my installer are both stumped on this.
We’re trying to see how exactly the EV charger communicates to know how to charge from solar, prevent overloading etc.
Typically you put a meter down around on your grid incomer, which would tell the EV charger if your home is exporting power for ‘charge on solar’ and if your home is using too much power to ramp down the EV load to prevent the fuse from going off.
However, I have a solar system (SolarEdge), feeding into a GivGateway, which handles the AIO battery pack. Logic tells me that there should be some communication between the gateway and the EV charger.
This way, the gateway can tell the charger the power usage, solar export excess and stuff, and the gateway will know how much power the EV charger is using so that it does not discharge the home battery to the car.
The manual for the EV charger does not explain how to set this connection up. GivEnergy tells us that we don’t need a wired connection between the gateway and evc, and that it can do it over the network. Afaik, this is a cloud connection, not a local connection, which I am not happy with at all. The gateway manual seems to tell us that a wired connection is possible but it doesn’t describe how exactly this works.
To be clear, i want to have a hardwired lan connection, and a wired RS285 connection between the gateway and the evc. Has anyone had any experience with this?
It it’s not a GivEnergy EV charger the charger will need a CT clamp that can monitor the export - clamped around the meter tail just before the meter.
I say tail - you have to monitor one “wire” not both - as live and neutral would cancel each other out from a CT point of view.
I think usually the live is the tail it’s clamped around. Neutral can be used instead, but I think there’s recommendations around interference and gaps between that neutral and other neutrals to ensure an accurate reading.
If it is the GivEnergy EV charger then I assume all the GE kit should be able to talk to each other, but I can’t comment on that as I don’t have a GE charger.
Thanks for your reply! Yes, it’s an GivEnergy EV charger. You’re right on that they should talk to each other but this is where I’m not confident.
The current way the ev charger talks to the rest of the GivGateway and AIO set up is over the cloud. So it connects back to GivEnergy’s servers to talk to the gateway. They are promising a local connection over LAN at some point. That being said, I don’t like the idea of it needing to go through LAN, and it seems to imply in the documentation that the gateway and the charger can talk over rs285. But the documentation is outdated and not clear, hence why I’m here.
Assume the charger is wired to the gateway, our Giv charger is on wifi as well (no LAN port), all works fine, shedules etc. the rest og the GIv stuff Gateway/AIO are on the LAN, zero issues.