Is This One Of The Toughest Home EV Charger Installs In Australia?

How hard can it be to install a hardwired EV charger in your home? If you live in a house like this, it can turn out to be really flipping difficult. And that's for a bunch of reasons. Number one, the garage where the owner wants to charge his car is separated from the house by a backyard that's covered in pavers. So that means the guys have got to pull up these pavers and then they've got to dig a trench at least 600 mm deep to bury the cables that connect the EV charger to the main house switchboard. But that's not all. This house, like an increasing number of houses in Australia, has got both solar and a battery. So the EV charger needs to be able to talk to the solar so it knows how much solar's getting generated at any one time if the owner wants to just charge off solar, which is absolutely the cheapest way to charge an EV these days. And it's also got to talk to the battery because what you don't want to do is empty your house battery into the EV because then you've got no energy left in your battery to power your house overnight and you're pulling it from the grid. What's the point in having a battery if you're going to power your house with a grid? Follow me. Here we are at the main switchboard for all the town houses in this development. These are the main breakers for all the units in the development. As you can see, unit 10, like all the rest, has only got a 40 amp supply. Now, a 7 kW singlephase EV charger will pull 32 amps when it's charging at full whack. that only leaves eight amps for the rest of the house and we need to solve that problem or that main breaker is going to be tripping all the time. In this video, we're going to show you exactly how we're going to do this really complicated EV charger install. So, you can see what's involved. We've got to solve the problems of getting from the garage to the house underneath the pavers of integrating with the solar, battery, and the really tricky one, managing the 40 amp supply so we're not tripping the main breaker every time the owner wants to charge his car. So, why go to the $5,000 expense of installing a hardwired EV charger when the homeowner can charge with his existing portable EV charger that he got free with his car? Well, it comes down to time. These things are really slow. They charge at about 2 kW. And that means to fill his car from empty is going to take, are you ready for it? 40 hours of charging. And when you're charging an EV, time is money. If you're leaving your car plugged in for hours upon hours, you're paying to charge that car whatever the grid is charging you. And if you're on a time of use tariff, which is becoming increasingly common in Australia, you're probably charging right through the peak period where electricity costs 5060. 75 cents a kilowatt hour instead of charging through the rarely cheap periods, which can be as cheap as free. The second often overlooked reason why you want to get a hardwired EV charger is peace of mind. Now, this house was built in 1986. That means we're working on 39year-old wiring. Now, this pulls 10 amps at full whack. And that socket over there is rated at 10 amps, so it should be fine. But an EV is a really unusual load in that it can pull the full 10 amps for hours upon hours. Now, this 39year-old wiring should be okay, but for peace of mind, there's nothing better than getting new wires put in that are installed at 2025 standards, not 1986 standards. So, what model EV charger are we going to install today? Obviously, that's up to the homeowner. As you saw, he's already got Solar Edge inverter and a Solar Edge battery. So, the obvious choice is a Solar Edge EV charger. Now, the benefits of this is it integrates into the ecosystem. It can automatically talk to the inverter, so it can know how much solar is getting generated at any one time, and you can set it to only charge from solar, which is generally the cheapest way to charge your EV. So, that should work out of the box. Also, you want it to integrate with a battery. If you've got a 80 kilowatt hour battery on your car and you got a 10 kilowatt hour battery on your home, it's going to be really easy to empty that home battery into your car. Then you've got no energy to run your house overnight. Not good. This will talk to the battery so you can tell it not to do that. But there's one big problem with this EV charger. It hasn't got OCP. What's OCP? It's a third-party independent standard for communicating with the EV charger from the outside world. Why does this homeowner really want OTP in his EV charger? Because he uses an electricity retailer called Amber. And with Amber, the electricity prices goes up and down quite wildly during the day. And he wants Amber to be able to control his EV charging. So, he only charges when the

price is really cheap and doesn't charge when it's really, really expensive. So, for that reason, he's not going to go with a Solar Edge. The homeowner looked far and wide for an EV charger that he liked that had OCP compatibility, and he found this one. This homeowner has decided to go with Chinese brand Sig Energy. After looking at our last video, he really liked the look of their equipment, and he's very confident that they've got strong support in Australia. And the most important thing is, we've been told, we'll find out that it's got a really good implementation of OCP. And if that's true, we'll find out. That means he has all sorts of options for third party control, including Amber. Now, let's address the three complications in this particular EV charger install. The first one, of course, is the paved backyard between the garage where the EV is going and the house where the switchboard is. To address that, we could have strung conduit along the brush fence, along that side wall, kind of along this wall between the kitchen and the bedroom windows, and then down the side of the house. But the proper way to do it, although it added $1,500, $2,000 to the install, is to go underground. One important thing to note is we're not just running power cabling, which is the white cables here. We're also running data. And you'll find out why in a minute. So the power and data cables, they come out of the trench when they get to the house. They go up the wall in rigid conduit and along all the way to here where because this is quite unusual in that the switchboard is inside the house, they got to poke through the brick wall, through the first floor ceiling and into the internal switchboard. Second complication in this EV charger install is that the owner has solar and battery and he really wants the EV charger to play nice with those. The homeowner has decided he's going to control his EV charging with an app called Charge HQ. Now, how Charge HQ works is it's all through the internet. So, the Solar Edge inverters, they do a great job of exposing what's called an API, which is basically control software through the internet for third parties. So, Charge HQ can use that interface. It can see how much solar is being generated and it can see how full the battery is and it can switch the battery charging on and off. And then the software in charge HQ can make decisions based on the homeowner's preferences about where to put the battery energy and how much solar to use when you're charging the EV. So hopefully touch wood if it all works. And that is a bit of an if because this is all new stuff with Charge HQ. The homeowner will be able to only charge from solar if he wants to which is the cheapest way to charge your EV. and also decide whether or not he wants to use battery energy to go into the car and also whether the solar should be used to charge the battery first or the car first. He should have all those options because he's got the internet interface charge HQ and the OCP compatible EV charger on the wall. And finally, the third challenge with this installation, which is the 40 amp main breaker. That means if the house is ever pulling more than 40 amps, that breaker is going to trip and the house is going to lose power until someone comes out and resets the breaker. Now, to give you some context, at full power, the EV charger will pull 32 amps. So, that only leaves 8 amps for the house, and it's very, very easy to use more than 8 amps. You switch the oven on, you're going to pull 10 amps. They switch that air conditioner on, that's going to pull about 15 amps. So, as you can see, it's just not going to work charging an EV at full whack and trying to run a household. So, how do we solve this problem? Well, we solve it with a feature in the EV charger called dynamic load management. And that's all made possible by this power sensor which goes in the switchboard in the house. Now, what this does is we put this, this is called a current transformer. We put this around the main feed to the house and this simply measures how much current is coming into the house at any one time. This power sensor communicates with the EV charger using the pink data cable that you saw before going into the trench. Then the EV charger subtracts the amps coming into the house from 40 and it knows how many amps it's got to play with to charge the EV. For example, if the house is pulling 15 amps, which it can very easily do, then it knows it's got 25 amps to play with. It sets that as the max current for the EV charger. Now, let's say you switch on a few more appliances in the house and it's pulling 30 amps. The dynamic load management then knows it's only got 10 amps to play with and turns down the EV charging to suit. And that's how dynamic load management lets you use a high current device like an EV charger, even if you've got a limited main supply. So, the EV charger is commissioned. It did take about 40 minutes, but this is the first one we've ever done. What did we get wrong? Bit of fun and games with the Wi-Fi. We had to switch it off and on again to get the Wi-Fi working. That took about 15 minutes to work out. Uh, secondly, we wired up the power meter in the house switchboard wrong. So, we had

to switch over two wires on the power meter and on the EV charger. And see, SIG Energy, to be honest, this cover plate is a complete pain in the ass to pull off and put on again cuz of where the screws are. I'm sure you'll sort that out in version two. So, everything's powered on. The house isn't pulling much current. So, I'm going to plug this in the electric car, the Ionic 5, and it should charge at full power, 7 something kW. Let's find out. Ah, fingers crossed. And there we go. Bingo. It's charging at 7. 3 kW, which is the equivalent of 32 amps. That's working great. Now, we've got to test the dynamic load control. To do that, we'll switch the solar and the battery off. So, they can't provide any charging power. We'll switch some appliances on, probably the oven and the kettle. That'll probably pull 20 amps. And so, that should drop down to 20 amps of charging, which is closer to 5 kW. Let's try it. Okay, I'm going to kill the AC supply to the inverter. That'll deenergize the solar panels and the battery. Boom. I'm also going to hit the DC isolator. Now I'm going to switch the oven on and the kettle on. That's about 10 amps each. So that'll give us about 20 amps to play with. So the dynamic load control should drop it down to about 5 kW. The charging power has dropped down to 4. 9 kW. And most importantly, the main breaker hasn't tripped and we're not sitting here filming in the dark. So yep, dynamic load control commissioned. So now the final part of commissioning is getting the EV charger to talk to the solar and the battery. And we're doing that with a third party app that's going to coordinate it all called Charge HQ. So now I've got to tell Charge HQ how to talk to the EV charger and solar edge inverter that controls the solar and the batteries and touch wood. It'll all work together beautifully. Connecting the inverter and battery to Charge HQ was a piece of cake. Well done Solar Edge. But connecting the EV charger wasn't. We had to use our contact at SIG Energy and they did it for us in the background. But we got there. Solar and battery and EV charger are all talking to each other. And that's where the problems begin. Although it's a sunny day, the EV charger is refusing to charge when it's in solar only mode. And that's because Charge HQ is fighting the control signal sent from the energy retailer Amber Electric. You see, wholesale electricity prices are right now between 0 and negative. Negative prices means you have to pay to export solar. So, Amber is throttling the solar, the 0. 5 kW, which is what the house is using, and nothing more. But that means Charger HQ can't see any excess solar. So, it's refusing to charge the car. Now, the good news is Charge HQ and Amber are both owned by the same company, so we'll need to wait for them to fix their apps to handle this specific situation. In the meantime, the homeowner is stuck with a dumb charger, apart from the dynamic load management. That's the price of early adoption. So, this is Don from DQ Electrical. Don, on a scale of 1 to 10, how complicated was this install? Uh, yeah, this one was probably 8 and a half. It definitely had its challenges. Obviously, we're in an out building, a shed that's um offset from the home. So, only way to get electrical cabling out here was to dig a new trench. The current power circuit that was out here was only a 16 amp power feeds. Obviously, 32 amp charger that ain't going to cut it. So, underground cabling, um lifting up pavers, uh mitigating all the underground services that are here, obviously water, folks. Um so, yeah, that is a challenge. Um but the boys did a great job. We had a couple of guys here dug it all up within a day and got it all laid. So apart from the trench, any other complications? Obviously the other main challenge now is um doing all dynamic load management uh integrating it in with the existing solar system, integrating with third party um software to make sure the customer is getting um the latest um features when it comes to charging off of cheap electricity rates and you know free excess solar stuff like that. So it's going to work with the solar and battery not against them. 100%. Yeah. Speaking about dynamic load management, is that becoming more common as houses get more electrical appliances? Yeah, definitely. Obviously, um EV chargers have got quite a heavy load. So, um being able to manage that with other air conditioning and other heavy loads in the home swing, pool pumps, uh hot water. So, if you're looking for an EV charger, you might just think, well, you know, I'll buy an EV charger online, get my local Sparky to install it. If you do that, are you going to get dynamic load management? Uh not necessarily. So, that's why we call them smart chargers. So, you know, if you want to get the dynamic um load reduction, you want to be able to charge from your excess solar, all those particular things, uh it's important that you're selecting the right charger. And not all of them do it. So, that's why we call them either smart chargers or dumb chargers. Yeah.

Gotcha. So, if you are buying an EV charger, just have a think about that. If you've got solar, if you've got batteries, if you've got a limited supply, then you're probably better off going to a specialist like Don rather than just buying one online and asking a sparky to install it. So, $5,000, one and a half days later, we've commissioned the EV charger kind of. We've got dynamic load control working. So, that's great. But what we haven't managed to do is the IT side of it, which is getting the EV charger to talk to the solar and the batteries. Now, that's disappointing, but this is a brand new charger. It's the first time we've tried it. Watch this space cuz I'm determined we will get it working. Touchwood.