New install and EV charging

[CDubbs]

Morning forum

New member, and looking forward to contributing and currently looking for advice.

I’m having PV and battery installed next week, 16 panels 8 east, 8 west @ 450w per panel, 6kw inverter, @ 1 x EP11 10kw battery.

Have a Zappi EV charger installed on Octopus IOG, my concern and it’s not totally answered yet by the installing company, is not drawing from the battery to charge the car, PHEV 14kw, when Octopus decides to charge, which can be in the 6 hour cheap window or anytime they have cheap electric to sell.

So can someone advise if the current setup can be used to hide the load on the house from the battery.

Currently the Zappi CT clamp is across the whole house load on the i/c live tail from the DNO fuse.
The supply cables after the meter for the whole house supply and EV charger is into a Henley block, tails then feed to the house CU and the Zappi CU.
The breakers for the inverter will be installed in the house CU as there are spare bays available, so if the CT clamps for the Fox system are on the house CU side of the Henley block, will this hide the load of the Zappi charger and not draw from the solar battery ?

Diag attached

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[Dave Foster]

Hi and welcome.

That’s actually quite a straight forward install of your EV charger, the Zappi CT clamp can stay where it is and as long as the inverters CT clamp is fitted between the Henley block and the consumer unit on the live feed it won’t see the load from your EV charging. (the live cable on the right of the picture clipped to the backboard)

[CDubbs]

Dave
Many thanks for the prompt reply and advice

Gut feeling was that was the case, but seemed too simple to be correct

[SolarJunkie]

I'm having exactly this problem.

My batteries will drain whenever there is a charging session outside of the cheap tariff rate and it will deplete the batteries in a short space of time, not to mention stress them more than they need to be.

I don't need to track the EV charge usage, as this is done by Octopus, so is it correct that I could simply move the CT clamp? The install instruction say to fit the clamp on the tail from the meter, but I don't see what difference it would make if I moved it to just after the take off for the charger.

Edit: This won't work for me, as the house currently has two CU's , each fed by a tail from a junction box.

[MaterialBarracuda48]

Edit: This won't work for me, as the house currently has two CU's , each fed by a tail from a junction box.

Can you give more details on your two CU's?
For example, do you have the EV charger running off a CU box along with house circuits?

I have 3: House, Solar and EV CU's and each is fed by splitting the incoming grid via Henley blocks.

viewtopic.php?p=9631#p9631
There is a picture that Will has posted up here, maybe you can follow it and see if you can move/add CT Clamp(s) about to make the EV load invisible to the system (as it should be)

[SolarJunkie]

I have each tail (neutral and live) going into a separate terminal block, one out to the main CU, one out to the secondary CU which was originally for the annex to the house and the third to the charger CU. This means that I could only connect the CT to part of the house loads.

I will have to alter the feeds to the house CUs, so that there is a single output to feed both. I'll get this done when I update the CU's and consolidate the wiring into one box, until then, I'll have to manually manage my car charging, as something has changed with the Octopus app, which means that if it sees a time schedule interrupt, it cancels everything, rather than just move to the next time window.