Summer is the time of year with more daylight hours, making it ideal for photovoltaic self-generation installations. However, autumn is better for generating solar energy in some countries due to extreme summer heat. Clean energy is excellent for charging electric vehicles, and at Circontrol, we offer various solutions to maximise its use. We have products to manage complex charging infrastructures, such as our Dynamic Load Management, or for home charging. Let’s explore our new solutions to make the most of solar energy in EV charging at home.
eHome 5
The eHome 5, our latest innovation in home charging, recently presented at Power2Drive in Munich, has been designed to take advantage of photovoltaic self-consumption installation to charge an electric vehicle. Thanks to its easy installation and features it allows to optimise a new or existing photovoltaic installation. The charging station is compatible with any inverter in the market. It does not need to be integrated into the inverter, because it measures the PV production in real-time.
For that, Circontrol’s eHome 5 offers three charging modes. Those are “Just Green” when using only the surplus power from PV energy; “Smart Mix”, combining PV and grid energy; or “Boost”, using all the available power, both, grid and PV, to speed up the charge. These modes allow charging the vehicle considering the lowest energy rates and the highest sun activity, helping to save energy and costs.
Additionally, the eHome 5 offers a great user experience thanks to its cloud-based app for authenticating, managing, and monitoring charging sessions. The app also allows users to schedule charging sessions by hours or days and check the charging history. This way, users can use the best solar energy production hours to charge their cars.
Take full advantage of solar energy
Moreover, the new eHome 5 lets to take advantage of PV production, even when it is not enough to charge the vehicle. In those cases, firstly, the charger will supply the grid with energy from solar panels, to ask for, after, more power from the grid and compensate the balance to result in zero at the end of the day charging session.
In addition, the new Circontrol charger monitors household consumption and can automatically adjust the energy demand to prevent blackouts.
