C
Commander Kinsey
Guest
On Mon, 17 Apr 2023 17:50:00 +0100, SteveW <steve@walker-family.me.uk> wrote:
Bad design of car. If you lock the car, it shouldn\'t lock the charge flap at all (you can\'t steal power out of it like syphoning petrol), and if it wants to lock it, it can give you 5 minutes to plug it in. If you don\'t use the app, it should default to some sensible setting (or one you gave it) and charge at a certain rate. The car shouldn\'t require such mollycoddling.
On 17/04/2023 10:19, Theo wrote:
In uk.d-i-y SteveW <steve@walker-family.me.uk> wrote:
That\'s the problem. The 100A (or lower) supply is based on the
assumption of relatively short duration peak load and longer periods of
partial load, not long, large, continuous loads.
Car chargers run for many hours at a time, so two or three of those,
plus washing machine and tumble dryer (moved to night time for a cheaper
tariff), electric heaters, immersion heater and the possibility of the
electric oven and hob (according to my son, it\'s not unusual for
households with students to be baking cakes at 4am, after the
night-club!), plus someone getting up early and using the 10kW electric
shower and you have a load that the supply cable was never meant to take
continuously, plus a higher than normal peak to an already stressed supply.
EV chargers can be configured to sense the total load being offered by the
property. If the supply is 100A then the charger can throttle back the
current being taken by the car so it stays within the 100A envelope.
Somebody turns on the 50A electric shower, the car drops down to a low
current, once the shower is finished the car ramps up the current again. If
there are multiple chargers they can be configured not just to obey this,
but to cooperate in sharing the load: eg charger 1 has priority over charger
2. That arrangement saves going outside at 3am to unplug one car and plug
in another.
So there isn\'t a problem of busting your supply, assuming everything is
installed right.
My charger has no current sensing. It can operate co-operatively, but
only if your other charger(s) are the same make and model.
As well as that, if every house has something along those lines, the
entire street supply will be over-stretched.
That I agree is more of a problem. I expect we\'ll start to see tariffs that
encourage load shedding at times of high local demand (eg cooperation
between local cars to stagger their charging times), especially since the
miles people do in the average day might only require a few hours of
charging. Such already exist for national demand.
The trouble is that we are getting more and more away from simply plug
and charge, needing to use multiple apps for car, charger and
electricity provider, possibly with 3rd party apps and relying upon them
all working together smoothly.
I already find it a minor irritation that, on getting home, I have to
get out of the car, without locking it (or the charge flap will also be
locked), which leaves lights, radio and dash on; plug in; then lock the
car; then use the charger app to set charging and the car\'s own app if I
want to monitor charge state. That\'s before we introduce a 3rd app to
allow the car to charge at lower demand times, rather than a fixed period.
Bad design of car. If you lock the car, it shouldn\'t lock the charge flap at all (you can\'t steal power out of it like syphoning petrol), and if it wants to lock it, it can give you 5 minutes to plug it in. If you don\'t use the app, it should default to some sensible setting (or one you gave it) and charge at a certain rate. The car shouldn\'t require such mollycoddling.