EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) for Home Use

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614 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2912970 12-May-2022 14:06

cthombor:

Evnex chargers have an excellent reputation on https://www.facebook.com/groups/NZEVOwners. I haven't heard any adverse comments.

I can't answer your question about whether you can charge when the cloud servers are down. I'd guess that this is quite rare -- but it's a good question and I'd *hope* that Evnex would reveal downtime statistics. A related question -- probably more important to answer if you're worrying about downtime -- would be whether your Evnex unit could be configured so that it'd have a manual override you could use when it is unable to connect to the internet for an extended period of time e.g. because the cellphone network is down or overloaded in your area. However you would have an "easy" way to get at least a partial charge, if you mothball your existing 8A charging setup.

My main concern with the cloud servers is if evnex ever went under, the odd time you have to manually start in a rare occurrence is fine with me, just always a concern when installing things like this that it's beholden to a company both existing and a promise you'll never get charged for the service.

Phone reception is patchy but the charger does have wifi and an ethernet port should it be needed. I might try and see about running an ethernet cable from the comms panel on the same wall to the location of the box if I get one installed to just use it that way as it seems the easier more reliable thing to do and I have a port available on the switch in there.

everettpsycho

614 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2912975 12-May-2022 14:23

cthombor:

Your 2017 30kW Leaf might have either a 6.6kW onboard charger or a 3.3kW onboard charger. If it has a 3.3kW on-board charger, it'll take about 8h to charge from 20% to 100% if it is charged from a 7kW charger -- and it'd take just as long if it were charged at 3.3kW using a 15A 230VAC supply. The 7kW chargers can deliver up to 30A -- and wiring a 30A unit in your garage *might* be spendy... so you might get a firm quote on the installation cost before proceeding with this. That said -- I'd say it's *much* safer to be using a dedicated "mode 3" EV charger that's wired into your house supply by a competent electrician, than to be plugging an 8A "mode 2" portable EV charging device into an aging wall-socket in your garage (unless that socket and its wiring has been inspected by a competent electrician)!

I'm pretty sure ours has the slower 3.3kW onboard charger, using the free chargenet chargers it's not all that fast. I know the 7kW is overkill for what the car can handle and we could probably get by installing a caravan socket for now. We're pretty sold on the ev life now though so don't think we will be buying another fully petrol vehicle so figured if we are going to do this we should just go all in with the better charger for if/when we get a better car down the line that can use the full 7kW.

Current solution is working fine it's just a bit too slow for a 30kW and won't work with a second car if we pick one up. We are in a new build so I really hope there's no complications. If the wiring isn't up to standard the original sparkys will be called back in. In hindsight maybe we should have got them to prewire but at the time we made the decision not to we really didn't think we'd be getting an EV anytime soon, then we moved and realised our mileage was going to go through the roof so took the plunge just before petrol prices went a bit mad.

Future state it might be worth us looking to add a 15A outdoor socket so we could charge a second car on the driveway independently of the circuit in the garage but we will see. For now if we get a second car it will likely be a cheaper 24kW leaf as the two combined should cover our needs.

SaltyNZ

8227 posts

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#2912981 12-May-2022 14:41

everettpsycho:

Current solution is working fine it's just a bit too slow for a 30kW and won't work with a second car if we pick one up.

An observation from another 30kWh owner - we've had ours for over 4 years and it has 150,000km on it. If you're saying that 8A overnight isn't quite cutting it then I take that to mean your daily trip only just fits within the range of the car. Ours was the same: I did a 110km daily commute in it, and the 8A charge overnight was just enough as long as I didn't stay out late or expect to drive it much further that day.

Be aware, this is going to run your battery down fairly fast. Ours was always in the 95th percentile for mileage and 5th percentile for battery health for its age based on Flip the Fleet data.

After about 120,000km the health started to decline noticeably more quickly. It's now basically useless and we're holding onto it while we wait for EVs Enhanced to get their 16 Blade battery on the market.

Basically my point is: if you're running it that hard, expect a relatively short battery life compared to other Leafs that are being cycled much less. The 30s in particular cook their batteries - they get hotter than the 24s and they don't have the range of the 40s.

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everettpsycho

614 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2912988 12-May-2022 14:53

SaltyNZ:

An observation from another 30kWh owner - we've had ours for over 4 years and it has 150,000km on it. If you're saying that 8A overnight isn't quite cutting it then I take that to mean your daily trip only just fits within the range of the car. Ours was the same: I did a 110km daily commute in it, and the 8A charge overnight was just enough as long as I didn't stay out late or expect to drive it much further that day.

Be aware, this is going to run your battery down fairly fast. Ours was always in the 95th percentile for mileage and 5th percentile for battery health for its age based on Flip the Fleet data.

After about 120,000km the health started to decline noticeably more quickly. It's now basically useless and we're holding onto it while we wait for EVs Enhanced to get their 16 Blade battery on the market.

Basically my point is: if you're running it that hard, expect a relatively short battery life compared to other Leafs that are being cycled much less. The 30s in particular cook their batteries - they get hotter than the 24s and they don't have the range of the 40s.

Right now we aren't thrashing it too badly, it can do about 150km of range from 100% and the round trip is just over 50 a day, so we can't quite make it last a third day and are charging every other night plus whatever we need at weekends. My usage however is about to be more like 100km a day on top of my partners 50km which will stay the same, this will mean nightly charging for the longer trip or every other day for the shorter one. I'm not certain on what we are actually going to do car wise, part of me is considering looking for a phev to take on one of the trips if the price is right on one to try and limit thrashing the battery. Hopefully the 16 blade comes at a price that could be done, if that does play out I'd be tempted by a 24kw for the shorter journey with a view to upgrade it to a 16 blade longer range model and then switch the cars round. Don't think it's going to be a cheap mod installing those though.

Jase2985

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#2913050 12-May-2022 15:55

would it not be more wise to charge it every day but keep it in that 20-80% range?

everettpsycho

614 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2917661 23-May-2022 15:36

Jase2985:
would it not be more wise to charge it every day but keep it in that 20-80% range?

This is something I get but really struggle to manage. I'd be fine if the just had a limiter you could set but having to do the maths to know how long to charge for and program it to turn off isn't something I really want to be doing every time I recharge the car.

I think we have settled on getting a second leaf now though. Similar to the range is fine for 99% of uses the size is also fine for 99% of our uses. Worst case scenario we need to collect something and we can just drive both cars, one with the kid and one with the seats down. Still cheaper than driving a petrol car that far.

That in mind this charging situation is something I now will need to address as one will be on the driveway and one inside. A sparky seems to think it'll be fairly simple to just run two sets of cable from the board to the opposite side of the garage and back to back two installs at the same time to avoid repeat work and additional holes in the wall. Initially I thought a caravan socket plus a dedicated evse but at $500 for the caravan cable I might as well just pay the extra for a second evse box.

That said I'd be keen on any recommendations, considering there will likely be two cars some nights I think load monitoring would be pretty important to have on both to stop any issues. I was considering the EO, or potentially the evpower units. I have asked evnex how much for a pair but not optimistic they'll do it for a good price.

siyuan

189 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#2917692 23-May-2022 17:23

everettpsycho:
This is something I get but really struggle to manage. I'd be fine if the just had a limiter you could set but having to do the maths to know how long to charge for and program it to turn off isn't something I really want to be doing every time I recharge the car.

Since I run Home Assistant for automation, I installed ODB2 dongle on my Leaf and use the LeafSpy integration to get the battery level into HA. Then with some simple math, HA tells me when to stop charging once started. I also went the extra mile to get my EVSE integrated into HA (some details here) so that it stops charging the car at the calucated time. The accuracy is usually about +/- 1%, I'm reasonably happy with it. Of course, if I leave LeafSpy running while the Leaf is being charged, I can have it stop at precisely 80%.

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afe66

3181 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#2917993 24-May-2022 14:40

My leaf 1.2 (24kwh) has option to charge to 80% as a setting,

siyuan

189 posts

Master Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#2918022 24-May-2022 15:57

Unfortunately Nissan decided to remove that feature in 2014.

RobDickinson

1524 posts

Uber Geek

#2918039 24-May-2022 16:06

As a small update the tesla gen 3 wallbox now works OK with MG cars too after a software update

cthombor

81 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#2918051 24-May-2022 16:56

siyuan:

Unfortunately Nissan decided to remove that feature in 2014.

Yeah my 2014 Leaf had a timer which was "confused" about the day of the week -- because it "thought" it was in Hawaii but with a very large daylight-savings correction ;-). But I found it quite handy, once I figured out (roughly) the %SOC it would charge per hour while at home... so I set it up to start charging at 11pm every night of the week, and adjusted its end-time to get it very roughly to 80% SOC overnight. Easy-peasy when I didn't need a charge, I just didn't plug it into the wall. And overall I liked it better than what I have now on my e-NV200 -- which can be programmed to stop either at 80% or 100% SOC but gives me no control over its start-time. So... whenever my slow-solar-charging (at 920W = 6A * 150VAC through a 3:2 stepdown transformer) during the day isn't sufficient to keep it topped up, in order to keep the %coal in its "fuel tank" as low as possible I either start the charge manually at 11pm (yawn) or I futz around with the time-delay settings on my EVSE (which gives me a choice of starting immediately, after a 2-hour delay, after a 4-hour delay, after a 6-hour delay, or after an 8-hour delay).

All to say that I respectfully disagree with your assessment, and I'd say Nissan made the right move to shift to a charge-control timer starting in 2014!

everettpsycho

614 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2918079 24-May-2022 17:39

cthombor: All to say that I respectfully disagree with your assessment, and I'd say Nissan made the right move to shift to a charge-control timer starting in 2014!

It didn't have to be an either/or though. They could have left both in tact to set a charge timer with a battery cap on the charger so we could do both. Timers are something it's easier to do outside the vehicle using a wall charger or timer socket so to lose the load management that can't be done by other equipment easily is something a little bit frustrating.

ANglEAUT

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#2918150 24-May-2022 20:55

My 24KWh 2015 Nissan has to 80% or 100% charge limit setting.

Additionally, it has an aircon & charging timer. See pg CH-21 in the manual. I can set the car to only charge to 80% and start any time I want. The dash also has a once off timer disable button so that I can start charging immediately is I wanted. Fast charging always bypasses the charging timer.

Of course, the get the correct onboard time, I have to set the clock as an offset from Tokyo time after futzing about with the 3-2-1 button dance.

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