Five mistakes when choosing a charging station for your home

Installing a home charging station for an electric car is not just a piece of equipment for a private residence, it is your confidence that your car is always ready for a trip. It is important to choose the right charging station and avoid mistakes during installation and configuration. Below are a few common misconceptions and our recommendations on how to avoid embarrassing misunderstandings.

If you are buying an electric car for personal use, then most likely, you were thinking, even before the purchase, about where you are going to charge it. This applies equally to new and used electric vehicles.

Sometimes it seems that there are enough charging stations around you in the city, and using the city's infrastructure, you can charge the car while shopping or visiting restaurants.

An alternative to this way is to install a charger at home. Returning home in the evening, you can put the car on charge and not worry that you will go on your next trip with an incompletely charged battery. It's like a phone - if you charge it every night, it doesn't cause any disturbance.

It's comfortable. It is not expensive. This saves battery life compared to using fast charging processes. This saves time. It is, after all, reasonable.

It is known that the vehicle can be charged from a three-phase or single-phase alternating current network. You can still use direct current, but this is not an option for the private residence.

Manufacturers produce electric vehicles with charging power consumption: single-phase - 3.7 kW, 7.4 kW, and three-phase - 11 kW, 22 kW. It would seem that everything is simple - the greater the charging power, the faster the car will charge. But this is not always the case.

Some electric cars simply cannot consume much power, and even if the station is powerful, the electric car will not use all its power but has a limitation provided by the manufacturer. That is, of the two values - the power consumption of the car and the transmitted power of the station, the smallest of them will always be used.

Another point to consider is the ability of the building energy system to provide sufficient energy. This also imposes its limitations in the case of using a simple station. We will have a separate discussion about more complex solutions.

An electric car consumes a lot of energy while charging. Much more than a kettle or an iron. The charger can be used by all family members who are not expected to have special qualifications in the field of electrical engineering. That is why in Europe it is forbidden to charge an electric car from a household outlet. You must use a special charging station.

Therefore, compliance with all rules and regulations is a vital necessity. This includes having the necessary permits and inspections and employing qualified professionals to work on the installation. Charging equipment can generate sparks, so it is important to follow fire safety regulations as well. When installing a new electric vehicle charging station, it is very important to properly ground it. If the grounding is not done correctly, you have a risk of putting yourself and your property in danger.

Always make sure your charging station is maintained, updated, and checked regularly for safety.

As a rule, the charging power affects the cost of the charging station to a very small extent. But charging stations have many other parameters that determine their price category. These include additional features, which may include the following:

• Energy counter
• Various timers that set the operating mode
• User identification
• Ability to accept payments
• Smartphone connection for control and monitoring
• Connecting to cloud management systems
• Remote monitoring systems
• Dynamic power balancing
• Some other systems

Not all of them are needed if we are speaking about a residential building. For a charger connected to a private energy source, it is very unlikely that it will be used by someone else except family members. It means that there is no need to do separate accounting and no need to check who exactly is connected to the charger. Payment for consumed electricity is included in the total electricity bill. Everything is simple.

We can recommend using a smartphone connection to see what is happening at the parking and set limits on the operating mode by time or power. The smartphone will connect via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

We also find the Dynamic Power Balancing (DLB) feature very useful. It helps to avoid unpleasant situations when overloading the power system at home. It is so important that we will talk about it separately.

Load balancing means the proportional distribution of system load. Speaking of charging stations for electric vehicles, dynamic load balancing (DLB) is a feature that dynamically changes the charging power consumed by an electric vehicle depending on how much energy can be allocated to it from the energy system of the household.

An electric car is the most powerful consumer of electricity in a private residence. But often the general power of the household is limited and we cannot consume too much energy from the grid, otherwise, the protection device is realized.

DLB is a device that works in conjunction with the electrical switchboard of the house and the installed charging station. It monitors the total load in the grid, and as soon as it drops, the entire freed stock is sent to charge the electric vehicle. Often it is structurally built into the charging station.

It allows you to avoid many problems and charge the electric car smoothly, without the risk of damaging the energy system in the household.