How do I charge my car from solar? | Electrifying

#homecharging #electriccars #solar
Discover more and find your perfect home charger:
If you want to use solar energy to charge your electric car, you’ll need a home charger that comes with solar integration. In this video we take you through the process that will enable you to use your own solar or even wind power to charge your car.
We’re going to assume here that you already have solar panels installed, the first thing you’ll need is a charger that is compatible with home-generated energy. The EVIOS One unit that we’re using was designed to work with solar installations right from the start and has some really neat features built in.
There’s actually no physical connection between the panels and the charger. Using a clever sensor, the charger knows exactly how much power is being generated by your solar and then matches that input from the panels with output sent to your car.
There are a couple of things to be aware of if you want to charge like this. Like all electrical appliances, your car needs a certain level of power before it can charge. For electric cars this is around 1.6kW or seven amps, so if your panels aren’t generating that, your car won’t charge.
Of course, the question most of us want to know is how long it will take to charge my car purely from the sun. Well that depends on quite a few factors. The first is the size of your solar array, which is the name given to your collection of panels.
Then there’s the capacity of your car battery and, of course, the weather.
Let’s say, for example, that we have a 4kW solar array on our roof and that it’s in direct sunlight all day. Our Citroen here has a usable battery capacity of 45kWh battery, which means that we would need almost 12 hours of direct sunshine in order to fill it up from empty. Now, clearly, we don’t tend to get 12 hours of direct sunshine in the UK, so an empty to full charge will probably take at least a couple of days if you want to charge purely from the sun. But it will be able to keep the average motorist topped up for their commute. With free, green energy.
To discover more about the process and read our reviews of the best solar compatible home chargers on market, check out our new Electrifying.com charging information hub.
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[@dalroth10]

I liked this video and think it will help anyone who is thinking about getting solar and an EV to understand the potential benefits. I offer my own experience over a 3-year period to help explain the benefits. I live in a 4-bed detached house in the east midlands and have a 5.6kW solar array, which is 16 panels. I have a 64kW battery in my Hyundai Kona EV, which has a range of 300 miles. Over the last 3 years my solar panels have provided 50% of the electricity I've needed to charge my EV. This equates to 11,500 miles of free energy from the sun. During the winter months, when there's less sunlight, I use Economy 7 cheap rate electricity to charge my EV at night.

[@SebNutter]

This is the kind of real world information we need. Than you. A couple of questions: 1. If you had 32 panels would that cover your car charging needs year round? 2. Would you consider or do you have a battery? 3. In the summer can you charge 100 per cent of your car needs daily?

[@kit8y8]

@@SebNutter @dalroth10 This is something I would love to know too

[@bill_heywood]

Great video from Ginny. I love getting free miles from my solar panels. We have a Zappi charger, which gives excellent flexibility to work with solar and off-peak charging. If you've got an EV and a roof, get solar, it pays for itself

[@bjrntoreborge4281]

Did you get the solar panels for free?

[@bill_heywood]

@@bjrntoreborge4281 I said they pay for themselves, not that they are free. Since I had my solar panels in February, they have cost me £1142 and saved me £2271 - a net saving of £1129. Now I'm getting paid for export, those net savings are only going to increase

[@manu-g21-mx]

Free? Free? !!!

[@bill_heywood]

@@manu-g21-mx has the sun started charging a fee? 🌞😉

[@bill_heywood]

@@bjrntoreborge4281 good point, I have to be honest... they pay me The real question is, if you can have solar panels, why haven't you?

[@Flickerbrain]

Here in Germany I am using the Austrian Go-eCharger and the Swiss Solar-Manager. The Solar Manager gives you a great overview of what is happening and it doesn't use sensors on the cables, just the accurate data from your inverter. You can also use it for other smart switches in the house. All works really well.

[@colinhartree1619]

We have used the Zappi charger for years to harness electricity from our solar panels. It has three settings, solar only, grid or solar with back up grid as required. It is very good as long as the car and the Zappi have firmware that understand each other. understand

[@garyhill9723]

Currently with our 16 panel/4kw set up I use the granny charger. For every 10-12 kw I put in the car I pay for around 1, which covers the times during the day our solar output doesn’t cover the base load. To use 100% solar you’d need a battery to soak up all the solar then charge from the battery/solar, with the granny or have a large house battery.

[@rjmacf0015]

They must be some very small or very old panels. There’s no way you can charge a car year round on 4kW peak output. In fact you won’t even charge a decent battery other than three months in summer on average. The arithmetic isn’t realistic….like this turkey of a video.

[@chrisfox5525]

Or use a granny charger when you know it’s generating.

[@Peter-ke7wy]

I only ever use a granny cable to charge my Leaf 40 kw at home. I never let it run down below 40%, so it fully charges overnight.

[@chrischild3667]

Same here my type 2 charger is largely redundant.

[@mfs1011]

Agreed. Whole premise of video is flawed and could cause people to waste cash.

[@RodneyCurtis]

Thanks for the simple explanation Ginny and Electrifying! I have solar panels here in the states and so far have just charged my plug-in hybrid with ‘em. As soon as I get a full BEV, I will get a charger that integrates with my panels. Appreciate the tutorial.

[@JoshuaMcTackett]

For my Tesla I use the standard wall connector and ChargeHQ with my fronius inverter and internet connection. It perfectly matches the excess electricity that my home isn’t already using. For my BYD I use the granny charger when the sun is out lol

[@stevenbarrett7648]

We just plug on once the solar battery is full / lots of solar being made so instead of putting power into the grid we are taking it all for the car, just a dumb charger nothing special but we do need to keep an eye on it as once the house solar battery is depleted or daylight fades as we don’t want to start paying for power from the grid. Later at night Octopus kicks in with cheap rate charging so overall we soon have 80% in our Tesla MYLR

[@Harrythehun]

One way to minimise the costs! But a lower your state of charge to around 60% for even better mitigation of battery degradation.

[@stevenbarrett7648]

@@Harrythehun usually charge to around 60% unless we are going on a trip. To be fair Tesla super charging at the right time of day is cheap enough anyway. Obviously solar is ‘free’. Just wish we could afford to go for a heat pump too !

[@chrischild3667]

Would have liked to have seen a tad more information on this one and alternative solutions, such as using a 3 pin cable to charge at

[@MatthewEng2593]

So does it switch off if a cloud blocks the sun? That might cause excessive load switching

[@t67m]

One factor I hadn't appreciated, and which isn't mentioned in this video, is that charging a car purely using excess solar is surprisingly wasteful. Certainly my car (Kona EV) consumes about 400W during charging to run the various electronic systems and this power does NOT go into the battery. If your excess solar is only just above the 1.4kW minimum for charging, you effectively only put ~72% of the electricity into the battery (1kW out of 1.4kW). Charging faster increases the efficiency massively - charging at 7.4kW is 95% efficient (7kW out of 7.4kW goes into the battery). For a 50kWh (circa 200 mile) charge, this makes a massive difference - 69.4kWh from "excess solar" @1.4kW reducing to 52.6kWh with "full speed AC" @7.4kW, saving 16.9kWh!!!! If you have a good solar export tariff with cheap overnight electricity (e.g. Octopus Flux), it might well be quite a lot cheaper to export excess solar at 1.4kW and then charge at full speed overnight.

[@johnafotheringham4266]

The elephant in the room as far as I’m concerned is that if you don’t work from from home, then for much of the sunniest times your car is nowhere near the solar panels. This is where battery storage can help, but managing ev/solar and battery can be a bit complicated at times, and of course battery implies more cost in the short term

[@SteveMorton]

I use my granny charger to top up on sunny days, we have a storage battery as well, so if the sun disappears behind a cloud for a few minutes the charge continues from the battery. I don’t do deep charges this way, but as I don’t do many km a week a top up once a week or so works fine from Solar.

[@ians3328]

Exactly, you don't actually need an integrated expensive solution unless you need the speed. PhD in hindsight I would have installed a Zappi but I did not - good news is though the Ohme Pro is very handy (before I got the solar) as it is using intelligent OVO system so only costs 10p a unit and no extra for other units. Charges only when Ovo has loads of cheap energy ie all day apart from 6:30-9pm.

[@johnminshell6532]

Looks like brilliant Idea if you are not planning to go any where in your car

[@lordpitnolen2196]

A neighbour who has had solar panels for years recently "inherited" an older LEAF (probably 20kw?) and simply he charges, albeit slowly, using his 'granny charger' from a 13 amp socket. He is a low mileage, infrequent user and never uses a public charger.

[@mastarce]

I have never heard of a minimum power limit for charging. My charger is capable of 6A charging on 220V. Works fine.

[@briangriffiths114]

I found out by accident that my Fiat 500e will accept a charge as low as 4 Amps or around 900 Watts. However, I normally charge from solar at 6 Amps (1.4 kW) using my dumb charger with the sun providing 2/3 of all my car's energy over the year.

[@bidgooj]

I use a Zappi EV charger with my solar panels. Although 7.4KW system, I typically get a generation of 3KW where I live. I typically use the Zappi Eco+ mode with the 100% green setting. This way the car uses no energy from the grid. As soon as my panels have charged up my storage battery then any excess going to the grid that exceeds 1.4KW goes to my Mercedes EQC. I leave my EQC permanently plugged into my EV so any excess does not go to the grid. If I need a quicker charge then I use the Zappi Boost mode of 7.4KW to allow me to use Octopus Go cheap rates from 12.30 to 4.30 in the morning. As a result I think I have had free car mileage apart from 4 times since 1st April!

[@MandyFlame]

Same, except I don’t have a cheap overnight tariff from my provider

[@thepete129]

Same as us

[@downwind_david]

If you haven't got solar yet, then I would look at getting an inverter with your solar system that handles all this already. For example, I have a SolarEdge system that has a home battery and a cable for the car. I am then able to chose options in the inverter software as to where the solar power goes, which in my case is house loads, then charge home battery, then car battery and finally output to grid to earn money. The installation is one neat box other than a mish mash of different add ons with the concerns of whether all the different bits of hardware / software will talk to each other.

[@thepete129]

I agree, I wish I had that option. When I started 10 years ago, I’m the mishmash variety, but it still works :-)

[@ians3328]

If you can sell your solar for £0.15 and buy a car full at £0.075 per unit why would you put the solar into your car ? Surely it is better to export all your solar and just top the car up at night on the cheap rate. Whilst also filling your battery to power the house from the solar/overnight top up.

[@Darthadios]

That can work only in mediterranean countries, but like in here the sun is shining like a 3 months in a year, it´s just not work + we have a proper winter and snow.

[@montanax8127]

I'm planning to work 2 days remotely, 3 days at office. I can charge on the 2 off days. Trying to challenge myself to drive pure green starting from January when I get solar panels.

[@johndoyle4723]

Just plug your 3 pin charger in, you can have 6,8,or 10 amps, depending on how sunny it is. Most days I can put 30 miles in the car if home.

[@nigelhudson1948]

The trick is to use a smart chargepoint such as the Indra. You can charge overnight on a smart tariff to say 70% and then use the solar mode during the day to charge up to 80% or 90%. The only drawback is that you have to ensure that the smart chargepoint is compatible with the tariff that you choose - there is not universal compatibility. My set-up is happy solar charging at 1.3kW.

[@nige-g]

A solar panel on the car roof and again on the bonnet.👌

[@The_Observer72]

Every charger on the market works. No magic.

[@greggg4011]

It's nice to show what you show, don't get me wrong, but I'm frustrated watching it because I rent an apartment. Compliments for mentioning the contactor battery minimum which I read was 6Amps, and have only seen mentioned twice on KZbin.

[@theanorakchannel2496]

We don’t have one of these specialist charges that includes Solar, we have a standard Omi charger. We’re in the UK. We have batteries, so the 5.4 kW ray of panels charges the batteries, and that charges the car. We have found since we had our solar installed at the same time as getting our first electric car that our bills have remained unchanged from before we had the electric car and using standard, electricity tariff. Therefore, we getting all our car charging for free! Not sure you can beat that! Especially in the rainy old UK.

[@DanielMedina-vj1zi]

I want information about solar chargers for cars. I have not found too much information about it. One of my questions is about batteries, Almost all solar systems have batteries, but electric cars have their own batteries. I think we must save a lot of money in a solar system if we do not buy extra batteries for the panels (obviously, we will not charge the car at night.)

[@brainbros5209]

The year is 2026, you have this device on your home, and you drive an Aptera that is now FULLY charged from the Sun 😍

[@Harrythehun]

Sorry but they will go bankrupt. Not enough nerds on this planet. Tesla for the win!

[@brainbros5209]

@@Harrythehun I take it you're not a daydreamer? We'll see how this ages. I'm not afraid of being wrong as long as I'm learning along the way.

[@aussieideasman8498]

I didn't expect an Aptera disciple on this video. You see - I do watch other stuff. Now, tell the readers how many hours it takes the 1,000 mile silly trike to charge fully from flat with that on-board solar only. That's presuming they aren't a Ponzi scheme.

[@Harrythehun]

@@brainbros5209 Fair point. The Soccer moms and and company cars is a big part of the buyers. Hard to see them roll down the roads with the Aptera.

[@brainbros5209]

@@Harrythehun I ride a motorcycle, so the road awareness of that + higher risk tolerance threshhold make it fun and appealing. The more this vehicle isn't for everyone, the better my chances are of getting one.

[@GaryV-p3h]

We probably won't ever get enough sunshine here in the UK but that's not a problem for me because I'd have to winthe lottery to be able to buy solar panels and a battery & the day that happens I'll be on the first plane out of here for a new life in the sun.

[@richardlangford646]

You do not need to spend thousands when just plugging it into a wall sockets works better. You can suck power out of solar and battery storage just by being smart about when you connect, and what else in the house wants power.

[@tedbearfudge]

It's not really free energy if you pay £10,000+ to install the solar array in the first place is it?

[@CharlesGwinn-ep9pb]

They need to have a way to charge the car battery fractionally(since its just a series of cells strung together 72 or more) .The use should be able to solar charge an optional subset of the main battery using less power than the whole batt would require. Or if there was a device that could match the wave frequency of the inverted solar to the grid frequency then you could charge use solar to subsidise the grid output and the more panels you buy, the more independent you become over time. Even a 150 watt panel producing 600 wh daily would get you 2 -2.5 miles@.15/mile, saving you . 30-.38 per day vs . 6kwh x . 15 avg is . 09 per day. Hello panels payback in 1/3 to 1/4 the time. Well DUH.

[@nursemsic]

It would have been better to have shown, visually, what sort of physical roof size you need when you stated 4kw. Is this the roof in the video? Because thats far from typical for a UK house. Could you do a follow up for what perhaps a detached, or semi-detached house roof could do?

[@aussieideasman8498]

Move here to Brisbane, where the sun shines a lot and the houses easily take 6.5 kW, on average. Most can take 10 kW. It's an EV paradise - not to mention great for lifestyle. Further North is even better.

[@ianhouliston46]

One problem, people who take there car to work miss out on most of the sunshine..

[@haazabaaza7438]

Saturday and Sunday?

[@noorijanze]

Lucky for us in Pakistan we could have arround 8 hours of clear son and 4 hours partial

[@MrSweeperUSA]

I usually get home at night, so I charge with the 🌙 moon

[@AndrewSheldon]

Simple algorithm made to sound like rocket science.

[@rjmacf0015]

Unfortunately the numbers don't quite add up for solar power as a source to charge car batteries. These vary from 50-150kWh capacities. Home solar peak power might be 5-10kW with most homes even in southerly and south facing locations generating in total 10-30kw TOTAL on a good day so even daily topping up of 10-20kW in addition to the base load of any home just isn't realistic?

[@rjmacf0015]

@@garysmith5025 Thanks. As you appreciate the distributors are now competing to reimburse home PV excess. I have an Eddi v2. Its a nightmare due to software problems-see the forum. I agree six months ago excess going to grid was wasted at an export price of caped by the cartel at 4p/kWh. That's changed and we now have a SEG of 12p/kWh from Scottish Power. They all rushed to do the same. Charging an EV on solar is of course great in principle. The point is unless you literally use a car to drive 5 miles a day and have a very good geolocation its not practical to suggest we could be driving an EV significant distances and charging 50-110kW a day. To be fair to the presenter she does point that out. Its sadly another You Tube title "white lie"....you can of course do it just don't for a minute think it would be enough for routine use for all but a tiny minority?

[@thepete129]

Most cars do 4 miles per kilowatt needing to put in 50 kW a day in Your instance will be the equivalent of driving 200 miles a day. Most people don’t do that most people do 30 miles a day which would be just 7 kW of energy. We have a standard 3 1/2 kW system and for half the year we produce 20 kW a day. The house uses 10 the car charges 10. Simply works and if you can’t make it work then you’re the one that needs to change because this is the obvious future so get used to it

[@rjmacf0015]

@@thepete129 sorry your arithmetic isn’t impressive or realistic either. Life isn’t about your views and you. It’s about the school physics of energy, location, azimuth and the average output of panels not populist “most people” comments on you tube. The video is an unrealistic and blatantly over simplification of something that couldn’t be any simpler. Have you heard of winter sunshine and angle of incidence. Yesterday our 5kW peak array facing due south generated 0.25kWh….. great video “Ginny”!😂

[@tomsdaddy]

I see your charger switches between 'solar' and 'mains', but will (for instance) automatically switch from solar to mains each evening, and then switch back to solar again in the morning ?

[@jak493]

It’s hard to justify based on the initial installation cost as it would take 10+ years to get your money back. I know the green benefits however the financial is not so clear cut

[@bradleystanton8190]

Choose wisely and Buy a smaller capacity ev if it suits your journeys needs, everyone knocks the Mini range yet it suits me down to the ground. Doing small inner city journeys and easily charges from solar.

[@bonilla2022]

Tesla chargers do this as well. " Charge from Solar" is an option.

[@KMUMMULMOMANIN]

In your video, You showing different property where solar install and charger installed where no solar panel but showing charger point on green mode. Video need to fix to showing realistic charging situation.

[@JetFeng]

to charger EV with solar the best way is to add battery storage.

[@MrBigbeee]

Is anyone doing this off grid? How feasible is that?

[@bloodynorahvan2203]

If anything an off grid setup is simpler. You'd just run the charger in 'grid' mode, which it would take from your solar array / battery array

[@Richard.StJS1]

Go on compare the e-C3 to a Corsa and work out where vauxhall has wasted all that money haha

[@16jocko]

Video more about sale of a brand of charge controller than anything else. This is a much bigger subject than the attempted coverage here.

[@Book-For-Brain]

3 month ago❤

[@Reddylion]

nine

[@manu-g21-mx]

Free? Come on

[@pintu.pati.733]

🛰

[@charlesholder8009]

Free green energy after you spend £20k on all the equipment but don't factor in the Co2 from the manufacture and disposal in 15 years' time. (Hard hat and earplugs fitted) Why would you even have all that kit if it was not to do another task which it now can't do if it's charging your car? This seems to be a bogus, manufactured scenario just to fit your narrative

[@johnafotheringham4266]

Not really. Many (most) solar installs are capable of generating more than normal household usage. This surplus is generally passed to the grid, so intercepting it for the car makes perfect sense. However, if you’re talking about the back of the envelope calculation presented, then I agree. It ignores both domestic usage and charger losses, so as a ballpark estimate it was a tad optimistic, but the conclusion that it would take days to fully charge a car was broadly correcf

[@charlesholder8009]

@@johnafotheringham4266 It would make more sense if the large box situated on the ground, was a battery. Charging the battery and then using it to charge the car seems a better option. But when paying to drive by the mile comes in on top of swinging insurance and road tax the whole concept of owning a car becomes untenable. We are about to be controlled in everything we do. While the elite fly around the world to make sure we are doing what they want.

[@pauld7827]

The trouble is that you have to have a smart charger or car.