I have setup an off-grid 48V system with an EasySolar 48/5000. I have a EV Charging Station connected and its generally working however there are a few got-ya's.
1. EV Charger off, car connected, house batteries full, Solar charger is on float on a bright sunny day. I switch the EV Charger onto Auto and it just sits there with status "Waiting for Sun". There is plenty of available capacity but the SmartSolar is just bringing in around 230W to manage a small load and float charge the house batteries. I switch the EVCS to manual at 8A, car charging starts and the SmartSolar comes to the party and ramps up incoming solar to support the EVCS. I switch it to Auto, charging continues and within a minute or so the EVCS is running at 13-14A as expected. The EVCS works fine on Auto if plugged in before float charge is reached. How does the EVCS determine that there is not enough sun?
2. I had to tweek (and still tweeking) the "Power calibration (0.6-1.4)" setting in the EVCS General settings. Initially set to 1.00 it was showing that there was more power going to the car than the load on the inverter (!!). I have been using the kWh figure in the Tesla app to determine what is delivered to the car. Unfortunately the app rounds the figure to zero decimal places so I have used a number (for example) of 3.5kWh the moment the app changes from 3kWh to 4kWh and correlated this with the "Charged Energy" figure on the EVCS. The Power Calibration figure I have so far is 0.85. (Inverter is 230V)
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3. A great feature for an off-grid EVCS would be combine a schedule with the SOC percentages used with Auto mode. Although I have "Start charging at backup battery SoC(%)" set to 95% and "Stop charging at backup battery SoC, if off-grid(%)" set to 93%, I still see the charging starting and stopping repeatably especially in the mid afternoon. For example at 2:30pm, house battery at 96%, bulk charge, solar starts dropping, house battery goes down to 92% and EVCS stops. Battery gets to 95% EVCS starts then stops a short time later when back at 93%. There is talk of this repeated process not being particularly good for the car. I know I can change these numbers but I really want to maintain the max possible house battery charge to power the house through the evening and night.
With a schedule active on Auto mode there would be a hard-stop for the EVCS at a pre-determined time. Ideally there could be date-ranges for each schedule so (for example) winter parameters could be different to spring parameters.
I'm interested to hear suggestions or work-arounds and of others experiences with the Victron EVCS.
