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smejfi avatar image
smejfi asked

Victron EV charger without ESS and inverters

Hi all, I have a question regarding the Victron EV charging station. As far as I know, the charging station in combination with ESS should be able to limit the charging power according to the main circuit braker, so ev charging wont overload the breaker when other house loads are running. I have not tested this so far, although I have allready installed a few of those chargers, but I believe this actually works. My question is, if it is possible to install stand alone Victron EV charging station (without inverters and therefore without ESS) and still benefit this feature? Of course I understand that there would have to be an external energy meter which would measure how much power goes through the main circuit breaker and probably there would have to be GX device as well, but if there are these components (Charging station, GX device and energy meter), will this charging power limiting feature work? Also now when new Victron energy meter came out, I was wondering if this was possible also without gx device, but that is probably too much to ask. Thank you for your answers.

ev charging station
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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Yes, it works without ESS, on both grid connected or off grid installations
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smejfi avatar image smejfi Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Thank you for your answer, I get that for Carlo Gavazzi energy meters the gx device was necessary to comunicate with the meter, is this also the case with Victron brand energy meter?
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kudos50 avatar image kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Are you sure no further disclaimers are needed here ? As discussed in other threads, overload protection in my setup will not work simply because it is designed to do something different. That's OK, but I did actually buy the chargers because you said "no problem, use overload protection". I ended up writing the node-red flows to accomplish load-balancing myself.

Again, so many people, so many setups. Node-red and modbus are life savers.

In an ESS setup, overload protection max amps is read only. It is taken from the max amps input of the Multi's. No matter if this value actually represents your grid connection max amps. But even if that is no issue for this forum-member / use-case.... than still, during overload detection, the power will only be reduced and if below 6A it will stop charging. And it will never restart. That is proper overload protection but it is most certainly not load balancing.

Writing a flow is not super difficult but the fact that charge current cannot be 0 results in added complexity as you need to cook something up to stop and restart without influencing manual or scheduled stop and start.

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