EV charging

I’m thinking about buying an electric vehicle to primarily do the short journeys that I do 95% of the time. Not really worried about range as we have a second vehicle

My idea is that if I have a car with say 140 mile range like the Mini, as I only do 20 miles most days there would be enough downtime before / after work and days off connected at home to only use PV power March to September. Has anyone any experience of this? Does my logic hold?

I am out of the house 4 days / week 9am till 6pm and have a 6kw system

Thanks!

If you don't go anywhere with the EV on the 3 days you are not using it for work odds on you will get a decent day of sunshine to charge the car.

I've got a 6kw south facing array and was seeing in excess of 30kwh of generation per day in late Sep not long after I got my system installed.

Realistically you can probably manage with just PV for 4 months reliably and its top up the rest of the year.

It also depends on how you drive those 20 miles too, if it's 10 miles each way to work with 8 hours or so in-between along mostly slower A roads it'll likely get decent efficiency. If it's s quick blip down a dual carriageway or motorway it's going to use more out of the battery.

6pm will be a bit late in the day for your array to be producing decent generation in April and September too, same with 9am a touch too early.

Thanks so much, I too am south facing so similar setup. The battery on the mini is only 28kw usable so 30kw hours on a sunny day in September sounds great! Thanks again.

How Do I stop the battery discharging into the EV whilst charging the car from off peak grid power? I am setting the charge to coincide with Octopus Go times (0030-0430) and setting the charge level fairly low 30%.. Hopefully this should work.. Does anyone else have another (Better) cunning plan?

Head_Scratcher the battery shouldn’t discharge during the timed charge period.

However if you don’t set it to 100% charge, it may discharge.

E.g. if the GE battery is at 50% and you’ve set a charge target of 30%, it’ll discharge until it gets to 30% then hover there for the rest of the timed charge period.

Head_Scratcher The other way is to set the discharge power of the battery to zero during your off peak times. Its under Settings > Battery Options > Discharge Power

I do similar as per chrisdev suggestion. Interrogate the charger to see if it's charging or not then set battery discharge to 0 if so. (and similarly because I'm on the intelligent tariff I reverse Uno myself and set the battery to charge up at the same time - the charge & discharge power of the battery can be set independently)