Every year we ask more than 500 installers in the SolarQuotes network which solar products they would trust in their own homes. This year, as well as asking about solar panels, inverters and batteries, we added a rapidly growing sector: electric vehicle (EV) chargers. [Read more…]

Tricks and traps when charging from a standard powerpoint. 

Spent all your spare cash on an electric car and don’t want to incur the expense of a hard-wired home EV charger? Then this is the post for you.

For five years, my two EVs have only ever been plugged into a powerpoint. [Read more…]

Exclusive! An in-depth look at a pioneering bi-directional EV charger installation in South Australia. V2G is exciting stuff, but some surprising limitations are revealed. [Read more…]

As electric vehicle ownership accelerates in Australia, new EV owners face the challenge of charging their cars as cheaply and conveniently as possible. [Read more…]

The Fronius Wattpilot finally launches in Australia

I have good news if you want to charge an electric vehicle with Austrian technology. Fronius Australia launched their Wattpilot EV charger last week.  Last week we were told it would be available here “in a couple of weeks”.  A surprisingly imprecise period of time, given they are Austrian. [Read more…]

How fast can I charge my electric car at home? 

The answer depends on what you plug it into.  It can also depend on which EV you have. [Read more…]

A Chargefox electric vehicle charging station in Adelaide.

If you’re running a still-growing network of 500 EV charging stations across a continent as vast as Australia, you want to avoid low-value maintenance/repair visits to your locations wherever possible. [Read more…]

If you haven’t got a Tesla EV (red dots =. Tesla chargers) then your options to recharge across Victoria are limited.

Regional Victoria is awash with public EV charging stations if you happen to be a Tesla owner. An April report by the Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance says if Tesla charging stations (only usable by cars of the same marque) are excluded from an assessment of that state’s charging infrastructure, EV drivers face coverage gaps away from the city. [Read more…]

Chris from Queensland has owned a Zappi EV charger for over 3 months now. Find out what he thinks of it.

Readers will recall our previous discussions of solar diversion here and here, and my complaint that it’s too hard to do off-the-shelf.

One of the handful of fully off-the-shelf products we were alerted to is the Zappi charger, and last week I had the chance to discuss the product with a user in Queensland, Chris. [Read more…]

Solar & EV owners: don’t stress about charging your car directly from the grid when the sun isn’t shining.

The first thing I’ll do in this article is point out it’s difficult to fit caveats into a headline.  The second thing I’ll do now I’m writing the article and have the space to explain is state there are exceptions to the two main points I am about to make, which are:

1. It doesn’t make economic sense to charge an electric car with a home battery.
2. Charging an electric car with a grid-connected solar-battery is worse for the environment than simply charging it from the grid.

[Read more…]