Since two weeks i’m employing two EVCS stations (version 2, without display) in our newly built home. I have them connected to a cerbo gx that also manages our home battery running as a DESS connected to three Multi RS solar hybrid inverters with approx 48kWh of batteries and the cerbo gets data from a VM-3P75CT energy meter regarding the main connection to the grid. I am running the latest stable firmware on all devices.
Let’s start with this: overall i’m very glad with how the evcs stations are integrating with VRM and they seem to be doing a good job al load balancing when the grid connection is about to be overloaded, this works very well! Also the controls work very intuitively!
I do have some issues that I would like to clarify:
- The load calculation seems to be off: my vehicles are showing lower values for charging than the EVCS station does. In particular it seems to be the case that the load on L1 is overestimated by the evcs.
This picture shows the fact that the value reported by the evcs cannot be correct, since the grid is not delivering this much, and the battery is also not contributing:
This is the output from the evcs station in home assistant, somehow L1 is reported way too high:
- wouldn’t it be more convenient to not include the evcs in the total AC loads? (See the first picture above) This would provide a better understanding of other consumption in the house since the evcs is reported as well.
- Yesterday I’ve put the cars on maximum charge power: one car with 3 phase charging at 16A per phase (limit of the car) and one car with single phase charging up to 20A (limit of my breaker)). This makes for a total charge power of 36A on L1 and 16A on L2 and L3. My grid connection is just 3x25A and I’ve set a maximum grid limit for the chargers to 24,5A. I would have thought that the evcs stations would divide the 24,5A between them and thus charge at 3x12,5A and 1x 12,5A respectively. What I saw though was that the three multi’s were shunting power from L2 and L3 to L1 to allow maximum charge power. This would be a great feature if you would really want to charge both cars as quickly as possible but it comes at a penalty of at least 10% conversion loss of course (AC to DC to AC). I’ve reduced the wanted charge power to 3x10A and 1x14A for now to get rid of this shunting, but I would love to be able to set the charge power to maximum but not have to worry about this shunting by the multi’s. Is there a better way to prevent this?
- I’ve noticed that car charging slows down significantly when DESS wants to charge the home battery. Is there any way to set the priority of charging the cars to go above charging the home battery? I’ve tried to do so by setting the grid import limit to 24,5A for the chargers and 22A for DESS / the Multi’s but this did not solve the problem. This used to work quite well in my old home where the car charger was a different brand and did not communicate with the Victron equipment, thus it would slowly increase it’s power usage as soon als the grid dropped below 24,5A, the battery charging would further reduce, and so on, and so on until the car charger took what it wanted and the battery took whatever capacity was left. Is there any way to appoint priorities to car charging or home battery charging?
Thanks a lot in advance for anybody wanting to help!