Welcome home: smart wallboxes for electric cars
A wallbox is a convenient way of charging your electric car at home. It allows you to fully charge the batteries of plug-in hybrid or battery-powered electric vehicles in a few hours or overnight (depending on the battery capacity and charging power). (Image: Adobe Stock)
A wallbox is a convenient way of charging your electric car at home. It allows you to fully charge the batteries of plug-in hybrid or battery-powered electric vehicles in a few hours or overnight (depending on the battery capacity and charging power). (Image: Adobe Stock)
When a wallbox is connected to the internet,
- it becomes a 'smart wallbox',
- can be integrated into your smart home system,
- and features many practical everyday benefits.
A home wallbox is connected to a 400 V and 16 or 32 amp high-voltage power supply, as is found in most homes. Installation is simple: like an electric cooker, your electrician simply routes the cable to the charging point and gets the charging station up and running. You can then charge your electric vehicle at home with up to 11 kW using the right charging cable – usually a Type 2 connector.
Charging station control by smartphone
As the smart wallbox is usually installed on the wall of your house, in a carport or garage, it can quickly also become part of your smart home. This is done by connecting your smart home and charging controllers or other intelligent systems to your home automation system.
Depending on the brand, the cost of a smart charging station is around £125 to £210 more than a simple model without online functions. However, the extra investment makes sense even if you only plan to integrate your electric car into your smart home in a few years’ time.
Power from your solar panels
Anyone with a solar PV (photovoltaic) system installed on their roof can reduce the energy costs of their electric vehicle: simply use the solar power generated on your roof to charge your electric car. Just link the solar PV system to your smart wallbox and control the power supply using a smartphone app. Depending on the provider, the charging process and load management can be monitored and controlled remotely.
You decide how much solar power you wish to use to charge your car and how much for your household appliances. And if your self-generated power is occasionally insufficient due to the time of year or the weather, the energy management system will automatically use electricity from the power grid.
Bidirectional charging: Vehicle-to-Home
If a home with its own roof-mounted solar PV system generates more power than it consumes, the surplus is fed automatically into the power grid and a feed-in tariff is paid for this. However, as the feed-in tariff has been reduced in recent years, the customer may need to buy back the electricity at a considerably higher rate. It would be much more cost-effective to temporarily store your self-generated electricity for later use.
And this is where your electric vehicle comes in. Your electric car has a large enough battery capacity to power your home for several days. Of course, the prerequisite for Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) is that current can flow through the cable bidirectionally – that is, into the electric vehicle and back into the house or apartment.
Home and car automation are developing in parallel, as this bidirectional charging principle could soon work with a new bidirectional wallbox: intelligent software connects the electric car to the smart home, and the vehicle battery can then be used as a power source. An initial pilot test in Wolfsburg, Germany, with around 1,200 households and 270 bidirectional wallboxes, is intended to show how reliably and conveniently an electric car can store self-generated solar power and then feed it back into the smart home.
