You can apply load balancing to analogue meters too.
What is needed for this?
- Energy meter
- Active Load Balancing licence on your charging station
1. Energy meter
As there is no digital meter that communicates your real-time consumption from your home to your charging station, you need a separate energy meter to solve this.
Via current transformers (see image below), we measure the current flowing through your counter. For single-phase 1 transformer, three-phase 3 transformers.
This info is passed on to the charging station via a measuring device (see image below) and a data cable (UTP Cat6) so that active load balancing can be applied.
current transformer measuring device
2. Active Load Balancing licence
In some cases, the licence and activation of this energy management function on your charging station is already included in your employer's @home charging package. First of all, check with your fleet manager whether this is the case.
You can also purchase this licence + activation yourself from MobilityPlus. These are one-off costs. If you are interested, send us a ticket and we will send you an offer. Click here to create a ticket
Even when you switch to a digital meter, this licence remains valid and even necessary in function of the capacity rate.
Configuring Active Load Balancing
Thanks to Active Load Balancing, the car will never be the cause of a home power failure. This happens when the maximum protection of your home is exceeded.
Attention: only the charging capacity/charging speed of the charging station is dynamically adjusted according to the consumption in the home.
In the module, we set the maximum protection of your home. Read here where to find this info.
It is also possible to restrict the charging capacity of your charging station, but with an analogue meter this is not useful. Once you switch to a digital meter, however, this is necessary to avoid high peaks in function of the capacity rate.
If you also have solar panels, their output will go to the car if it is currently charging and the charging capacity of your charging station is not restricted.
What are the possible risks when there is no energy management with an analogue meter?
Since the charging station has no insight at all into the home's consumption and maximum protection, the chance of a power failure is real.
To avoid this, we advise you to have the charging capacity of your charging station restricted. We then also inquire about the maximum protection of your home and also the maximum peak you reach on average with your home.
Please note: This is not a conclusive solution to avoid a power outage.
If you also have solar panels, their output will go to the car if it is currently charging. But the restricted charging capacity of your charging station will never be exceeded. So that way you can't actually make optimal use of your output.