Can you charge your electric car off-grid with a Zappi? 

Charging an EV off-grid is NOT an unusual request

We often get approached by electric car owners and typically Tesla Model 3 owners, wanting charging setups that are outside the box but when Paul called us earlier this year and said he was living off grid and wanted to charge his EV we immediately knew 2 things. 

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1. It wasn’t going to be easy but 
2. The Zappi was up to the challenge.

 
For those with offgrid setups, it's a common quest to remain offgrid while driving electric and without being dependent on patchy public electric car charging infrastructure. Most ev car owners boast about the convenience of charging their electric cars at at home so why shouldn't off grid guys and girls enjoy the same privilege?

The challenge when charging an electric car off-grid 

Back to Paul's scenario. He has 15 solar panels producing up to 4.8kw feeding into a 24 cell battery array and obviously no electricity grid connection. The Zappi was never designed to be connected offgrid. So the challenge with the Zappi was how to simulate the grid connection to provide the Zappi with enough information to differentiate the solar generation and the stored energy in the battery array.

What are the off-grid charging principles?

Working with our team, Paul was able to come up with a solution that works and works well. The solution involved a separate AC connected solar and battery inverter. The inverter on the solar array converts the DC energy to AC from the solar array to service the house and a second inverter on the battery array converts the stored DC energy to AC to simulate the electricity grid for the Zappi to charge the vehicle. With this new setup Paul is reporting that his solar array is now more efficient with his battery array now being charged earlier each day and harvested energy being available for the charging of his EV.