Charging Options

[Kawika]

I am considering building an off-grid charging system specifically for my electric vehicle.
My plan is to install a batterypack that would charge up from Photo Voltaic panels during the day. The vehicle could be charged from the battery pack in the evening. I would also like to evaluate the possibility of directly charging the vehicle when it is home during the day.
Without getting into too much detail, what are the best alternatives to make this work efficiently?
Mahalo!

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[NY_Rob]

Between the solar panels needed, the storage battery, BMS, EVSE, support structure, etc, etc... expect to lay out $20-$30K for such a setup.

You really want to do this?

 

[stickyfingers]

Between the solar panels needed, the storage battery, BMS, EVSE, support structure, etc, etc... expect to lay out $20-$30K for such a setup.

You really want to do this?

Agree with NY_Rob. Unless you already have all this at an existing structure ie: your home or you plan to use it for your home only then it's viable but as a standalone option to charge for EV it's not worth the initial investment. I have a cabin that I'm converting to off-grid and I've already sank about $10k and likely an additional $5k to get it fully functional. Anything in the city might be a lot more especially if you are looking for a turn-key solution.

 

[E.S.]

Between the solar panels needed, the storage battery, BMS, EVSE, support structure, etc, etc... expect to lay out $20-$30K for such a setup.

You really want to do this?

It's a little more involved than that, or at least it was for me. When I bought my system, it came out to be around $23k, but after taking advantage of state and local rebates, I wound up paying out of pocket around $15k. Anyone going for a home solar set up needs to do in-depth research on their state and city's incentives for home solar. Another factor to determine is how much is the person spending on fuel costs monthly (both gasoline and electric) and compare how much one would save each year that will lead towards the solar set up paying itself off. In my case, my costs were about $4k a year saved. My set up will pay itself off before the end of my 4th year of use (and from that point, I'll be totally free along with selling electricity back to the local power company).

Note: I'm not saying everyone will get a chance to get my same set up, but to do your research and see what your out of pocket costs are, compared to your yearly fuel expenses, and see how long it will take for that set up to pay itself off.

 

[Revelation]

What is your daily driving like? How many miles do you drive? How many sun-hours does your area get each day? You could spend $5K or $50K.

For instance when I drove my Model 3 into the office I would use about 45-52% SOC for the round trip. Let's just round the number to 40kWh of energy used.

A 10kW system ($3k-6K pretty easily) [4.5 sun-hours where I live] would generate enough energy on most days to handle that. I would need a larger battery bank. I could go with say, x12 Egyll 5.12kWh batteries ($1,500 ea) for 60kWh in total.

That would meet my daily driving needs. Once you figure in energy usage in the house, you'd need a bit larger of a system - though that was not listed as a requirement.

Panels can be the cheapest part of a solar system these days. If you could get away with charging a portion of your battery from the panels without touching the batteries then you could get away with less batteries and extra solar panels. Batteries will be the most expensive part of it and inverters, well depends on what all features you want.

If your daily driving was a lot less, you could get away with a much smaller system. I'd recommend looking at say a Sol-Ark 15K (coming soon) which can be grid tied, it can sell back and do net-zero. It can also do 200AMP pass through from your grid connection into your house panel. It can output 62.5 amps from the solar panels and it can output 50 amps from batteries only (off-grid or grid down mode). It could also pull from the grid, if needed, on days when the weather prevented adequate charging of your batteries.

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