Export electricity... where does it go?

70sbudgie

Coastalwatch said:

70sbudgie said:

They are also paying to use the cables that takes your excess electricity from your house to theirs (as well as all the equipment to get the rest of their electricity and all the protection systems required to keep it safe). 

If you wanted to sell your excess generation to your neighbour with the EV at a cheaper rate, the way to do it would be to install a smart EV charger that monitors your export and controls the charge rate accordingly (an example is the Zappi ). Bear in mind when setting your export price, the cost of installing the charger and the rate you would otherwise earn for exporting.

You might earn / save more for both of you by using a refer a friend service from your supplier.

Alternatively you could use the CoCharger App as I do with my neighbour. As a host you set the cost per hour and minimum charge time. Your chargee requests to charge and you can accept or deny as you see fit. The App handles all the finance with money popping into my account a few days later. It's worked well for us this last six months or so.

Thanks for this suggestion. I've just looked up the co charger app and it looks very interesting. It has great potential as my town is a black hole for public chargers.

70sbudgie

Solarchaser said:

Just to throw in the potential issue of an ev charging with excess solar, is that unless you have an excess of over 1.2kw, then the EV will not charge, so if you typically export 1100w/ hour, this won't be able to go into your EV even with a Zappi.

You can balance this with constant low output if you have home batteries dealing with the peaks and troughs, but without batteries the low output could see you buying electricity from the grid.

Thanks for this too. I have been researching whether to replace my charger with a Zappi, but had missed that the minimum charge rate is quite so high. I have been considering the benefits of trickle charging during the day vs charging at night.

I have Octopus outgoing so they won't let me have Go as well, but I do have an E7 tariff.