Evnex E2 Plus EV Charger
An overview of the Evnex E2 Plus Charger, using the Evnex mobile app to manage charging, and Home Assistant integration.
As part of the discussions with Adam from LAMM Solar and Electrical, I mentioned that we were getting an electric vehicle and I was interested in getting a home charger for faster charging. After clarifying that I wanted nothing to do with a certain T*sla brand, they recommended taking a look at an Evnex charger.
We only have single-phase power in our house (and no immediate plans to change that), so that narrowed it down to one of their E2 range that can provide up to 7.4 kilowatts:
| Model | Connectivity | Solar | Cable | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E2 Flex | WiFi | - | 5m | $AU799 |
| E2 Core | WiFi | Y | 5m | $AU1,099 |
| E2 Plus | WiFi+4G | Y | 8m | $AU1,399 |
The Flex is the base model. It doesn’t have the ‘Solar smart’ feature that allows you to “schedule your charging to use only your excess solar power without drawing from the grid, giving you free kilometres from sunshine”.
The Core sounded like it was the one, but I took note of Adam’s advice to always get a longer cable than you think you’ll need, as you wont regret it. Some chargers let you plug in your own cable, whereas unfortunately the Evnex ones don’t. That pushed me to the ‘Plus’ as rather than 5m it comes with an 8m cable. It also supports a client/server model which I understand would be useful if we wanted to get a second charger installed and they could be managed together.
I was also interested to see what kind of ongoing support they had - I found there’s an active support forum with prompt responses to queries, so that was also encouraging. They’re designed and manufactured in New Zealand. If I can’t by Australian then New Zealand is the next best thing!
And so that’s what we got. We ordered directly from Evnex and it arrived a couple of weeks later, just in time for LAMM to install when they refreshed our solar panels (there was a small reduction in costs for doing both together).
Oh and Adam was spot on with the longer cable. 8 metres was enough that I could run the cable along the ceiling of our carport over to near the charging port on our car. Keeping it off the ground and avoiding a tripping hazard. 5m would have been too short to do that.
Mobile app
Evnex provide a mobile app that you can view and manage your charger.
For comparison, here’s the Kia app at the same time:
In the Evnex app you can view the details of the current charging session (and past ones too)
Like the solar inverter, the Evnex also uses a CT clamp to monitor actual electricity usage in your house. I’d say ‘current usage’ but that could be confusing🙂
You might just want to be able to charge any time, but for me I wanted to limit charging to when our electricity plan is cheapest. It is true that the Kia app provides simple scheduling for when to accept charging:
But the Evnex app has much more advanced controls:
The app has an advanced schedule setting, where you can configure when you want to allow charging and the costs that it would incur (from your electricity plan).
My current electricity plan has free power from 11am-2pm, so that’s the main time I allow the car to charge. But on occasion I may want to allow charging overnight (when it isn’t free but the cost is low) so I’ve created 1 hour intervals that I can selectively enable if needed.
You can add in different prices.
And for each time period you can assign one of three behaviours:
If we had a larger solar installation, then the Solar Smart feature could be useful too, to manage how much of your solar-generated electricity to allocate to EV charging.
Charging done (set to stop at 90%):
Home Assistant
Yes, there’s a really good Home Assistant integration for the Evnex chargers. It provides two devices:
There’s a number of controls and a bunch of sensors
You can use these to track usage and generate some nice graphs. I can imagine you could get quite clever with using Home Assistant provide even finer control over how your car is charged. I could see something like monitoring the weather forecast to predict likely future solar generation to adjust how and when charging is offered. Not something I’m going to do now, but there’s all kinds of possibilities.
Money back
Narelle discovered that our local council were offering a number of sustainability rebates, including for installing your own EV charger! We just had to supply a before and after photo of the installation and then a week or two later we got $200 back. Nice!