Big Dunc
Member
You can get something monitoring your surplus PV and it can turn a charger on or off. However, a dumb charger will only charge at full power or not at. The beauty of Zappi is that it modulates the charging speed to match the surplus. I know you could manually restrict the charging speed in the car (or car app) but that would be another layer of faff.I have long thought that "smart charger" is a mistake. e.g. Zappi et al doing "Excess solar so I'LL HELP MYSELF" isn't smart, its selfish.
Dumb Charger and something (else) that tells the car to charge is, I think, much better. Loads of scenarios that middle-ware can handle far better than a Zappi reacting to excess PV - including when Energy Supplier has Time-of-Use tariff and variable schedule from day-to-day.
Sure ... someone should have written a decent APP to do all that by now ... but I can't find one.
The MyEnergi / Zappi web portal has the facility for variable tariff's (i.e. those on agile), although I have never used it so cannot give any real detail about how good it is.