Questions and Answers
Why Liff set the goal to support and promote popularization of electric transportation?
The cars that use combustion engine emit 120 grams of carbon dioxide every kilometer. Some even more. That counts to two tons of carbon dioxide per year. To visualise this amont lets calulate that amount in meters. One cube of 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter can hold 1.84 kilograms of CO2, i.e. the annual volume of carbon dioxide is placed in a cube of 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer! For example, an average tree absorbs 21 kg of carbon dioxide per year. It means that 95 trees are needed to absorb the carbon dioxide issued by one single car per year!!!
Everyone is able to make a significant contribution to the preservation of the nature around us by consuming green energy and using electric transport!
Why do I have to buy smart charger?
Smart chargers differ from the simple ones by a built-in controller, which allows to communicate with the charging station. Such stations are usually by couple of hundred euros more expensive than simple ones, but they have many innovative advantages. Here are some of options:
- 1. Can set the charging time by choosing cheap charging tariff,
- 2. Can remotely manage the operation of the charging station,
- 3. Can get charging statistics,
- 4. Can block the charging station from unauthorized access,
- 5. Can provide a charging station for rent for the purpose of earning additional income,
- 6. And in the near future, can monitore the charging process and collect information for preventive actions to maintain the efficiency of the charging process and battery diagnostics. Buying a regular charging station is comparable to buying a push-button telephone - you can use it, but you are deprived of many convenient, and sometimes very necessary functions.
Therefore, we recommend buying only smart charging stations. In Europe, all smart charging stations must comply with the OCPP 1.6 protocol.
What charger is the best for me?
Сhoosing a charging station, we recommend to thing about the following issues:
- Are you planning to charge one electric vehicle or several at the same time. There are charging stations that can charge two electric vehicles at the same time.
- You have single-phase or three-phase current. In case of three-phase current, the charging speed will be faster.
- How many amperes are in the house and how many of them do you usually use in daily life. If you have, for example, 25 amperes and a three-phase current (the maximum power is 9.5 kV (25x380 / 1000), and you buy 11 kW charging station, then you may experience a powercut. So you must think about increasing the current strength by purchasing amperes, or buy a less powerful charging station or install a dynamic load management device.
- How many free amperes I have in my house. Based on this, you can either buy amperes, or purchase a charging station, taking into account free capacities.
- How far away will be the charger from EV. That will be important since different chargers have different cable length. Some chargers do not have cable at all, most of the charging stations have a cable about 4 meters long, but there are chargers with 7-meter cable and even with built-in ordinary home sockets (which is very convenient if you want to charge an e-scooter, e-bike or use an outlet for other purposes).
- Options for communication with the charging station. Some home charging stations can be connected via wifi, some only via cable, and some have SIM card option.
- We advise to think about the location of the charging station, the distance from the point of connection to the network, whether it will be hung on a wall or installed on a pole.
Why my EV is charging slower than maximum capacity of the charger?
EV producers set up the charging speed according to used technologies. Some EVs can charger 350 kWh, some 50kWh or even less. The charging speed depends on the weather conditions (the colder it is, the slower is charging), the state of charging (SOC), was the car driving before charging or not. The EV never maintain the charging speed at maximum level. Usually, the maximum level of charging speed is achieved when battery SOC is 20-70%. Before and after that the speed of charging is significantly lower.
Can I charge from ordinary home socket?
The electric car can be charged at home from a standard 220 volt outlet in Europe and 120 volt in USA. The car owner will need a cable and a special charger. But it should be borne in mind that, firstly, that charging from ordinary socket is less safe and the process will take much longer time compared with chargingn station.
What if there are not many free amps in the apartment building, and many tenants want to charge their electric vehicles? Is there any solution for that situation?
The electric vehicle can be one of the largest consumers of electricity. For example, Nissan Leaf can consume alternating current of 3.3 kW or 6.6 kW (depending on the year of production), at a voltage of 220 volts, these are currents from 15 to 30 amperes, respectively. Tesla and other electric vehicles use even more. At peak hours of electricity consumption (in the morning and in the evening), starting charging electric car can cause the powercut. In order to avoide such situation, a dynamic load management device can be installed. It measures the total current in the network and controls the charging process by assigning maximum charging currents to the charging stations. The balancer calculates the currents in each phase (both in a single-phase network and in a three-phase network), when the total current of all consumers exceeds the threshold of the allowed limit, the balancer gives a command to the charging station to reduce consumption by an amount equal to the excess of the total consumption over the allowed limit. Thus, the balancer protects the network from overload and powercut, and at low network load speeds up the charging of the electric vehicle. When charging several electric vehicles at the same time, it distributes the available current between them according to a pre-configured scenario.