What is True Solar?
True Solar lets you use as much of the power your solar panels produce as possible. With the True Energy app, you can monitor the electricity flow in and out of your house in real time and optimise your electricity consumption. For example, automatically start charging your electric car when you have excess production, saving money and giving the environment a hand.
Use as much of your power as possible
When the sun shines, and your solar panels produce more electricity than you can use, the excess is typically sold and sent into the energy grid. When the sun isn’t shining, and you aren’t producing electricity, you have to buy it from the grid.
The price of the electricity you buy is usually higher than the price you get when selling it into the grid. In other words, using as much of your excess production as possible, for example yo charge your electric vehicle, makes a lot of sense.
With True Solar you can create an overview of your electricity production and easily choose to use as much of your production as possibnle to charge your electric vehicle.
The SmartMe module
The next step is to connect a Smart-me communication module to your Kamstrup-metre, so we can follow which way the electricity is flowing. The module can be bought here, and you can easily install it yourself.
The logic behind True Solar
True Solar works with True Smart Charge for your vehicle. It is necessary to create one or more charge rules for your car that enable us to time the chargeing of your vehicle.
In principle, True Solar takes over from Smart Charge and returns to Smart Charge again after using the excess production.
Activating True Solar
You decide at which “production level” True Solar should be activated. If you, for example, set the level to 5 kW, True Solar is activated when your production exceeds 5 kW.
True Solar reverts to Smart Charge and will charge using power from the grid when your production is below 5 kW. In other words, True Solar starts charging your vehicle when there is enough power from your own production.
This means that you will buy the “lacking kW” from the grid.
IMPORTANT: We can at the current moment in time not offer you to set a limit for how much your vehccile will change through the True Energy app. There are other solutions on the market that can limit your charging to a predefined level set for your vehicle, house and charger.
Some electric vehicles, including Tesla, enable manual setting of charge speed.
1 The charger’s electricity consumption (kW) is the maximal effect that the charger can charge. The value comes from the charger itself and cannot be altered.
2 Lowest activation effect is the limit you set that decides when we start or stop the charging of your electric vehicle. If your production exceeds this limit, we start the charging. If it is below this limit, we stop the charging.
In other words, you can decide how much electricity your solar panels need to produce before we start charging your electric vehicle. 3 Grace period is the time you wish there should be betwen us checking the power production and activation effect level, and subsequently potentially either starting or stopping the charging. The grace period can be between one and sixty minutes.
Example
you have a charger that charges with 11 kW. You have set a minimum activation effect of 5 kW and a grace period of 20 minutes.Your solar panels produce 8 kW, and your household is consuming 1 kWh. In other words, you have 7 kW that you cannot use. The 7 kW exceeds your minimum activation effect and this means that your charger begins charging your vehicle. Your vehicle will charge for 20 minutter, since this is the grace period you have set. The charger charges with 11 kW. These consiste of the 7 kW you produce and 4 kW that you buy from the grid. After 20 minutes, True Solar checks your solar panels again, and now they are only charging at 4 kW. This means that they do not reach the 5 kW that you have set as the minimum activation power, and therefore the car does not charge for the next 20 minutes. If your goal is to save money If you use True Solar, you will most often not be able to avoid buying power from the grid, since this would demand a particularly high production. However, in the example aboe you only pay for 4 kW. If your goal is to avoid paying for charging your electric vehicle If you want to charge your electric car 100% with the power from your solar panels, it requires that your minimum activation power can be set to 11 kW, which requires a large system. Alternatively, it requires that your car can charge with less than 11 kW, which, for example, Tesla supports.
When you have installed True Solar and completed all steps in the app, you should see an image similar to the one displayed here.
4 Total effct – production from the solar panels – The needle will point to the solar panel graphic to iluustrate that your solar panel generates electricity.
5 Total effect – purchase of power from the grid – The needle will point toward the grid to illustrate that you are puchasing power from the grid.
6 Units A unit is a charger – a physical charger or an ”Incar” charger, which is used by some manufacturers, such as Tesla.
The Unit (charger) can be:
”Active” – It is charging since the production from the solar panels is high enough. ”Standby” – It is not charging since the solar panels are not generating enough power to charge the car.
”Disconnected” – No car is connected.