Hi. This one's going to be interesting. We're going to take a look at a Level 2 7 kilowatt electric car charger for. This is the one that I'm going to install.

Uh to fast charge my Ioniq electric car at home. So this is an Electric Car Charger in quote marks and we'll get into that. This is the Uh, My Energy Zappy and it's designed and manufactured in the Uk. So Hi to all my viewers in the old Dart and uh, we're going to take a squish at this.

We're going to, uh, take it apart and I'm going to explain how these um, electric car chargers work because this is not actually a charger. As such, it's what's called an Evse or an Electric Vehicle supply equipment. The charger is actually in the car itself. or at least for uh, these Ac chargers, which this one is.

This is a single phase Ac charger does come in a three-phase model, but my home only has a single phase. and also my Ionic Electric car only has a single phase charger built in. And you'll notice. I just said the car has the charger built in because this is not the charger.

The charger is actually built in to the car. It's not in here. This basically is just a glorified relay with a one Kilohertz generator. But being a bit harsh, there's a lot more engineering that goes into these Evs.

So any Ac charger for an electric car like this, be it single phase, three phase, or just the regular wall outlet one that actually comes supplied with it. Just your regular, you know, 240 volt, 10 amp jobby, None of that Yankee rubbish. Um, and then these are all Ac charges. and it's simply uh, supplying the A.

the Ac directly from your grid pretty much into the car and the actual charger itself is built into the car. Now, this differs for the Uh. fast charging Dc chargers. They actually there is no Dc charger inside circuitry inside your car.

Basically, the car just has a relay in it that connects the internal battery pack through straight to the Uh charging connector and then the external you know, 50 or 150 kilowatts or whatever the high-powered Dc charger is. that actually is an external charger. But this one we're going to take a look at. This is a level two Ac charger and this is just an Evse or an Electric Vehicle supply equipment.

So like I said, this is a my energy A zappy. Uh, fairly highly regarded. They're one of the Uh leaders in the industry and it's yes, there is nothing in there. This one has a fixed lead attached to it.

You can get one that actually does not have a fixed lead, but I wanted the fixed lead. I didn't want to dick around with that. So this is the Type 2 Ac charger connector. Um, also known as a Meniches connector as well because that's the company that actually uh, first developed this, I believe.

So this is the standard here in Australia and also in the European Union as well. And the Yanks have their own Uh standard which is the Sae J1772 standard which um, this signal in as we'll talk about in a minute is basically uh, the same between them. but the physical connectors and other you know, slight differences and stuff like that. Anyway, those Yanks are weird.

So what we've got here is a protective earth pin in the middle. We've got neutral here and we've got the Uh active here or the phase one. If you're using a three phase, then you've got uh, the second phase and the third phase. but uh, they're just not fitted in this particular connector.

And we've then got two control pins up here and this one is called the Uh Pp line which is the Uh proximity pilot pin. and then this one here is the Cp or control pilot pin which basically, um, tell the car, um, what type of charger you've plugged into, how much power is available and stuff like that and we'll go into details of that um, after the tear down and we might, uh, try and measure some stuff on here. So this manicures plug is the Iec 62196 standard and uh, the Us do actually have this, but it's under the Um, Sae J3068 standard. I'm not sure what cars in the Us use it, I'm not up on a Yankee land what's happening there.

So basically what happens is you plug this into your car, then your car looks at a one kilohertz square wave on the Uh control pilot pin here and the duty cycle of that uh determines uh or tells the car how much what is the maximum power that it can actually draw from this and then the internal charger of the car is supposed to obey that and not exceed the limit so that you know you don't blow up your like your wiring and your cables and blow your fuses and blow the arse out of your Evse here. So these Evses actually can be as simple as like just a one Kilohertz generator and a relay to switch um, the mains and that's but you know there's more to it. The rest of us like, um, protection type stuff. So anyway, it does do a couple of other things but basically uh, the control pilot uh pin on the Iec 62196 are standard uh between here and Earth if we actually measure that.

So this is designed for uh, single phase, uh, 32 amp. So uh, we'll find that the Um standard for this so it should have a 220 Ohm resistor across the proximity pilot pin and the Earth here and we can actually measure that just to verify it. Want to be? Have they supplied me the correct model? I hope so. should get Yep.

220 Ohms Bingo! And you can have various other resistances on there to uh indicate other maximum Uh currents available. But this one? um, yep. designed for a 32 amp single phase 240 volt Aussie outlet. Just as a bonus, this is what a uh, single phase 32 amp Aussie connector looks like.

I don't know. um, is this the standard in your country? But anyway, this is, uh, the three-fin the three-pin one. uh for the single phase and there you go. That's it.

Cool, huh? So I rather like the uh design of this, uh, my energy zappy here. It comes in a nice output. outdoor, weatherproof, uh case, it's got. I had to screw this on the bottom.

This is like a cable rack because this is a wrap thing because this is a fixed uh thing. So I mount this on the wall of my garage and then I can just wrap the cable around here and then it's just as I said, it's just got the uh, dummy, um thing in here to just keep that in what place like that? It doesn't do anything electrically, it just holds it in place so it does flap around in the breeze. Nice touch. There you go.

Made in the old dart, this is uh, 230 volts. although my house and my lab they run about 240 to 245 volts so I'm getting right up there on the upper limit, uh kind of thing. and it's got a residual uh, current uh uh. basically earth safety thing built in that looks like six milliamp and it's also got pen, uh, fault isolator.

I don't know if that is a requirement here in Australia. leave it in the comments if you know, but I believe it is. um, in the Uk and some other countries. Uh, Penn basically stands for uh, protected earth and neutral and this, basically, uh, will detect if there's a uh, earth breakage fault upstream from your house.

you know, somewhere in the street or something like that will actually detect that. Um, I believe, like there's various methods to actually detect that and uh, yeah, it will actually trip that because you don't want somebody touching the, uh, metal work of the car. For example, when it's uh, charging and then for the earth to break and you can get all sorts of unbalances. and uh, yeah, you can.

I get a little bit of a zappy. Get it here a week. You can get a zappy from the zappy if it didn't have pen isolation. Oh goodness, that's terrible.

Muriel. So anyway, let's open up. This is just a protective cover on it. Um, and screws, uh to install it.

Look at this. Um, it's got a that is the saddest ass Aussie sticker I've ever seen in my life. Look, it's cut. Look, it's like one of the stars has chopped out and look from the Southern Cross.

it's upside down so all the electrons are going to fall out and it's like not even like it's not trimmed. probably. Oh, that's just no. No, that's an insult.

That is an insult. That's Gonski sacrilege. And you'll find because as I said, this is not a charger. it's just a basically a glorified more than the glorified relay.

But it's basically, um, just got relays and uh, and protection stuff in it. There you go. There is not much at all. There's just a main board.

it's got a little daughter board there. not sure what that does. and we got some big ass. oh look, look at those.

Ah, Panasonic Jobbies. Thank you very much. Um, some big ass relays. What are they rated at 35 amps? Thank you very much.

Um, yeah. so they've got three of them and basically power in here. So single phase, uh. in here.

the three-phase board will be different. Of course, it's more expensive to have to be bigger, more relays, everything else. Um, but yeah. your single uh phase in here and uh, then just your relays to switch it.

Now because of these, a double pole single throw jobbies. Um, you can see, you can probably just see the pins down there. This is switching both, uh, the active and the neutral here, but so is this one as well. It's also switching the active there and the neutral.

and this one up here is switching the earth in. So why? They've got effectively two in series and I can't see anything tapping off here, so I I can only presume that's for extra safety. I guess you've got two of them. Um, just in case one of them, you know, fuses, um, shut or something like that.

That'd be my guess. So there's our six square millimeter copper coming in. I'm probably only going to be drawing a 29 amp absolute maximum I believe. but anyway, I can.

You can set it in software on the Zappy to have any sort of maximum current you want. And if you want to know why I got this Zappy model against others, is that, um, this one actually is solar aware. So I've got a little, uh, current clamp here. I'm going to have to, uh, install that that'll install on the incoming grid connection and you're going to install it the right way around.

It should have an arrow. Yep, there it is. This charge is intelligent in that it knows how much excess solar power you've got that would normally be going out to the grid and getting paid a pittance for. And then it can modulate the charge current to the car when it's charging.

and I guarantee that you're only charging your car with excess solar from your own solar rooftop. And that's just great. I'd love to be able to charge my car, knowing guaranteed that all of it is coming from the Solas. So the whole idea is you come home and you plug in your car and let's say it's night time then.

Um, this thing is going to detect that there's no excess solar available. Obviously because it's night and so then it's just not going to charge the car. and as soon as the sun comes up at like 7 00 am, you start producing some excess solar. all the other appliances in your house or off and stuff like that.

Um, it'll start charging the car at whatever rate you have available. I'm not sure the granularity of it, but is that a word? granularity? Anyway, yeah, it will modulate. Um, the charge rate up to uh, the full 32 up to the full 32 amp. Seven kilowatts? Uh, of course, my, uh, solar home solar system is normal eight kilowatts.

So in the middle of summer I should be producing, you know, at peak, and about eight kilowatts or so. So assuming I'd chew less than a kilowatt in my house, I should have the full seven kilowatts available to, um, charge my car up. But yeah, anyway, I thought that was really cool and everyone recommends this. It's really good.

It's well made, it's made in the old dart anyway. as you can see, uh, they cables are terminated in ferrules here which then go into the big cage clamp terminal box. They've got proper cage clamps, not that little leaf spring rubbish. I can show you that.

Here there you go. Proper cage clamp. Beautiful. And this is how it's doing.

at some Rcd. You can see the active and neutral are both going through this clamp here, and then it's able to measure any imbalance in that. So under normal non-fault conditions, of course, all your current flows from your active through to your neutral. So if you got current flowing in this direction like this, and then this direction like this, out out the other wire in a full loop.

They cancel each other out. So this current clamp is going to measure zero. There's going to be zero output from it, but as soon as some fault condition occurs, some earth leakage, you know, a rain got in somewhere, or somebody's touched something, something's failed somewhere. Then there's going to be an imbalance in the current between the active and the neutral.

and then you will get either a posit depending on which way, you'll get either a positive negative output from your uh current clamp here. so it's able to measure that and it's calibrated to do it to trip at six milliamp and you can see that the protective earth here has its own current clamp as well. so I assume that's part of the pen protection system. So anyway, that's all very nice and dandy.

So you can see there's only four wires going in on a charging cable active, neutral, earth, and then the Cp or control pilot. So the proximity pilot here and you can see that labeled oh down on the board there pp um peepee the uh, proximity, uh, pilot, uh pin is not connected so that 220 ohm resistor we measured before that must be physically within the connector. This goes off to a front panel Lcd, which I'll show you in a minute. This says it's a protection board so I'll take you out.

take that out and show you in a sec. But there you go. That's a just a 405 something, so that's just analog mux. And yeah, they've just got some little passive stuff around there, little Op amps or something like that.

So yeah, that's doing some of the measurement. Now over here. look at this. This looks schmick and expensive.

This is a recom, uh, Dc to Dc converter module. uh 20. It's probably one of those potted brick jobbies. uh, 24 volts, uh, 830 milliamps there.

So that's basically pairing this thing. and they've got another transformer there, so I don't know what that's doing. I've got a, uh, a big ass mob in there, so that's nice to see. Beautiful.

So is that a common mode choke and um, X and Y class are caps there. And curiously, there is a little relay there and an opto coupler so I don't know. I have to reverse engineer this to have a squeeze at what's going on there. I'm not going to do that in this video, but anyway, that's interesting.

Ac input terminal block and then this is another E-sense thing. This has lots of options. In fact, it has a wireless current sensor option or although it comes with the wired one so it supports up to three current clamps here and it can actually measure your Uh supply as well so I can give you that sort of uh detail. But it's basic operation, it only needs the one current clamp which goes on the grid side there.

So there's that protection board. I can't read that on the Lcd here. Um, why? It's got a little bit of like capped on tape over that? I'm not entirely sure. But anyway, so obviously they're off boarding their uh, protection uh circuitry onto this dedicated board.

And that probably makes sense because the protection is probably is based on regulations which could vary from country to country, so you don't want to go, you know, changing your main board or anything like that for different countries. So I suspect that's why they've whacked that on the Uh on the dedicated board like that. So for different countries, they can just whack in whatever protection circuitry it might have. You know, different current trip ratings or whatever it is.

Um, and that would be programmed in there. so that's got its own micro to handle all that. By the looks of it, it'll do its own measurement and do its own thing. Nice.

So you'll notice that there wasn't really a processor apart from the protection board there. That's because the processor must be on this main Uh display and button board up here. Yes, that is a little antenna there because it has a as I said, a wireless clamp interface and it's called um, Harvey. I'm not sure what standard they use or whatever, but anyway, um yeah.

so if you don't want to run your cable or it's you know, too hard you can't do it over. You can actually get a which is quite novel because it's actually powered from the current clamp itself which is really interesting. It's basically an energy harvesting thing which powers the transmitter and this is the receiver here and it can just receive the current clamp and there you go. It's just got a little uh light window here and uh, the you can see that the lids on there, they'll light up different colors and uh, that just uh like charge indication and stuff like that.

but apart from that it's there. You go. uh yeah, it's one big ass graphical Lcd. it displays like a little car and stuff and there you go.

There's the uh wireless connection up there. I got no idea what that is, but you know, leave it in the comments if you want to know a little backup battery there for uh, real time clock and the micro oh must be hidden under there pick 24f for the win! All the microchip fanboys go wild and uh, the good thing about that is that you can probably still buy those in the current component crisis. So yeah, winner, right? So let's just power this up on the bench here and see if we can measure stuff it's in verifying my energy is up. Rcb board test startup we're in.

That's a pretty nice display. Ev disconnect Yep, no electric vehicle, no grid? No nothing. So I haven't read the manual on this. But uh yeah, it's in fast mode at the moment.

which, oh, timeout. Um, fast mode at the moment. Which means that it'll uh, it doesn't have to follow that Eco like the solar thing, which is Eco mode. Um, so I don't know.

Is that yeah. Eco mode? There you go. So in. Or I think yeah, Eco Plus mode is where it, um, guarantees that it only uses energy from your grid.

Whereas if you want to, you know the sun's not out or it's night time, you just need a charge at the fastest possible rate. Um, then there it is you put in fast mode. Bob's your uncle. It does have a stop mode.

I didn't think it did, but charge settings you should be able to set like the maximum charge. I don't know yet. There we go. Eco Plus settings, manual boost, Smart boost, and the range here.

Well, that's going to vary between vehicles, so I think you could. Maybe hopefully you can program that. so I have to program that for the ionic Eco Plus settings. Minimum Green level.

There you go. Stop Stop delay, Plug in charger Eco Plus. look at that. You can start and stop it.

different. Um, import and export? Uh, powers? That's that's rather nice. And then you've got like, uh, timer modes as well. That's really nice.

Ah, there you go. It tells you your pilot Pwm. That's fantastic. I was going to actually have a look at that, but that isn't that nice.

It'll It'll actually tell us what the Pwm is and presumably that's measured or well because it's generating it. It knows what it's generating. I guess whether or not it like measures that as a feedback, I don't know. There you go.

This is nice. There's my lab. voltage generating consumption and stuff like that. If you put the extra current clamps on importing, it's pretty cool.

What was that that that had Aussie something? Oh yeah. Australian, uh. Eastern standard time. so that's pretty comprehensive.

Yeah, there's that Harvey thing. The remote, uh. current clamp. Okay, what I've done now is I've just, uh, removed the input earth on this thing.

I just want to see what happens if I power this up. Rcb door. Yep, Nope. No error whatsoever.

It uh, has no problem with the lack of earth on the input. but I guess it's not surprising because if you go through oh geez, I'd have to. jeez. there's a half hour whiteboard tutorial in its own right how all this uh, sort of stuff works.

But yeah, just the earth on the input itself because there's no fault, current or anything like that. It's it. Doesn't know there's an issue yet. Actually, I just checked Um to see if they have any info on this.

I did actually find a video with the one of the R D engineers or someone at Uh My Energy I'm talking about. It's very extensive, very detailed about all the various protection modes that this goes into, so I'll link that up here and down below. I haven't watched the full thing, but like, whoa, Overload. It's probably got all the detail you could possibly want on all the various standards and protection modes that this thing covers under.

It's just absolutely incredible. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to experiment with this sucker and see if we can get it to actually, uh, simulate a car plugging in. Now, as I said, it all happens on the Uh Cp or control a pilot pin here and this is basically outputs a one kilohertz square wave and as I said, the duty cycle of that uh will then indicate to the car what the maximum charge current it can, uh take is and there's a formula for that. I'll put it up here.

Here you go. So uh. now here's a diagram of from Stuller from Wikipedia about um, basically what's going on here in terms of uh, the car. So basically it's the control uh pilot pin relative to earth here.

So I've got two wires, uh, sticking out. You'll notice I've got a Diode over here and my decade resistance box. So it's basically a diode and resistance in there. And then the Evse here will be able to determine uh, what that the cars actually plugged in based on, uh, the value of resistance on there.

So it's a nominal uh, 2.7 k here after the diode here. And the reason that they've got the diode is because, uh, let's say that you've got uh, water. You know it's raining or something. You've got water into your uh connector here, then of course that can simulate a resistance that can appear as a resistance and then that could, actually, um, turn on your.

it, can activate the relays in here and can switch the power through and attempt, uh, to charge the car and you don't want that. Um, so the Diode just adds, um, some asymmetry in here to the waveform and we might be able to, um, see that. I'll try and hook a scope up as well. Just can't get it all in one shot.

that's all. But anyway, so that's the reason that for the diode and um, then it switches a 1.3 k in parallel with that, which gives you about 880. So let's dial that up to 880. Um, something like that.

and then we'll be able to switch between those two. Basically, right? So I'm going to power this on and I've got it just set to 10 meg here. so it'll just appear open to the charger. It won't know the difference.

So let's power it up. It's very 8-bit I love it right? So I set this up just a 2.8 I think that's going to be near enough to oh, we can go down to 2.7 There you go. Okay, so I'll release the one meg. Um, the 10 Meg here.

There you go, Tada. I've got waiting for Ev. Okay, so it's detected that it's plugged in, but it's now waiting for the car. Okay, so if we, uh, go back, uh, to give about 880, here we go.

Ta-da There we go. it's switched on. It's green. It's Rcd check-in charging.

It's now charging, but the car's not actually taking anything as you can see over here on the display. But in theory the car should be taking power and then if we go back, I'm not sure at what point it like unbalances, but you know what? chart? Charge delayed. Okay, I think that's a software thing. It's got a charge delay thing in there, which yeah, I don't know.

I haven't set this thing up. We have an Rtfm jet charged too late. I don't know. The relay clicked again.

something's going on. I don't know. Yeah. But anyway, there you go.

Cool, huh? You saw how that, um, just the diode and the resistance value on there. Uh, detected that the car was plugged in uh with the Uh 2.7 K. And then once you put the 1.3 k in parallel with that, then it determines that which is 880 ohms through the diode. Then it determines that.

Uh yeah. Well, let's start charging. So it switches the relays inside this which is the main through and that's basically you know all this thing does. It's just a smart relay pretty much.

And there we go. We're in waiting for Ev mode with the 2.7 k and there you go. You can see the up up. No, it's no.

it's because it just went into restart mode. Oh okay, yeah, no. There it is. There's your one Kilohertz square wave.

There you go. you can see that the duty cycle 53 there, which I think corresponds to the full seven kilowatts, which is what it's set up to by default. Or they're basically 32 amps. Aha in the advanced settings.

Here you can set up this supply grid for the device itself. Oh yeah, 31.8 amps? There you go. Let's just say, 10.2 amps shall we? All right? let's try that again. Ah, there we go.

Got it, Got it? You didn't believe me? Did you There you go. So the duty cycle is now only 17 there. So that that tells the car, please do not exceed, Uh, that you know 10 amps or whatever based on that uh, formula you know as a bit of a give or take there a bit of how you're doing, but you know it's it's gonna. The whole idea is that it doesn't exceed the maximum wiring limitation, maximum fusing limitation, and whatever installation that you've got.

And the charger. Oops. So there you go. It's vanished.

It's got some yeah, toad delay restart thing, But there you go. Cool, huh? Okay, so what I want to do now is just check what happens if I remove, uh, the diode, see if there's any, uh, fault detection on here. All right there you go. Um, nothing.

It's hasn't. It's just detected that? Well, there's nothing there. It's not giving me any error, but the good thing is is that it's not going to, um, start the charging. Yeah, it doesn't matter if I go to 880 or whatever.

Yep, it's just not going to do it. So yeah, it's doing its job. So there you go. That's the basics of how the control pilot uh, signal works there on the Iec 62196 and Saej uh, say 1072 or whatever it is and the Sae J 30 68 standards.

There's all these different standards for different countries, but I believe like all that is very similar, there could be like you know minor differences and but that's how it all works. If you disconnect it, it knows it's disconnected like that. When you plug it in with the Uh 2.8 K, it knows it's uh, you know There we go waiting for Ev to do its thing and then we can put that into charge mode. Cool bananas, huh? So there you go.

I hope you enjoyed that video. Found it interesting. Um, but I was my first time playing around with uh, one of these Evse um, chargers so it's really apparent. You know, I've been using my little uh piddly 10 amp 240 volt jobby at home, but I haven't like played around with the signals and stuff like that so that's really cool.

and like in theory, yeah, you could actually design and build your own one of these really, you know, fairly simply. In fact, there is an open. um, it's the open Evsc. um, it's called and the reason I didn't get that one is because like it kind of sort of might have integration with the solar and stuff.

I'm not sure like it's all just around this one. Everyone recommends this, everyone says it's really nice and um, yes, I thought I'd go with this, but I do have um, the physical connector now so I could actually play around with the open Evse if you want to be too. I can simply disconnect this one because it's not going to be permanently wired installed and I can play around with either do-it-yourself stuff or open Evsc. But you know, there's not too much more to play around with here.

This is just the basics of, um, of how it works. It's pretty simple. It's just a smart relay with, you know, ground fault protection and residual current protection and stuff like that. And this one's a little bit smarter in that, uh, it can use your excess solar based on a, uh, current clamp on the grid.

So anyway, yeah, subscribe to my Eevblog2 channel if you want to. Um, see. like just like after I've installed this, I might actually, um, see if like that that wiring heats up. How much it? I know it's going to heat up in the, um, the roof.

Like how much it heats up. Put that sort of videos on my second channel. I think I'm like just hundreds of subs away from 100k subscribers. I get my Youtube silver reward for my second channel.

Well, that's if they'll give it to me anyway. Um, so yeah, over on Eevblog2. Catch you next time you.