It may be counter intuitive but sometimes it's advantageous to charge your electric car at a slower rate. Here’s three of the best reasons and their advantages.
Battery Balancing and Battery Life Expectancy
Fast charging is known to dramatically reduce the the life expectancy of your battery. As a rule you should be limiting the times you fast charge your car to only when you need to. However, on some vehicles it's not possible to slow down the charge (from inside the car), which could be considered a design oversight. As a workaround, on a small number of EVSEs/Chargers the charge rate is selectable right down to 6A! This feature is enabled on all our portable EVSE models.
Also, although all modern electric cars have some form of Battery Management System (BMS), to look after your battery pack, slow charging does help the BMS more comprehensively condition and balance the battery. The result being that the next time you fast charge your car it may do so much more efficiently.
Solar Matching / Advantage
By charging at or under the capacity of your solar panels and (obviously while the sun is shining!) you will only use the sun to charge your vehicle which will essentially mean you are running your car for free. Check the table below as to the setting on your EVSE you should select dependent on the number and size of your solar array.
Negate need for adedicated circuit
To charge at anything near 3.3kw (15 amps), you may need a dedicated circuit installed which can cost between $500-$1000 to complete.
So in the example above of a shared circuit, you will only be able to run the radiator OR the pool pump AND charge your car at the same time. And this is ONLY if your charge rate can be reduced, as is possible with our EVSEs. Else you will need to arrange for the installation of a dedicated circuit which we, of course, can also help with.
See our Installationspage for more information on that.
