Smart Charging FAQs

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Smart Charging.

Does smart charging still work if a charge station (temporarily) goes offline?

When a charge station is added to a Smart Charging group, the system sends an offline profile. This ensures that if the charge station goes offline, it falls back to a safe charging capacity. Even if all charge stations go offline at the same time, EV drivers can still charge without overloading the circuit breaker.

I only want to do building optimisation, why do I need to install a second meter to measure the charge stations?

The grid meter measures the load of the entire building, including the load of the charge stations. To determine the building consumption, the consumption of the charge stations must be subtracted from what the grid meter measures. Because the grid meter measures load per phase, the load of the charge stations must also be known per phase to do a proper subtraction. This is not possible without a meter that measures the load of the charge stations per phase.

I want to use building optimisation and phase optimisation simultaneously. Why do I have to choose between them?

Building optimisation automatically includes phase optimisation.

Shouldn't I also place a meter to measure the solar panels?

No. The effect of the solar panels will be measured at grid level.

When applying building optimisation, will the data be processed fast enough to prevent an overload?

The Smappee metering data is normally collected every minute (not faster, in order to prevent too high data consumption). As soon as the data consumption of the entire building is higher than 90% of the Power Supply Maximum, the metering data will be collected every 5 seconds, until the building consumption is below 90% again. The delay in getting data from Smappee meters to the Smappee Cloud to the GreenFlux cloud is less than a second.

Worst case scenarios depend on site setup and conditions. If you need guaranteed response times for a specific site, contact Support.

I have a site where there is only a single phase grid. Should I apply phase optimisation?

No, this won't have any impact. Keep in mind though that if building optimisation is applied, this still requires a meter that measures the consumption of the charge stations.

I have a site where there are only single phase charge stations, but the local electricity grid is a three phase grid. Should I apply phase optimisation?

That is a possibility. An alternative is that three different capacity groups are created, since basically there are three isolated circuits at the location. The latter does require a very reliable registration of which charge station is connected to which phase. For robustness (also in light of potential future changes to the electrical installation), using a local meter to automatically determine and keep track of the grid topology might be the better option is this case.

I want to use local meters, but I would prefer to work with another meter supplier, is this possible?

No. There is no standard interface for the smart charging interface as shown in Figure 6 in Section 4.4. Adding other meter suppliers is therefore not a matter of plug and play.

Where can I find the installation instructions for the Smappee hardware?

These are provided by Smappee. Please check the Smappee website.

Why can I not buy the meters from GreenFlux?

GreenFlux only delivers cloud technology. Hardware (both charge stations and meters) must be purchased at the hardware supplier.

One of the Smappee meters is broken. What should I do now?

If a submeter or Smappee Genius is broken, it can simply be replaced and re-registered in the Smappee system. There is no reconfiguration necessary in the GreenFlux system. This is because once the initial setup has been done, GreenFlux will automatically be notified by Smappee on any (hardware-)changes at the location. Historical data will also just remain visible.