Design that writes our history

For safe operation of the wallboxes, protection devices against current faults are required if a line or contact is defective. These are often not built into inexpensive wallboxes and have to be installed additionally, which incurs extra costs. 

The connection to the in-house energy management makes sense for photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine owners who produce their own green electricity. This makes it possible, for example, to control that your e-car is only charged with the electricity from your own PV or wind system, or that it is only charged when your own system produces sufficient electricity or the electricity from the grid operator is particularly cheap during certain hours. For the grid operators, such smart wallboxes are an aid to better manage the power grid and protect it from overload. They therefore often reward e-car owners with special, more favorable rates. 

You want your e-car to be charged only when the electricity is not needed elsewhere in the household or business. Using a digital electricity meter, we determine how much electricity is available and pass it on to our wallboxes.

A wallbox must be integrated into the house installation by a qualified electrician. 

Almost all car manufacturers offer a wallbox directly with the sale of an electric car, which are usually manufactured by outside companies. These wallboxes are usually more expensive than those from the manufacturer itself. A comparison is therefore worthwhile.

Wallboxes can be connected not only to the power grid, but also to the Internet and smartphone. This offers many advantages. If your wallbox has an Internet or wireless connection, firm updates can be read in automatically, which means that your wallbox is always up to date on the software side. In addition, you can use back-office services for maintenance, service or billing, which can be useful for billing company cars, for example.

Charging cables are expensive. You have to decide whether to use an existing charging cable or whether you also need a fixed or flexible cable installed on the wallbox. Usually, you will receive a charging cable from the car manufacturer as part of the delivery. This is intended for connection to public charging stations. In this case, only one socket is required on the wallbox. However, every time you charge, you have to unpack the charging cable and plug it into both the car and the wallbox. This can become annoying over time. It is annoying if you forget to put the charging cable back in the trunk and realize at a public charging station that you forgot your cable at home.

Type 2 plugs on e-cars have been standard in Europe for several years. They thus fit into every new car.

Long charging times are rightly annoying. In most cases, they are due to the fact that the charging station or wallbox offered is only connected to one of the three live strands of the thick power cable that leads to every household and every AC charging station in this country. As a result, the charging pole also only uses a third of the maximum power – instead of flowing at 11 kilowatts (kW), only 3.66 kW. At 22 kW, it’s only 7.33. So charging your e-car can take up to 24 hours.