Making a "dumb" charger smart for around 50 euros

I wanted to share some information because of a question I got from a customer. He asked:

Can I replace my relay in my charger with a smart relais so I can use Stekker?

What is good to know, is that you don’t need to control your 3-phase relay inside the charger. Each charger has a “Control Pilot” signal that communicates between vehicle and charger. If you interrupt the CP line, the vehicle and charger won’t see each other. This means that the charger will stop providing power to the vehicle.

What you could do is let your vehicle charge based on our Home Automation integration with a smart plug platform of your choice. You will need a 240V relay that doesn’t supply 240V but just connects the CP line.

You switch this relay with a smart plug at the switching input. The output that is switched will have the CP line on the COM and N.O. connections on the relay.

An alternative is to use such a Zigbee unit to connect it to an existing domotic system:

You will no longer need a smart plug.

Before you purchase such a Zigbee module, you should verify a with the supplier if you can control it via your domotics environment and whether that it controllable with IFTTT.

If you’re interested in doing this, let me know. I can provide some extra pointers.

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I connected our sauna to a Philips Hue smart plug:

and this relais:

The 11kW sauna I turn on manually of course :blush:

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Yes, that works, too!

Since it’s in your home, it’s basically a heater with a CoP of 1 :slight_smile:
That probably makes it attractive to turn it on when you have exposure to imbalance prices, which are much more negative, which isn’t something regular residents themselves can apply for.