Introduction

Did you know that Enphase Energy, whose microinverter and energy storage products we’ve been installing for years also makes electric vehicle chargers?

Read on to learn the details of why you might choose an Enphase smart EV charging solution for your home, if you either have an electric vehicle (EV)  now or plan to purchase one in the near future.

In January 2022, Enphase finalized their acquisition of ClipperCreek. ClipperCreek has made high-quality, very sturdy EV chargers since 2006. However, the chargers didn’t include “smart” features such as connection to wifi, charging on a schedule, or an app to start or stop charging.  

Over the past couple of years, Enphase has been working to add to the solid foundation that Clipper Creek built. In late August of last year, I participated in a beta installation of their new Enphase IQ Charger, and we started installing these products after they became commercially available in October of 2023.

What is an EV charger?

EV chargers, also sometimes called EVSE (for Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment), are the products that act as an interface between your home’s electrical infrastructure and your electric vehicle. They take 120VAC (for level one slow charging) from a standard electrical receptacle or 240VAC (for faster level 2 charging) from your main electrical panel or a special receptacle, and pass that electricity to a J1772 plug, which you insert into your EV’s charging port. Inside your EV, the charging port is connected to an internal charger that converts the AC electricity to an appropriate DC voltage to charge the vehicle’s battery.

For simple EV chargers (like those made by ClipperCreek in the past), you’d just plug in your car when you needed a charge, and you might use charging timers or electronics within the vehicle to change when you start charging, the charge duration, or if to charge the battery fully or only partially full.

Why Choose an Enphase IQ EV Charger?

Smart EV chargers can have a multitude of additional features. They’ll connect to your wifi network, and may allow you to start or stop charging from an app on your phone, set up daily schedules for charging, monitor the energy used by your EV charger, etc.

In the case of the Enphase IQ Charger, it has all these features, and more. Let’s go through all the current features, and discuss what the future might hold.

First, this charger is internet connected, and integrates into the existing Enphase Enlighten app and ecosystem. When the charger is installed, your installer will connect it to your wifi. From either the Enlighten app or Enlighten on your computer, you’ll be able to manually turn the charger off and on.

We believe that the self-consumption mode is probably the most important and helpful feature for those of us who already have or plan to install solar electric systems with Enphase microinverters. In Arizona, we’ve had export rates for solar customers for several years, which means that you are only credited a fraction of the retail rate for any energy you send to the grid. But if you can use solar energy as it’s generated, you can avoid buying expensive electricity, and save more money.

If your solar electric system has energy consumption monitoring (which we install as standard) and you install an Enphase IQ EV charger, you can set the charger to operate in self-consumption mode. When you’re home, you keep your EV charger plugged into your vehicle. In this mode, the Enphase IQ Gateway (which used to be called the “Envoy”) will monitor your energy consumption in your home, as well as solar production. 

When there is “extra” solar energy available that’s being exported to the grid, the IQ EV charger will be commanded to start charging your vehicle with solar energy. 

The charger can ramp the charging rate up and down, at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of maximum charger rate, to maximize EV charging from solar, and minimize any energy imported from the grid. In the image above, we can see the charger adjust the charging rate several times, depending on what the energy use of other loads are in the home and what the solar output is. When a large electrical load is turned on mid-afternoon for about 30 minutes, the charger takes a break from charging until the load is turned off. It’s a really smart system!

For new solar customers, it can make a significant difference in the cost to charge your vehicle, and enables better utilization of your solar electric system. Of course, this will only be a big benefit for folks whose electric car or truck is at home during the day when the solar electric system is producing energy.

What if your car doesn’t charge fully during the day, and you want to start your next day with a fully charged battery? This is where what Enphase calls “Add-on schedules” come in. You can set up the charger to either charge the battery when electricity rates are lowest (typically in the late evening or early morning), or simply tell the charger to charge during a particular time period, for example 12:00am-7:00am. This provides a great deal of confidence that you’ll start your day with a full battery, ready for whatever comes your way.

Beyond the big features of control, self-consumption, and scheduled charging, there are a couple more small features worth mentioning.

The IQ EV Charger also has what Enphase calls “Storm Guard.” This feature charges your EV using solar and/or the grid anytime severe weather conditions are predicted.

The charger can also be installed in conjunction with an energy storage system to allow charging of your EV when the grid is down, however, this does require additional hardware that increases cost.

Last, this is a really sturdy, high quality product. It’s rated for indoor or outdoor use, with a NEMA 4 watertight rating. We still recommend installing it in a garage or carport if possible, out of direct sunlight and rain, for best longevity. The charger also includes all the important safety features, including ground fault detection.

Installation Details and Costs

By now, you might be wondering–should I see about having this charger installed? What’s the installation process like? Is it worth it? And how much will it cost? 

First, let’s talk a bit about what we have to do to install this charger. The first step is to make sure that your existing electrical infrastructure can handle the added load. EV chargers are a big load. These chargers can continuously draw 32A or 40A for a typical charger, or even 48A or 64A for the larger units. So for a typical IQ 50 EV charger, we’re talking about 40A, or a 9.6kW load.

Note that the model numbers of these chargers refer to size of the circuit breaker they are connected to, not the continuous charge rate. The maximum continuous charge rate will be 80% of the breaker size. 

Depending on what other electrical loads you have in your home, and the size of your current electrical panel, you may or may not be able to add an EV charger. So we’ll need to take a look at your electrical panel, as well as the nameplates of any big loads such as air conditioners, electric stoves, dryers, etc. We will then do a set of calculations per the National Electrical Code to determine if we can install a charger, often called “load calcs.”

If everything looks good with the load calculations, we’ll proceed to procure a building permit, and do the actual installation. The installation includes placing an appropriately sized circuit breaker in your electrical panel, running wire and conduit to the desired charger location, connecting the charger to the wire, and commissioning the charger. 

Is it worth it? We believe that if you have or plan to have a solar electric and/or energy storage system with Enphase products, it makes a lot of sense to have your EV charger also be from Enphase, due to the benefits we shared above. If you already have an EV charger from another manufacturer, it’s a bit more difficult to justify in monetary terms, but the benefits of having an integrated system are still significant.

The most cost-effective way for us to install a Enphase IQ EV Charger for you is to do it in conjunction with the installation of a solar electric system or energy storage system. This is because we can add on a few hours of our technicians’ time for the EV charger installation to the other work, without having to send them out for a separate visit. And we can also typically include the EV charger on the same building permit as the solar or storage.

For an IQ 50 EV charger installed with new solar or storage, installed costs currently start at around $1,600, while longer wire runs may add $300-600 in costs.

If we’re adding an EV charger to an existing system, an IQ 50 EV charger starts at about $2,000, if you’re able to help us with scoping the installation by gathering some information and sending it over to us. For longer wire runs, or if you need an onsite evaluation, the costs are higher.

Larger chargers like the IQ 60 and IQ 80 require bigger wiring and more capacity in your electric system, and will cost more, but are not needed for most electric vehicles. You can figure out what might be a good option for your current or future EV by using Enphase’s Find an EV Charger tool.

At the time of this writing, we are happy to install chargers for our new clients installing solar and/or energy storage, and for our existing clients with Enphase microinverters. 

What About Bidirectional Charging?

Bidirectional charging is when an EV charger not only sends power to a vehicle, but can also take energy from the batteries, send it to the home (vehicle to home), and even the grid (vehicle to grid). 

Especially for those with energy storage systems, this will be revolutionary. For example, what if you have a battery system with 10 kWh of stationary storage, but you had a Rivian R1T with the standard amount of storage? You could access 105kWh of energy from your truck in the case of an extended outage!

Enphase is currently developing these products. Although they aren’t available yet, Enphase plans to bring them to market this year. You can learn more on their Bidirectional EV Charging page, or follow our social media for updates. 

Interested or Have Questions?

If you’re interested in having an Enphase IQ EV Charger installed on your home, either with an existing Enphase solar electric system, or with a new solar and/or storage system, please contact us or call us at 520-207-4053.

If you have questions, please share them below in the comments!