Our Wired and Wireless Energy Managers are monitoring devices which enable load balancing with our Home Basic and Home Plus series chargers and solar charging with our Home Plus series chargers. If you don't have solar panels, then the Energy Manager still provides load balancing.
Load balancing is a safety feature which balances the power consumption between your house and the charger to avoid overloading your fuse. For example, if you have a 60A fuse, and you turn on the ovens, electric showers and other high draw appliances at home and try to charge your vehicle at the same time, there may not be enough load available for the charger to charge at the maximum rate which is 32 A. When this happens the charger will reduce the charge rate to avoid overloading your supply.
Your installer will be able to confirm whether you need this load balancing feature. The installer will also be able to advise whether a Wired or Wireless Energy Manager would best suit your installation.
The Wired Energy Manager is compatible with our Home Basic and Home Plus series chargers.
The Wireless Energy Manager is compatible with the Home Plus series chargers.
The Wired Energy Manager is a wired connection from the fuse board / consumer unit to the charger, it can be a good option when the charger is installed quite close to the consumer unit.
The Wireless Energy Manager uses LoRa (Long Range Radio) technology to communicate with the charger.
The Wireless Energy Manager has 2 modes -
1. In Standard Mode the Wireless Energy Manager has a range of up to approximately 50m.
2. The range in Long Range Mode is up to approximately 85m. Long Range mode is only supported when using an external USB-C power supply.
Energy Manager products can be retrofitted after charger installation.
When two chargers are installed together, you can either use 2 Wired Energy Managers or 1 Wireless Energy Manager (with Home Plus chargers).
We will soon have load balancing across multiple units, this is called group load management.
The Energy Managers use bi-directional CT clamps placed on the main incoming tails to monitor the export/import from solar panels and the grid.
The Energy Manager products enable the load balancing and solar charging features, they are not intended to be used as the most accurate source of your energy usage.
The CT clamp on your main incoming tails has to be rated for 100A, this means the readings will be less accurate at lower amperages. The main purpose of the CT clamp is to protect your main fuse from overload if you are going to exceed your fuse rating.
In comparison, a Smart Meter is an MID metered connection, which by law has to be more accurate that the CT clamp being used to measure your grid usage. This is why Energy Manager grid readings will not exactly match your Smart Meter readings.
Readings from the Energy Manager products are sampled and averaged over a period of time, this will also result in a difference with the Smart Meter readings.
If you see a message "Energy Manager connection has timed out” in the S&P App, please read our Wireless Energy Management troubleshooting.