Peak Shaving means preventing the peak usage of your building.
To understand the basics, we recommend reading our Dynamic Load Balancing article first because peak shaving is exactly the same as dynamic load balancing, the only difference being that instead of limiting power to the main fuse of your building, you decide the limit.
How does Peak Shaving work?
So the goal is to prevent your building from using too much power at once. We need to know 3 things:
What's the maximum power you want to use?
How much power are you using besides the charger?
To know the second item, there must be a Meter installed at the main fuse of your building. This way, we can constantly monitor your power consumption and adjust the charging speed accordingly.
When you use more power in your building, we charge slower. If more power becomes available, we can charge faster.
Example
Let's take the scenario from our Dynamic Load Balancing article.
Your house's maximum power consumption (main fuse): 25A
Your car's maximum charging speed (car limit): 16A
Your car's minimum charging speed: 6A
So the scenario looks like this:
If we start charging without peak shaving, we will just stay below the 25A maximum of your building's main fuse. In fact, we are just doing Dynamic Load Balancing. This is how that looks:
But let's say you only want to consume a maximum peak of 18A. This maximum is the Peak Limit (yellow):
You can see the charger will always try to keep your building below the yellow line. Because the minimum charging speed of your car is 6A, this sometimes means we have to stop charging entirely.
But at 8:30, you are still consuming 20A, so past the limit of 18A. We cannot prevent this, as the charger has already stopped charging. This may happen when all other devices in your building combined are simply using 20A. The charger cannot affect this. In this case, you may want to look at a home battery system or V2G solution.
How to set Peak Shaving
App
Go to the main screen where you see a picture of your charger
At the bottom, select "Peak Shaving".
A slider will appear. Set it to the desired maximum power consumption of your building.
Wait 10 seconds.
The charger(s) should now be in the correct mode.
Web Portal
Go to Locations, then View the desired location.
Go to Load Management
Open the Power Sharing group.
Toggle "Peak Shaving" to ON
Set the desired maximum power consumption of your building.
Wait 10 seconds.
The charger(s) in the entire group should now be in the correct mode.