Meet the E2 Flex: EV charging as smart as your home

What is smart charging? At Evnex, smart chargers connect to everything you need to run your household efficiently and affordably — and the E2 Flex is our most adaptable smart charger yet.

Smart charging: one of those phrases that gets lobbed into sales decks next to “seamless experience” and “cutting-edge technology”.

It sounds clever but does nothing more than vaguely suggest a charger does more than turn on and off. It’s time to lock down the definition.

At its core, smart charging is about connection — between your car, your home, and the grid. It means your charger talks to the world around it: pulling power when it’s cheapest, cleanest, or most available, and holding back when it’s not.  

Take the E2 Flex. Our latest EV charger — our most affordable yet — is designed to adapt to your home’s needs. It handles the fundamentals of smart EV charging properly: scheduling your charge for cheaper power, protecting your home from overload, and quietly charging from the grid.

It also comes with a solar upgrade option, so if you get solar down the line you can unlock solar smarts for a one-off fee of $349 — no return visit from your sparky required.

And it’s just $799, providing serious smarts for its price.

What is smart charging?

Smart phones, smart fridges, smart watches — the “smart” here is synonymous with “connected to other things”.

Smart chargers can be connected to your home’s power supply, to your solar panels, to your battery, to the grid, to the internet, and – most obviously – to your car. But some smart chargers connect to all these things, and some connect to just one or two.

What features do smart chargers have?

Common smart charging features are:

• Charge scheduling

• Home overload protection

• Solar smarts

• Multi-charger management

• Three-phase monitoring

• RFID access controls

• Electricity retailer integrations

Evnex’s range of products — now with the added E2 Flex — is designed to give customers the smart features they need to power their lifestyle.

If you don’t have solar, you don’t need solar smarts. If you don’t have three-phase power, you don’t need three-phase monitoring. Our smart chargers are exactly as smart as you need them to be.  

At Evnex, this smart charging is flexible charging: starting with the essentials and scaling up only when your home, solar, or energy habits demand it.

That’s where a charger like the E2 Flex fits neatly — and why more advanced chargers like the E2 Core and E2 Plus exist for when your set-up grows.

Smart charging should be simple. Plug in your car, charge when electricity is cheap, don’t blow your fuses, and move on with your evening.

Why do I need a smart charger?

Our Product Owner Tom Rose likes to say that “smart EV charging is knowing when not to charge”. And when not to charge is most of the time.

The obvious example is cheap power tariffs: if you have cheap electricity overnight from midnight until 6am, you don’t want to start charging when you pull into the garage at 6pm.

Even with a basic smart charger (like the E2 Flex), you can plug your car in when you get home from work, and rest assured charging won’t start until midnight when that cheap power kicks in.

With a dumb charger you'd have to set an alarm for midnight, get up, manually plug the car in to ensure you get those cheap power hours.

How does smart charging work with solar?

If you have a solar set-up, you probably don’t want to charge at full speed from solar all day.

First thing in the morning you're going to have a little bit of excess solar as the sun comes up, so you want to charge at a slow speed. Then gradually, as the day goes on, you charge faster and faster as there's more solar; and then slower and slower again as the sun starts to go down.

Essentially, you want your charger to track how much solar you’re generating and send a matching amount to your car.

With a smarter charger, like the E2 Plus, this is easy to set up. You can even choose to charge with a combination of solar and the grid, in case of a cloudy day.

Every Evnex charger is smart. How smart it needs to be is up to you.

Want to get started smart charging? Get a quick, no-obligation quote here.

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