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Papa Red

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I am planning on adding a dedicated solar PV charging station for my 2023 Lucid Air Pure. My old house electrical infrastructure would require much upgrade to get a house charging station. The solar would be on my shed, wired to a battery bank and then directly to the Lucid. The battery is a EcoFlow Delta Pro X and is a packaged kit with the batteries and inverter all good to go. It would not be connected to the house system nor the grid- totally stand alone. I can use the 240 volt plug from the Lucid direct into the inverter or use a Lucid wall mounted charger in between. I am worried about the "handshake" between the car and the inverter. Some sort of software gremlin that will cause error codes. Perhaps the Lucid wall charger would help smooth out any issues?

I think it should work. Any advice or concerns from the smart people? (not an electrician . . .)
 
Papa Red said:
I am planning on adding a dedicated solar PV charging station for my 2023 Lucid Air Pure. My old house electrical infrastructure would require much upgrade to get a house charging station. The solar would be on my shed, wired to a battery bank and then directly to the Lucid. The battery is a EcoFlow Delta Pro X and is a packaged kit with the batteries and inverter all good to go. It would not be connected to the house system nor the grid- totally stand alone. I can use the 240 volt plug from the Lucid direct into the inverter or use a Lucid wall mounted charger in between. I am worried about the "handshake" between the car and the inverter. Some sort of software gremlin that will cause error codes. Perhaps the Lucid wall charger would help smooth out any issues?

I think it should work. Any advice or concerns from the smart people? (not an electrician . . .)
Click to expand...
You can’t go directly from an inverter to the car:
Solar
Inverter/charger
Battery
Wall charger
Car

The solar power must ba capable of 220/240v not a simple 110v if you want to charge a bit faster
You can get as fancy as you have $$ for
 
Thanks for the reply! There is a 240 volt outlet out of the inverter which I have seen videos of people connecting directly to their EV (not a Lucid). But, if I have to get the Lucid wall charger and go through that between the battery and car no problem. I am assuming if I get the Lucid charger ilo other manufacturers that will limit the finger pointing at least from the car to the charger if there are communication issues. I am mainly concerned about the mysterious software connections that must be made to let the car recognize the source.
 
YMMV, but you may want to consider a different charger since your limits are more on the Solar/battery/inverter side of things.

I'm on an Enphase system, 48A maximum, but the good part about my system is that the entire ecosystem talks to itself and will limit current or even shut off charging completely if I wan tit to remain "green" solar excess capacity only.

Charging a battery from solar, and then your car from that introduces a lot of lost efficiency; you may be able to do DC directly to the Delta, but the output there is AC, and then your car is doing AC back to DC. Charging a battery with a battery is the scenario most people want to avoid. I'm not saying having a battery is a bad idea, but it will limit your options. Your EV charger needs to know what the current limits are. One Delta X Pro can do 12kW but I don't think I'd want to pull that maximum rate on a nightly basis, for instance.

This is absolutely possible to do, but you're going to want to take your time to design a proper solar-isolated system with your charger in mind.
 
I looked into direct DC (solar) to DC (Lucid charger) instead of having an inverter but read somewhere that won't work for some reason.
 
At the end of the video his Tesla would not recognize the battery pack but his friends did. This is the kind of thing I am worried about- my Lucid not recognizing the battery for some reason
 
You'll need a LOT of solar panels on your shed to charge your EV in any significant way. In cloudy weather, they won't generate much energy.
 
So my plan is (10) 460 watt 4'x6' PV panels on the shed roof. I have solar on my other house, and based on that performance and the difference in array sizes and orientation I think I can get about 20 kwh per peak day of panel production. My commute right now is around 60 miles which is about 20 kwh of car battery consumption per my rough calc's and experience. So the PV may possibly, hopefully, perhaps give me a a charge good enough for my commute, and those days I don't go into work we bank some more electrons. Not going to be a 100% charge from PV I know, but hopefully a substantial offset.
 
Papa Red said:
So my plan is (10) 460 watt 4'x6' PV panels on the shed roof. I have solar on my other house, and based on that performance and the difference in array sizes and orientation I think I can get about 20 kwh per peak day of panel production. My commute right now is around 60 miles which is about 20 kwh of car battery consumption per my rough calc's and experience. So the PV may possibly, hopefully, perhaps give me a a charge good enough for my commute, and those days I don't go into work we bank some more electrons. Not going to be a 100% charge from PV I know, but hopefully a substantial offset.
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That's a nice-sized shed! Sounds good.
An alternative would be to get an EV charging station that can adjust its current output to operate safely with your existing load panel and power draw. I believe these are available from Enphase and Wallbox, but haven't researched to verify.
 
At any rate you won’t be going directly from solar panels to the car’s battery to get close to doing that you’d need solar in series to over 900volts
Direct connection of solar to a lucid battery will more likely result in things losing the magic smoke
 
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