The Charge HQ app home screen displays a summary of all information it has to consider in controlling the charging of your EV.
As the equipment and information available from each site varies, so will the home screen.
An explanation of all fields you might come across on the home screen follows along with some examples for different home solar, battery and EV charger configurations.
Indicates the current status of EV charging, ie whether the vehicle is plugged in, charging, complete etc. A sun icon indicates that solar tracking is active.
Where grid monitoring is in place, this field shows the amount of excess solar available for EV charging.
Where grid monitoring is not in place, this field shows the total solar production.
Colour codes:
For users in eastern states of Australia, where a NEM region is set, this field shows the percentage of renewable energy generation currently on the electricity network.
For Tesla vehicles, this field shows the ideal or rated range of the vehicle based on current state of charge.
For Tesla vehicles, this field shows the current state of charge of the battery.
Displays the voltage as observed by the onboard Tesla vehicle charger, or smart wall charger.
This field shows “Current charge amps / Offered charge amps”.
For Teslas, current charge amps may be lower than the offered amps either due to solar tracking or an explicit charge setting (e.g scheduled charging). Offered charge amps is determined by the charger and generally does not change.
For smart chargers, offered charge amps will change when solar tracking is active, as that is the method used by Charge HQ to vary the charging power.
Where a 3 phase charger is used, a "⓷" icon is displayed. Amps are displayed per phase, thus the total charging power = voltage x amps x 3.
Current charger power displayed in kW.
For Tesla vehicles, this field indicates the current state of the vehicle. It may show: Parked, Asleep, Attempting to Sleep, Charging, Driving or Offline.
Note: some vehicles, especially Model S/X, show Offline when they are sleeping.
When the solar includes consumption and grid monitoring, the bar and icons will indicate the current energy flows (see notes covering data update frequency below). The arrows indicate the direction of power flow.
The colour of the bar indicates how renewable the energy being utilised is:
For systems without consumption monitoring this section will not be displayed.
Indicates the total solar production in kW.
Where a supported home battery is configured in Charge HQ, the current state of charge (%) and rate of charge or discharge (kW) is shown.
The arrow will reverse direction to indicate charge or discharge.
Where grid monitoring is in place, the total energy consumption by the home is shown in kW. For the majority of homes, this value includes the EV charging power plus the rest of the household.
Indicates the energy being imported from or exported to the grid in kW.
For controls and settings on the home screen, see the respective support pages:
All values displayed will have some level of delay. Most inverters and batteries will have a delay of 1-2 minutes but some may be around 5 minutes. See Solar Data Delays for more detail.
Charging state data (from a Tesla or smart charger) is usually updated at least every 30 seconds.
Due to the differing delays, the charging data may often be out-of-sync with the solar data, as the solar data usually lags behind a bit. Where solar generation or home energy consumption is varying, it is normal to see short term anomalies in the data. It is normal to observe charging overshoot and undershoot the amount of available solar by small amounts for short periods. Sometimes this is actually happening, whilst other times it is just the data being out of sync. In aggregate, where data is updated frequently the solar tracking remains very effective. Systems with less frequent data will still be sufficiently effective to warrant their use.
The icons and information displayed on the Charge HQ app home screen will vary depending on the equipment that you have connected to the app.
Some examples are included below as an indication of what you should expect to see.
For Amber Energy customers, their personal consumption and feed-in prices are shown at the top of the home screen.
