Sealion7 Home Charger

Are you planning on getting solar with battery? If so you might be better off getting something that integrates with that. If not then cheaper option is to get a 15 amp plugin charger. Better option is 7kw charger. What is your time expectation to fully charge.

Why? Just go to bed each night leaving your car on the granny charger, wake up in the morning you and your car ready to go Simple 😁

Every 6 months you need to do a 'calibration charge' from under 10% to 100% in a single AC charge or your battery % indicator starts to get wildly out of whack. Doing this on a granny charger would take \~35 hours on my 60kwh Atto 3 battery. Would be even longer for a SL7. So that means not driving the car for 2 days if you try and do this at home! I don't have a home charger, I've been living off the granny charger for over 2 years now. In terms of getting enough range - it's totally fine, no problems at all. But I've never done a calibration charge because of this. My battery % indicator is sometimes around 10-15% off from the actual battery state. This is based on it jumping straight from 85% to 100% sometimes. If you don't put in a faster AC home charger you'd want to be prepared to find a nearby pole charger you can park out for 8 hours, or just not drive for two days. Or deal with a wildly inaccurate battery indicator. Which tbh is probably fine for day-to-day use, and you just do a push to 100% before going on a road trip.

0-100% charge would take about 60 hours on the granny charger. and also there is no solar generated overnight so those with solar will not gain the maximum return, or even someone like me who doesn't have solar - overnight electricity is not "green" like it is during the day.

you'd need a circuit upgrade to begin with, even if the charger you find suits your budget etc you'll need to factor in the electrician's cost. most people will see huge benefits by going for a single phase 32a (7kw) charger, it will take about 11 hours to fully charge 0-100% on an SL7. if you have 3 phase, then a 3x 16a OR 20a would comfortably get you the maximum AC speeds of 11kw only about a 50% charing speed increase over the 7kw 32a circuit, and the chargers cost a lot more. (mostly because the 3 phase chargers are generally 22kw max and not 11kw) if you want a 15a-16a single phase install, that would get you about 3.5kw and still need a dedicated circuit. I don't think its cost effective to half the charging speeds because you will still need the circuit installed/upgraded (most likely)

No solar planned! Just want a faster charger as a fail safe!

22 kw 3-phase Tesla wall chargers is only about $700. Not that much more for the charger. It's the circuit upgrade for 3-phase that's the expensive bit.. thousands

If you have absolutely no plans for solar, just go for the Tesla charger. They can be had for as cheap as $600 at Bunnings. Install will probably be around $7-800. I personally got an Evnex E2 Plus for my SL7, mostly for the solar diversion charging. Last month I put about 300kWh into the car purely from solar. Pretty sure they have a cheaper model that doesn’t have solar feature as well, and can add a module later if needed, so might be worth considering too.

Just to add to this, the Evnex have an E2 “Flex” charger which is the Core with soft-gated features. It’s pitched at the same price as the Tesla charger but had load-balancing built in (Tesla charger does not), and the extra features re: solar diversion can be unlocked for a one-time fee later. That’s the one I ended up installing. Edit: Changed “Plus” to “Core” for accuracy

Ah yep that’s the one I was referring to, it only came out a couple months ago. One thing though, the Plus does have an 8m cable as opposed to 5m. Paid extra for that in case we have another EV.

Good call-out, I think I mixed it up with the Core - updated my comment.

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Granny charger is good for 7km/hr which is 85km on a 12hr charge. How many km/day do you drive? How many hrs do you park the car to charge it overnight?

I bought one of these for my Dolphin: https://www.evswitchstore.com.au/ Believe they used to come with the cars and with BYD branding. It's been great, expect it will work the same with your Sea Lion.

get a sparky to install a 32a socket. then pick up a charger online from evse, evchargers, amazon, ebay etc.

find the cheapest 7 kW charger you can get,  shop around and charge at from 12 am at night on the special EV rate plans like OVO st 8cents per kWh.

I haven’t done the calibration charge in 3 1/2 years and my car is reading fine. That being said occasionally my 7 kW charge will bring it from about 20% to 100.

I use https://amzn.asia/d/01NVwD6j It gets about 3kwh charge rate, with the included 10a-15a adapter. Works well for local driving and topping up overnight. Have the longer cord option as well. If it’s down to maybe 40%, might take 2 days of light usage to bring it right back up, but for mostly local driving less than 100km daily average this works well. And my burn rate is about 17- so think as if 5 hours charging for every hour of usage.

The granny charger puts out around 1.4kw. Aldi have on sale occasionally a 2.4kw 10 amp CCS2 charger which max's out the output from a standard 10A outlet and I have found this adequate for overnight charging.

My solax 11kw charger 3 phase only gets me 5.5kwh on my sl7 performance

Not green, but quite efficient. Let's look at an Atto 2 with 16.2kWh/100km. Fuel is about 8.9kWh per litre, so the mileage has a lower limit of 1.8L/100km. Charging efficiency is 84% efficient as a conservative estimate depending on the charger level, and a gas turbine power station is about 60% efficient according to Google. (1.8L/0.84)/0.6 = 3.6L. Therefore in real terms an Atto 2 charging overnight should have an equivalent mileage of 3.6L/100km. It's on par with optimised hybrid engines, but still lower than even the most efficient ICE cars. Compare that to my current car which guzzles 12L/100km.

Charging to 100% on AC from any starting point gives the battery cells time to top-balance. Done occasionally this will help LFP batteries use more of their capacity. It will improve your accuracy somewhat because at least now your car can start counting down again from 100, but in theory the accuracy will start to drift faster than if you did a full charge from under 10 to 100. I'd be quite confident saying your battery indicator is a little bit inaccurate. Just not inaccurate enough to make any noticeable difference to your life. I'm basically the same. I tend to keep the car between 40-60% battery on the display unless I'm prepping for a road trip and if that's actually 20-40% or 50-70% it makes no difference to my life. But I commented above because I think it's better for someone to know the potential for drift and not care than to not know about it at all.

I got a Goodwe setup. All integrated, all works great off the single app and shows me everything I need. Solar, charger and battery all in one. It's a really nice set up and my power bill is going to be super low going forward (first month of it admittedly so not yet seen a full bill... but I'm expecting it to be close to the connection fee.

Thank you!

I bought this one for my Sealion7 and am happy with it: https://evse.com.au/product/ocular-lte-plus-w-6m-type-2-cable/ Will need 32A wiring to get the most out of it. You can start and stop charging with just the push of a button, or you can require app unlock to charge. You can also adjust the charge rate using the app. I like it as it lets me set a rate of charge to stay under my solar generation, or just crank it to charge ASAP when needed. I think you can integrate it with solar to just use excess, set schedules etc in the app. The little info screen is nice too. The Tesla one is similarly priced and I have heard it’s good, but the installers I spoke to warned that you need a Tesla account and wifi to turn the charger on, which sounds like a headache. Installation cost varies widely depending on how far you are from your panel, as you’re installing a lot of copper.

If the difference is only like $200 on a better charger on a $1300 total installation cost.. worth it if only for future proofing (future cars might have 22Kw as standard). The issue is a 3-phase circuit installation alone is more like $3k

Don’t need to sell me on the efficiency. I’m just saying that say time charging when the grid has more green energy is better than overnight charging.  More-so for people with solar

DO NOT USE A 15A to 10A adaptor, it will void your Home Insurance if there is a Fire and also void your Car Insurance Get an Electrician to wire and install a dedicated 15A Plug, cost is minimal compared to losing your Home and Car over an illegal power adaptor

SL7 performance - Doing school runs for me (about an hour round trip), uses roughly 3.5kw of power. Granny charger charges at 1.3kw. Car is always charged.. I don't think you really need a high powered charger at home if you're just doing short distance trips. For the odd long distance trip can usually recover from it over a week.

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Bunnings has a range of chargers now and can help with arranging an installer. Any electrician should be able to handle it though.

It comes with an 8amp granny charger and you can go get a 10amp one from bunnings for $200 if you want something a bit faster. The 8amp will get you \~15% overnight and the 10amp will get you \~20%. By the sound of it the 8amp it comes with will probably be enough. I would just see how you go to start with.

could you not just let it run down over a few days to 10% then hit up the local fast charger?

Apparently not - I researched this. Fast chargers are too fast for the cell balancing process to work effectively. My naive understanding of cell balancing is that different cells may have slight variations in capacity and charge/discharge rate. As soon as one cell is empty is the entire battery can no longer discharge even if some cells still have juice left. Cell balancing works by draining a tiny bit of energy off the cells that are filling too fast while continuing to trickle electricity into all the cells so that in theory the slower cells catch up and charging 'finishes' with all the cells at about the same level. The BMS can only do this when the cells have a high voltage and it's a slow process. I could let the car run down and charge up overnight at a nearby pole charger. But it's like $10 cheaper if I do it at home and not drive for two days, and even cheaper still if the sun is out so I get solar during the daylight hours. In theory. I haven't yet done a full calibration charge.

lol we’re talking about $200 savings and you’re referencing a $6000 system

Caution with charging at 10A overnight out of a 10A socket, it can accumulate heat getting to a bad state over several hours. 8A charging is recommended for longer charge times (over an hour).

This ^ is good advice!

Be careful pulling more than 8A (over many hours) out of a 10A socket, I have found wiring gets hot, you really don't want a fire due to wanting a rapid charger. 8A overnight, but I wouldn't trust 9-10A, upgrade the wiring / sockets etc to higher amperage if you must charge rapidly.

Thank you!

Nope. The prongs on a 10 A and 15A plug are the same except for the earth. The power point can easily handle 10A on the circuit without problems.

I'm getting solar and battery installed, getting the sigenergy which you can upgrade with a 25kw DC charger module, might be worth looking into.

I have solar. 27 panels. I had installed a 15A caravan port, and purchased a 15A capable 3rd party charger unit., (the one that came with the ATTO3 is not 15A capable, so check, your Sealion could be different) I do short shop trips, daily school run, and occasional 'far trip' (that is 40km for me) I only charge between 9AM and 3PM. (optimal solar time, using a smart charger, but car built in schedule will also work) Car remains in high 90% charged. I have not paid for charge in over 6 months You don;t need a 5k speed charger for what you promise to drive, and a 15A is only 300-500 (anthing over 500, you are being over charged) Cheap to try, and you end up with a usable 15A port if not.

You can't say that for sure on OP's question: Electricians will agree with me that extended charging times drop the load back 10%, even 20% for safety. You may have been dodging bullets all this time loading things to max and then set and forget for all night, perhaps all day, and all night again... 🤞🏼lucky you didn't burn the place down 🤞🏼

Makes sense. All good points.

>Electricians will agree with me I don't and I have a electrical license. lol. AS3000 is the guide and there is no mention of derating based on time. If a plug can handle 10 A, then that is a continuous rating.

seconding this one

Evos SB7 is what I use at home. FWIW I can charge my EV5 battery by ~50% between midnight and 6am (cheap tariff with AGL for EV charging) on single phase.

I do city commutes 3x a week among other things, the granny charger works fine for me in Summer (I charge off solar).

ordered a wallbox pulsar max 22kw charger (yes I know the BYD only does 11). 1409 AUD. Couple of reasons: 1) 50c operating temp - in a carport in Brisbane seems wise. A lot of chargers only do 40c. 2) good Home Assistant integration and controllability - this was a must have for me

I got the EVNEX E2 installed with solar (no battery) and love it. Full charge from 15% in just under 14 hours. I only use it once a fortnight but it’s great and mounted outside in the weather.

Using Amazon purchased non-Australian approved EV chargers also voids your insurance.

good to know! thanks