Content by wattmatters in January, 2026

Sydney to Urunga yesterday, aircon on.

There will be several voltages, we have three separate arrays each of different size, each connected into its own MPPT (one spare unused MPPT) in the Energy Controller. The system has a higher voltage DC bus, each battery module has its own DC-DC voltage buck/boost converter. The modules are...

The stack is on the back wall of the garage. Modules from bottom up, 4 x battery modules, EVDC module, energy controller (inverter) on top. That's the DC cable you can see, it's plugged into my MG4. Cable is 10 m.

In general if you are expecting/wanting to charge at high power from the grid then you will want a 3-phase system for the extra capacity. In most scenarios to charge at the full 25 kW requires the system to blend power from PV/battery and the grid, which it can and will do if you tell it to...

I'm only using charge from excess solar feature and have limited solar PV capacity and it has regularly charged at well over 10 kW. With discharging it was just powering the house during a grid outage so power demand never got that high. Here's a day where sun was coming and going behind...

That's clearly just some stock image they cut in and used the wrong image. The actual plug is a full CCS2 DC plug, same as any regular highway fast charge station uses. They don't, as above it's a proper CCS2 plug and connects directly to the battery. When you initiate a charge session the...

Tesla yesterday decided the summer holidays was a good time to take half a dozen charge stations off-line at Raymond Terrace. This supercharger site is barely a year old. It's a shame their own website did not advise of the outage. There was a constant stream of EVs arriving and waiting for a...

One of the really neat things about the MG4 (and other EVs) is that the auxiliary battery gets charged not only while driving but also while the car itself is being charged which for most EVs is pretty regularly. It also will use the drive battery to do an interim top up charge if necessary. So...

LFP and Na batteries have multiple cells that can fail too. Not sure what the number of cells has to do with anything. Same battery gods. Lead acid is pretty robust, has proven its worth for over a century and if not abused it will last pretty well, and one just needs to swap it out on a...

Why bother with anything other than a standard lead acid replacement? The car's charging system is set up for it.