we always love it when we get a sprinkling of innovation turn up from Norway the leading
country when it comes to ev adoption and that continues when it comes to charge points as well
we've just finished installing this zaptec pro ev charge park behind us and we've given it a full
efixx treatment all the way from install through a setup and commissioning or even using it to charge
very soon when that turns blue but we also think and we've discovered some absolutely fantastic
features that we haven't seen on any other charge part before so stick around to find out what those
are but when it comes to charge points we think about where the target application is going what
the problem they solve and that's where this one steps in isn't it it is i'm thinking about
apartment blocks said it's 35 they've all got a separate parking space but with ev adoption they
all now want to be able to charge their vehicle or you've got that workplace parking you turn up
maybe you've got 60 parking spaces and you want to be able to charge your car in the work setting and
that's a question we get asked a lot by ev owners especially when you do live in an apartment block
how we're going to charge the car when you've got no off-street parking and yeah this will come back
to actually how it solves that problem but let's think about that other thing that a lot of people
think about first when choosing a charger what does it look like and this one looks lovely i'm
gonna bring the camera in so nice and close so we can see it here we go yeah so it's got all the
things you've spent so the nice way they've done the led indicator there that obviously reflects
the charging status so the minute it's green it's ready uh for a car to charge and we have got it
plugged in and that's probably the other feature i really like about this charger is it's really slim
line even when it's got a charging lead plugged in so a lot of these untethered charges when
people add the lead the actual plug itself ends up sticking out from the charger at quite a distance
that's not the case uh with this zaptech unit you'll notice there's no visible screws on here
we'll let you into the secret of how you get under the cover a little bit later on in the video but
all in all i think this is a nice neat charger it's obviously quite a robust design ik10 as it
needs to be ip54 rated you know so it's good for the places you'd expect it to be in exposed
car parks or in those underground car parks where you do tend to get a lot of dust yeah and that
slender form is more impressive when you hear the fact it's actually three phase as well isn't it
yeah so you can charge it up to 22 kilowatts on here obviously that does depend on the charger
unit that's actually located in the car as to what power you can get and a lot of people forget that
um but there's more than enough power in there to cope with uh yeah a broad range of cars that you'd
expect in a yeah in a car park where anyone could turn up so let me unpack that gordon the zaptec
ev charger can charge ev cars up to 22 kilowatts i don't think that was my original problem
my original problem was those 35 apartments those 35 parking spaces and how will i be
able to charge those cars okay so this solves two problems so think about a traditional ev charger
you've installed one per bay and you have to take your cable back from every charge point back to a
distribution board where you have obviously lots of circuit breakers lots of cables and obviously
quite a large distribution board the clever thing about the zaptec one is you can install
one power circuit and then power multiple charges from that one circuit so say if we had a
63 amp three phase supply we could connect over 100 charges to that one house of life so
we come out of say the landlord's power supply we take a cable round to the 35 parking spaces
and it's going to cleverly manage the charge in those vehicles when they arrive and maybe they're
all arrived yeah exactly so you can obviously equally share it out amongst them and bear in
mind people arrive at different times leave at different times batteries are at different charge
levels or you can prioritize certain spaces usually mine is always a good place to start
but think about it in a business environment where possibly have some visitor bays
where people are only there for a few hours and you may want to treat somebody
for fast charging particularly if they've traveled a considerable distance during that time you could
prioritize that charger off a 22 kilowatt charging then ease off the charging on the other chargers
and it's a little bit of a different mindset isn't it we're so used to perhaps filling our cars up
with energy and taking a needle all the way up to full but this process is actually allowing
everybody to have some of the energy and thinking about that workplace environment if i wanted to go
over 60 parking spaces with ev charging what am i going to have to do at the mains end to upgrade it
to send individual single or three-phase cables out so everybody had fast charging yeah so
i'd mark the difference between you know there's these rapid charging stations that are
of springing up all over the country where yeah everyone can pull in and
and have you know maximum charge of hundreds of kilowatts on tap yeah that's the difference
between this sort of should we say ev grazing scenario where people can have a small amount
of power shared between them you know that that step up between that installation and the big
supercharging one is a massive amount of power infrastructure that has to go in and the cost
associated with that is astronomical and and then for many installations you know outside the reach
of anybody so you want to provide eb charging you accept that that needs to be flexibility you know
there is only so much power that comes into the building and not all of it can be diverted to eb
charging but this is a great solution for those apartment blocks businesses and other possibly
places where people are going to be around for some time so to give everybody a chance to absorb
that information 100 ev charges on one cable let's talk about all the great features that we think
are in the zap tech when we're installing it yeah well there is one standout installation feature we
really like and that is it's easy to install and that makes everybody's life simpler that's enabled
through a two-part installation process we've got a base plate that you can fix during first fix so
while gary's crashing around pulling cables in in containment you can separate it from the actual
charger itself so the electronics are less likely to get damaged and all the dust and everything
else that goes around people racing around in cherry pickers at that stage of the installation
so you can complete first fix you can do all your electrical testing and then the front point
bolts to that back plate um but then in terms of cabling gary what did he do there we could
have come in the top we could have come in the bottom we decided to come into the bottom we
fitted obviously the support for that cable and we brought in some my white or tough sheath cable
in order that we could feed it and we fed it as a three-phase neutral and a protective conductor
into the bottom of the ev charger remembering to blank off the other areas to maintain that ip54 as
well on it yeah and all those grommets come in the in the pack along with the fixing screws the clamp
that obviously the fixings for the clamp as well you could obviously install this as a single
phase charger uh in the uk you'll you'll know some different earthing systems listed in there
obviously majority on a tncs earthing system so that means you need to add pen fault protection
to the installation but again that's another great advantage of this system because you can use one
on pen for device to protect that entire 63 amp circuit if that's what you're actually installing
yeah so that's at source by the distribution board you're likely to fit your pen fault protector
there but if you've got a hundred ev chargers you're only fitting one of those but then when
i'm thinking about pen file the next thing i'll probably think about is the rcd protection and
that's built in as well isn't it yes so this got a full type b uh rcd in the unit itself and we
tested that out uh it is obviously electronic there's nothing there's no physical switches uh
to do in that to reset it you simply unplug the the charging lead and it goes through a self uh
self reset function uh the other standout feature that this charger has so think about that cable
uh you're gonna be spurring off a bigger cable if it's feeding uh you know obviously a 63 amp supply
around the building people sometimes worry about the fusing for individual units now this charger
has a 3-port mcb built into the device itself and that's ever so easy to get access to is it
once you've removed the cover and you're going in maybe you're resetting it because there's been an
issue with it obviously you find your type c 40 amp uh breaker in there and just open a window
up and just reset it off you go again yeah and that shows you obviously to do that to get in
there you need this secret key because that is the key to getting the cover off there's no external
fixings on this there's in fact no screw fixings on this you simply jack this in in the access
point tucked behind the rear of the unit and you can remove the front and what you'll notice and
i really like about this as well is once you're in that front there is another plastic screen in
there that keeps you away from the live parts if you are again going to be resetting that breaker
but it also keeps you away from the electronics a lot of these ev charges you've got what is quite
a substantial investment in terms of money with exposed electronics i like the fact that that's
sort of got another layer of protection in there you don't need to access any of the terminals in
there because it simply plugs to the back plate would also like as well and we also had a whole
series on torque and setting torques all the torque for the terminals are clearly labeled again
nice beefy terminals there we can torque them up to five newton meters well it was an easy install
but we only put that one cable into it so how are we going to get the data information to it
yeah well and we certainly need data because obviously all charges are smart these days
this charger comes with wi-fi connectivity we're all very familiar with but think about that
car park scenario wi-fi in car parks especially if they're underground can be a challenge the
alternative will be to use the 4g uh mobile phone network which again is built in that's what we've
used here so that worked out of the box no need to connect to the network but again you're thinking
that signal can be a bit sketchy when it comes to underground car parks so the third method that we
haven't seen on any other charge park before is you can use power line communication okay so is
that where the mains cable that we fed this with is going to actually transmit the data down there
yeah exactly so you have a power line modem so you bring in your ethernet connection to your network
and then that then transfers that signal onto the mains wiring and connects the chargers back to
the obviously to the inter internet um we've seen that similar before i mean people may be familiar
they used a lot in houses to transfer uh internet connectivity around a conventional mains wiring
but this time it's actually built into the charger itself and that is for us
a really standout feature that we haven't seen before well we're running out of things that i
like to cover we've got the easy install we've got the cable connected those torque settings
we've powered it up it's got connectivity i've got a feeling the next thing is probably commissioning
isn't it yeah and that's simplicity carried on gary you could probably even do it yourself so
that might be a topic uh for another video um but we out of the box we used the 4g connectivity
so we didn't need to even connect to the network in the building it's in a case of logging into the
zaptech portal where once you've got installer rights you can create your installation which
we did here you specify the circuit size that the charge is connected to and then it's a case
of assigning charges to that circuit and that's done by the unique serial number that's on the
product so that's a simple process and then you can commission all sorts of other useful features
even down to setting the brightness of the led on the indicator which may sound like a trivial thing
but you imagine if you've got a car parked with lots of chargers in you don't want green glows
everywhere particularly if it's in a sensitive area so i think that's a nice little touch you
can do the other things you'd expect to be able to do and that's another important one and we keep
hearing about cable thefts because these charging cables aren't cheap you can permanently lock that
to the charger which is obviously useful in a workplace where you may have the same person using
it all the time or that you want to provide your visitors with lead so again you can lock that in
you can also do that lock in through the user app as well so the user app itself can also
be used to initiate the charging process or you can enable rf id tags again so to sort
of touch in and touch out on charging as well because as we know energy prices are going up
you do need to restrict um restrict who can charge when you talk about energy it brings
me to charging for it and obviously measuring that energy as well doesn't it yeah well let's not mix
the two up guys it's charging the car and there's billing for the energy and if you are going to be
billing a charging people cash then the charger itself needs to have an mid class meter built in
there measuring instrument directive so it has to a certain level of accuracy and performance
and this unit has that built in so you can hook it up to back office uh charging systems uh so the
one that comes with the zaptech portal is great but you can take that a stage further and link up
to all ccp billing platforms and things like that so some of these apps that are flying around that
are common between lots of uh charging platforms so again that's another another problem solved
well we think the zaptech pro has solved all of your problems however we love comments and
we love comments on evie so make sure you leave them below were you thinking of installing eevee
in the workplace you've got all these parking spaces ready for ev charges to go in but you
didn't know how you're gonna do it and now you do yeah or if you live in an apartment block and the
landlord's been holding off and offering you ev charging again we think this is a great system
but if you've still got questions ask away and if you're actually going to install on these systems
it's so easy to set up i'm sure gary will come along and commission it for you thanks for that