Open Energy Monitor - Energise Your Savings
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are. It's Greg with Take It EV. And with me, I have Glyn from Open Energy Monitor Monitor and thousands of other interesting projects. It's good to have you on the show, Glyn.
Glynn:Oh, thank you.
Gregg:What are we gonna talk about? Like, we were just saying in a pre show that you've got so many things to talk about. But let's start with the Open Energy Monitor. Right? What is it?
Gregg:Why should people care? Why should they check it out? And, you know, how would you sell it to somebody?
Glynn:So, yeah, Open Energy Monitor, it's an open source, basically open source energy monitoring project that myself and my friend and colleague, Chris Sundley, started about twelve, thirteen years ago now. Oh, wow. And, yeah, right at the beginning, we started off small, very small. We we we were just at the time, we were building little little wind turbines, self build hoop hoop hoop picket style, you know, back backyard wind turbines, basically. We wanted a way to be able to measure how much these wind turbines were producing.
Glynn:And back then, there wasn't really any web connected energy monitoring devices available. And we thought, oh, let's let's see if we can build our own. We'd heard of at the time, we were playing around with things like Arduino, a little microcontroller platform. Yeah. So we managed to put together, like, a very simple energy monitor using using the Arduino platform and, you know, get it web connected and just start displaying energy data on a very simple web page.
Glynn:And we thought, wow, this is really cool. So we we we documented it online, open source, and released our designs of designs. And then then we got very soon, the website started to gain traction, and we had a lot of people asking us, oh, that that's really cool. I'd like I'd like my own, you know, energy monitor. Could you could you put together, like, a little kit of kit of parts so we can build our own?
Glynn:But, yeah, sure. We we we can do that. So we started putting, you know, electronics in in little little little plastic bags and then sending them off sometimes all all over the world. And that actually grew and grew to the to the point where we we were sending out, like, tens and tens of these little bags of parts every day. And then people started then saying, oh, this is great, but I'd like I'd like it preassembled, please.
Glynn:I don't want to have to solder it. So we're like, okay. Let let's see if we can do a, you know, a preassembled version, And we obviously developed the the the platform in in the meantime. So it's gone through various iterations over time to where we are now, where we I think we're on the fifth generation of the sort of energy monitoring device itself. So it's, you know, it's developed a lot in in in that time now now we now we might have worked with contract manufacturers.
Glynn:We've got various ones in The UK we work with. And, yeah, we now ship, you know, fully assembled, fully certified, you know, energy monitoring products. But but we still we still have kept the open source ness, and we've got a very, you know, active community forum and a group of like minded people who are involved in the project. And we try and use open source platforms that other people are familiar with, like Raspberry Pi is the main sort of web connected base station part of all our units. So that's something that's very, you know, everyone's familiar with and works works very well.
Gregg:This was more powerful than Arduino.
Glynn:Yeah. So and over time now, we're expanding to other other areas of monitoring, like we do temperature and humidity monitoring. Heat pump monitoring has been quite a new thing for us, monitoring the output of of heat pump and using the same, like, hardware and graphing platform that we that we developed. Because alongside all the hardware developments, we also my colleague Tristan, he's more on the software side, but he he's developed a full open source graphing and data logging platform to be able to, like, log large amounts of energy data and be able to graph it all. But but we also integrate with all the main platforms out there, like Home Assistant and QTT, Node RED, and things.
Glynn:It's quite a very flexible platform. And being open source, there's you know, it's totally possible to, you know, customize or tweak tweak it to, you know, to do whatever you want it to do really.
Gregg:That sounds interesting. I mean, Home Assistant is something a lot of people use, you know, to replace Siri or Google, whatever. Hopefully, didn't set off any anything in people's houses. But, yeah, to to kinda have a bit more, you know, non subscription and I'm controlling it at my own house type of type of deal. But what is the obviously, a lot of heat pumps, this I'm just trying to be playing it, not devil's advocate, like, you know, I presume this is the one of the questions that you get asked.
Gregg:It's like, my heat pump already comes with an app. Why would I put another trinket in there?
Glynn:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good question. Well, there's multiple reasons.
Glynn:I guess it depends what sort of data you're you're after. Like, so a lot of heat pumps, they come with basic onboard monitoring that might show you how much heat's been delivered or what the COP is. So with a with a heat pump, the COP, well, probably mention it a few times. I'll I'll I'll should probably explain what it is now. It's the coefficient of performance.
Glynn:It's like the magic the magic thing about heat pumps is that they multiply the electricity you put in to it. So if you got, an electric heater, you put in, you know, one one unit of electricity, you get one unit unit heat back out, but heat pumps are are magic. They you put in one unit's heat, and you might get up to five units of heat back from them. So I guess they're, like, 500% efficient. But their sufficiency can vary quite a lot depending on how well the system's been designed and installed.
Glynn:So being able to monitor and see what COP your heat pump is actually getting is a really important metric and can have a quite big effect on the running cost. So a lot of manufacturers, they make it possible for you to see that using onboard monitoring inside the heat pump. So I guess the first thing is different manufacturers are different ways they use to calculate this. And some of them or quite a lot of them, the figures they produce are not totally accurate. They're usually good enough to maybe you know, is is your heat pump really bad, or is it pretty good?
Glynn:But if you're interested in tweaking it to get the most out of the heat pump, it doesn't really give you a lot of a lot of data. But I guess if if the COP figure the heat pump gives you is lower than you might expect, the next question is is is why is it not working very well? And I think that's where our system really comes in. So we've developed, like, an independent heat pump monitoring system, which works totally independent to any heat pump onboard monitoring. So we fit we supply a bundle to to either an installer or or, you know, it can be self installed if you're you're technically inclined with an independent electricity meter and an independent heat meter, all billing grade, really, really high accuracy.
Glynn:So you can be certain that the data you get from our monitor is, you know, like a % correct or at least within one or 2%. And we've got we log the data in in very high granularity, like 10% data 10% accuracy. So you can really drill down and graph all the data. We provide tools to do this, and you can see exactly what the heat pump is doing at any given point in time. And then you can use that data to help you, you know, optimize how your heat pump is running, maybe tweak the flow temperature, tweak the weather compensation curve, and there's lots of settings you can play about with, but also to go back to your installer or go back to your manufacturer and say, look, you said the heat pump was going to perform, you know, get x cough, but it's going you know, it's getting you know, it's it's not performing that well.
Glynn:Please, can you come and take a look?
Gregg:So it's basically like a feedback, you know, you get the data back, and that's the best way to learn things about how to improve your system. Right? To see the actual data
Glynn:Yeah.
Gregg:Exactly. And react to Don't just guess.
Glynn:Because, you know, this all started. Tristan and I, we and my colleague, we we both installed heat pumps in our own houses. I put I installed mine two years ago, and Tristan put his in, I think, four years ago now. And we, you know, we we self installed our own heat pumps, is quite, you know, quite a learning curve, which we learned a lot about heat pumps in in that process. And it was a really valuable experience for us to go through.
Glynn:But I think together with that, the monitoring data we had, we were we were comparing heat pumps amongst ourselves, you know, the performance of our heat pump and seeing, you know, basically seeing how well we could get them to perform, We were getting really good performance data and comparing that with some other there's a lot of misinformation out there about heat pumps that maybe haven't been installed so well or maybe people have installed them like you'd install a gas boiler. When it's twice put
Gregg:it in and
Glynn:that's with how how a heat pump should be installed. Yeah. We we were getting really good performance. We thought, oh, it'd be great if we could share this and make this data available to other people. So we set up a website called heatpumpmonitor.org to share real world heat pump performance data using the data we were gathering from these billing grade high accuracy heat meters.
Glynn:And now we've got about 250 actually, 80 systems on that. It's it's it's it grow it's growing by the day. I can we can barely keep up with the number of, you know, systems that get added to it. And so it's now grown into a really useful dataset with, you know, heat pumps all over the country installed by lots of different installers. You can see what sort of performance they're getting and how those heat pumps are are running.
Glynn:So it's if you're looking for a heat pump installer who you know who's got a track record of, you know, installing very well designed and high performing heat pump systems, it's a very good place to place to look. Or if you already have a heat pump and you wanna see how your heat pump compares to a similar heat pump in a similar type of house, you can go in there and sort of filter it down and find find one. So, yeah, that's been it's really been really interesting, like building building that and analyzing all the data that's that's come out of that system.
Gregg:So it's not just a you know, as a person, I I don't have to If I'm nontechnical, I can get somebody else to install it.
Glynn:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And it's the best time to install it actually is when the heat pump is first going in. Yeah.
Glynn:We've got quite a lot of installers we work with who who now offer the system, like, just alongside the heat pump installations. Because, you know, as a percentage of a total heat pump installation, it doesn't actually add that much to the overall cost of installation, but it gives both the installer and the customer, like, I guess, knowledge and data about how the heat pump is performing, which will hopefully give the best outcome really for for both parties.
Gregg:Yeah. And also satisfies the perform the installation. Right? I'm guessing there are some installers who are kinda not happy to have that installed because they don't wanna be they don't wanna be bothered with all the guess that would
Glynn:be a a red flag if if you if if you've
Gregg:Sounds like it.
Glynn:If you're if you're conversation with an installer and they they push back against having monitoring, there's maybe a reason for that, and maybe you should speak to another installer.
Gregg:I mean, I, you know, I've got a heat pump. I've had this for two years now, and our installers became highly recommended by some people in the industry. But they didn't even recommend putting the Valence own monitoring. I had to add that on. I mean, they came back basically and installed it.
Gregg:And it's we had we had that conversation the other day, but the there's one of the elements of it is the flow meter. Right? And that's very hard to install afterwards. Exactly. And I'm probably not gonna be able to install it until I have a major amount of work done.
Gregg:But like I say, Seeker, if if you're if you're in the market for a heat pump, find out somebody who is actually not afraid to have their data exposed. And I suppose the other great thing about it is the fact that you see the data that you've gathered yourself, because presumably the you know, heat pump has a lot of sensors built in, but they don't keep that data forever. They just kinda aggregate it, show it to you in a user friendly manner, little graph, little, you know, figure for COP, and that's about it. Right? You don't get the specific, like, what was the temperature on Thursday?
Glynn:Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. That's a because we we keep all this ten second data. So I've got yeah, for my heat pump, I've got two years now of, yeah, really granular data.
Glynn:So I can go back and see what was the coldest day in 2022 and, you know, what was my how much energy did my heat pump use on that specific day and then compare it to the coldest day this year. Yeah. It's really really interesting. What we never anticipated actually is how competitive installers would be. You know, quite a lot of installers have started using the platform to basically benchmark their systems with other installer systems.
Glynn:Installers, they love, you know, they love a bit of band and they love to be they love to, like, one up their their colleagues and, you know, and friends in in the industry. So, you know, we we coined the the term top top of the scopes, which is the top of the, you know, coefficient of performances. Yeah. And the installers are basically, like, competing to see who could install the best performing heat pump, which is which is fantastic and sharing friendly friendly banters to how, you know, how how their heat pump is performing really well.
Gregg:I can imagine.
Glynn:Yeah. I think yeah. I mean, understandably, they're proud of their systems. They put a lot of time, effort, and, you know, hard work into installing these systems, and they get they get to then show to, you know, their friends and also prospective customers that as an installer, there's no better way to, you know, show a prospective customer that you can install a good system if you can show them the real world performance of, you know, their other systems. Yeah.
Glynn:So It's a really powerful tool.
Gregg:It must be. So you've installed your own heat pump. Was that just an exercise in trying to save money and do it, you know, because you're a very handy guy, right? Or was it just an exercise also of, I wanna see what goes into actually designing and installing the system Yeah. To to be able to, you know, to do this, to the the the monitoring?
Glynn:It's a bit of both of it because I've been learning about heat pumps, you know, reading about them, and I've been seeing the monitoring data coming from Tristan's heat pump because he he'd already self installed his his heat pump, I kind of wanted the challenge to do it for myself. And I quite enjoy learning new new things, and I could see that it would be a really valuable experience. And I had I, yeah, I plumbed plumbed at kitchen tap before. Was vaguely vaguely aware of, you know, how to how to join join pipes together. And there's some fantastic resources out there.
Glynn:I basically just watched lots of YouTube. Oh, wow. There's some really great YouTube channels out there, like Plumber Plumber Parts, Urban Plumbers. You watch enough of those videos, and you can kind of pick up on quite a lot of the the best ways to do things. So I just watched lots of YouTube videos and just started started doing it really.
Gregg:So when installers are telling us, you know, it takes a bit of skill to install a heat pump, could you like just briefly describe like why is it so hard? Like, by comparison to a gas boiler.
Glynn:I think it's just knowing, I think almost because I because I'd never installed a gas boiler before and I wasn't coming from a gas background, that was almost an advantage for me because I didn't have those preconceived ways of doing things. I think a lot of problems happen when a gas boiler installer installs a heat pump in exactly the same way as they would install a gas boiler. I mean, there's a lot of similarities. I mean, on a simplest level, all you're doing is moving moving water along a pipe, and the only difference is instead of having the gas boiler producing the heat, you have a heat pump producing the heat. I get I guess one of the key differences is to get a heat pump to perform well, you want it to run at a lower flow temperature than a gas boiler.
Glynn:I mean, modern heat pumps can deliver high flow temperatures, and you might see some marketing people say, oh, you know, is a high temperature heat pump. But that doesn't really mean very much because if you were to run it at a high temperature, it would just be very unaffordable and cost many times more than a gas boiler. So to make them to make them, you know, affordable to run and the most, you know, good performing heat pumps, they're less less than less than half the running cost of a gas boiler if paired with the right tariff, and particularly paired with solar and batteries as well. You can achieve maybe a third of the cost of a gas boiler in the most extreme case if you optimize it well, you choose the right tariff. But I'd say, you know, a good performing heat pump should definitely be cheaper than a gas boiler.
Glynn:But to achieve that, you you do need to run the heat pump at a lower flow temperature. So that doesn't mean your house will be colder. You can still have 21, 20 two degrees all year round in your house with a lower flow temperature. It just means that the system the system in your house needs to be designed to cope with that lower flow temperature. So what that means in practice is getting the pipework sized correctly and getting the radiators or all the underfloor heating, you know, sized correctly.
Glynn:And so that you know, every house is different. So every there's not, like, one size fits all. You need to do the calculations for your your specific house to work out what needs to be done. In my house, it's mostly just a case of installing some bigger radiators. Like, the radiators I had were very old, like, single single panel ones without any fins.
Glynn:So I basically just swapped them off double panel radiators with fins, and I installed one extra radiator in in the living room, like quite a big one.
Gregg:You've documented the whole thing
Glynn:on Yeah. I've got some there's YouTube videos documenting all of this, and I've created a little bit of pipe work as well Yeah. Just to make the pipes a little bit bigger. In most cases, that's not needed for a heat pump, but I wanted to make sure I was, you know, I was really pushing for the best performance possible, so I did I did that. And then also less is more when it comes to a heat pump.
Glynn:A lot of gas boilers are installed with lots of thermostats and smart CRVs and zone valves and things. And a lot of those things are needed on a gas system because gas puts so much heat into the property. Rooms overheat very quickly, so then you need a way to, like, close off TRVs and things. But with a heat pump, because it runs at a low flow temperature, you don't really get the it's a much gentle gentle heat, so you don't get overheating problems as much. And heat pump heat pumps work best if you have a large amount of emitter area.
Glynn:So effectively means you don't don't close your TRVs, like leave all the radiators open. It might sound counterintuitive, but it basically means it lets the heat pump deliver its heat in in the most effective way possible, and the heat pump just the heat just spreads gently throughout the house. I mean, for sure, if you've got a mansion and you don't use the East Wing for a few, you know, for a few weeks yet, turn off the East Wing. But for most houses, you're talking, you know, my house is a two bed, but sable pie is like a standard, you know, three bed semi. There's very little to be gained by turning off the bedrooms or turning off different rooms when you're not you're not using them.
Gregg:Yeah. I mean, for sure
Glynn:you can you can have the bedrooms at a cooler temperature but you want to keep as much of the system open as possible for the heat pump. But that generally means it means it makes it cheaper to install. You don't need to have things like zone valves, buffer tanks, thermostats. You can just get rid of all of that, which actually knocks many, many hundreds of pounds off the installation cost. So my system is super simple.
Glynn:It's just a heat pump, two pipes from the heat pump straight into the house, and they just go straight into the radiators just via a diverter valve, which either heats the tank or heats the radiators. So it's a very simple system, and the actual space it takes up then inside the house is very minimal. I managed to put it into the same little cupboard that my combi combi boiler was in, and I've got hot water tank, which is not much bigger really than a combi boiler. So by streamlining it and installing a simple system like that, there's quite a lot of other, you know, benefits benefits to that.
Gregg:Yeah. I probably wouldn't recommend that everybody goes around and installs their own heat pump, but I'm sure it was
Glynn:a It doesn't really make sense. It doesn't make sense at all from a financial perspective. Because I saved money by not getting in the solar. The installation cost is quite a big cost of the heat pump because the units themselves are already a few thousand pounds, but it adds up, you know, when you pay an installer. But, actually, I didn't get to claim the grant, so I missed out on 7 and a half thousand pounds, which I could have got if I'd have done it, you know, through an installer.
Glynn:So, yeah, I think it doesn't really add up. And maybe I saved a little bit overall, but it did take me, like, a few months of evening or weekends after work every day coming back and working for hours and hours on my knees in the you know? So it's it was like an experience, but, yeah, it doesn't really make sense.
Gregg:I'm sure it was a great experience. The in our house, when we had a when we bought it, we only had single panel radiators upstairs. And even with a gas boiler, in the winter when it was minus whatever outside, it was cold quite often. And I didn't realize at the time it was because the radiators were crap, basically. And just just upgrading the radiators alone probably would have
Glynn:made a huge gas boiler. If you could make a gas boiler run at, like, 40 degrees or 50 degrees, it'll be you'll get, like, 95% efficiency. But if you run a lot of gas boilers, by default, they're left running at, like, 70 degrees, and you don't really get you know, condensing boilers, they start getting really efficient at lower flow temperatures. Yeah. It's a real shame actually that, you know, a lot of condensing boilers are installed in such a way that they never condense, which you lose all the benefit of having this fancy condensing boiler if it if you run it at 70 degrees, it doesn't condense.
Gregg:Yeah. There there there is this myth that people wanna heat fast and high. Mhmm. And that's contrary to actual, you know, data. And I've never personally, I've never been a fan of the radiators being too hot, so I've always been turning them down Yeah.
Gregg:On the TRVs usually because the you you couldn't change the flow temperature down. But with a heat pump, you don't have the problem of the radiators being too hot.
Glynn:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, lot of boilers do have a often, they do have a way to turn the flow temperature down, but it's usually quite a crude dial. Ideal setup is what what all all heat pumps have generally is weather called weather compensation, where it'll automatically adjust the flow temperature based on temperature outside. Because if it's 10 degrees outside, you don't need such a high flow temperature as you would say when it's minus five.
Glynn:But you can get the same weather compensation systems for boilers, but not many boilers, particularly in this country, are fitted with those that kind of that kind of system. Yeah. But it's worth if you if if your boiler does have an option to reduce the flow temperature, give it a go. Turn it turn it down. And if if you've managed to reach, like, a a flow temperature of 50 degrees or 45 degrees, your heat pump your house is heat pump ready.
Glynn:You could literally attach, like, bolt on a heat pump to that house without any radiator changes. And, you know, it it worked worked pretty well. So it's quite a good test that anyone can do.
Gregg:Going back to the open energy monitor, so you would recommend non technical people to just get their installer to do it at the installation time or the heat pump installation time. But it is available for people just to install it themselves
Glynn:if they want Yeah. And particularly if if we're going back to Open Engine Monitoring in general, as well as the HEPA monitoring, as we mentioned earlier, we also do general electricity monitoring. And we we we do that using that clip on, clip on current sensors. So it's totally possible to install an electricity monitor yourself. Although if you want to do per circuit monitoring, if you want to say monitor your, you know, your your your EV or your cooker or your your socket circuits, you would have to instal the sensors inside your consumer board, does involve taking the front cover off.
Glynn:And so that's the kind of thing you might want to, because, you know, consider getting electrician to help to help with. But if you're just monitoring your total consumption, it's relatively straightforward to clip a sensor around your main, you know, the main cable coming into your house. You can usually do that, you know, quite safely without having to expose any live parts or anything.
Gregg:And is the benefit over the, you know, company doing it, the fact that you have I'm presuming here, but stop me if I'm wrong, you own your own data. Right? Nobody else
Glynn:Yes.
Gregg:That's sees it. You don't have to pay forever subscription, and if the company goes down, you don't the app doesn't stop working. Right?
Glynn:Yeah. Totally. So all all our units have the capability to do full local login. So like like I mentioned, we use we use the Raspberry Pi as our base station, and that's got quite a lot of storage capacity on it. So you could you could install I think we worked it out once, it was like about a hundred years worth of entity data.
Glynn:Because even though we do log 10 data, it's actually quite a small amount of data. I've got about five years worth of data logging, and it's only a few hundred megabytes of data. So, you know, if you're using, I think we use like eight gigabytes of, yeah, memory storage on the on the Raspberry Pi, so that's quite a lot of data storage. But we also we run a cloud service, which people can use and post their data to, which is quite convenient because that lets you quite easily access the data when you're away from home without having to do any fancy port forwarding or things like that. Yeah.
Glynn:So a lot of people do choose to use our cloud service, but our cloud service is also open source. So there's nothing stopping you actually running your own cloud server using our, you know, open source platform. Or you can, like I said, you can integrate with Home Assistant and, you know, log log the same data values into your Home Assistant dashboard and everything, and view it view it that way.
Gregg:And that provides a backup in case the SD card on the Exactly. Router file goes bad.
Glynn:Yeah. Yeah.
Gregg:Because it well, I've heard of people having issues with SD cards on their Raspberry Pis, not not with Open Energy monitor, like, in general
Glynn:Yeah.
Gregg:When they write We're
Glynn:quite aware of that issue, and early on we did have a few issues like that, but we've put quite a lot of work into optimizing the OS for long term stability. Like, we've had Pis running over ten years on some installations. Now we do that by we minimize the amount of writes we make to the SD card, And we do things like log the log files to the to the RAM memory rather than write them to the SD card. And and just write to the SD card very in a very controlled way.
Gregg:Okay.
Glynn:So if there is a power outage or you want to prolong the lifetime of the SD card, that's the yeah. We found it. It does last a very long long long time like that. I'm I'm a I'm use industrial grade, very robust SD cards, which are a lot more they're basically designed for this sort of thing where a lot of battery pies use just standard, digital camera, quite cheap SD cards, which do tend to fail after a period of time. But, yeah, we've not had too much of a problem with that anymore.
Gregg:Do you wanna talk about I mean, we've been talking for twenty eight minutes, believe it or not. But do you wanna talk about anything else? Your van or Well, mean, we could quickly talk about mention that the Glyn does loads of things, not just the up and air.
Glynn:Well, it's quite a cool I guess it's quite a cool thing to we could talk about it briefly. So, yeah, I've got an EV camper van. So it's an E and B 200. It's probably one of the first EV camper vans. Well, maybe a handful of first EV camper vans in in in The UK because back this is going back, like, July ago now when I first converted it to a camper van.
Glynn:And even now, you don't really see many electric camper vans. We've done a lot of a lot of traveling in this camper van. Over those years, every year we go away for maybe two big trips, maybe one or two big trips in the van into into Europe, and we don't think we've come across many other electric camper vans in that time.
Gregg:Do you get loads of people interested or dismissing it? Or like, does it engage people, you know, do they wanna have a I'm
Glynn:actually really interested in it. I think electric or EVs in general, there's a lot of advantages for a camper van. For example, heating. EVs, they have a built in, you know, air con and heat heating system. Some of them even have a, you know, heat pump.
Glynn:So for a camper van, that's great. You you don't need to add additional heating system. You can just just press a button, and you get heat, where in a camper van, you often have to feel like a a diesel heater or a propane heater, which Yeah. Sounds horrible. Yeah.
Glynn:They're they're smelly and noisy and everything where an EV is just built in. And also leisure batteries, you know, camper vans, they all have leisure batteries, but obviously, in an EV, you just you've got you've got a huge battery. Yeah. So in in my camper van, I've got induction hub that runs off runs off an inverter, which we then power from the from the 12 volt system, but then but whenever the EV is switched on, that's obviously constantly being topped up from from the DC DC converter. So it's basically an unlimited amount of power, and cooking doesn't use much much power at all.
Glynn:So we can park up for days at a time just using the inverter to cook, using power from the traction battery.
Gregg:Yeah. And I presume loads of camping sites already have power available.
Glynn:Right? That's it. Yeah. And whenever we stay at a campsite, we just plug into the hookup. We generally haven't had we've never really had a had a problem doing doing that.
Glynn:I mean, probably because there's not that EV campgrounds, I'm sure, When there's more campsites, we'll start to, you know, make it more of an official official thing, but, yeah, we've never had any problem charging from a from a hookup at least. Don't do it too much in The UK. We often do it abroad where there's not many EVs in general. But the thing is every if you if you go to the standard campsites these days, almost every motor home or or camper van is plugged in and they're all they're all running like you because we often go away in winter to places like, you know, Spain or South Of France or Italy where they're they're all running like heaters plugged into the hookup because it's cheaper than running a diesel heater. Yeah.
Glynn:So charging the van, we just charge quite slowly if because what we say at a campsite for, you know, a few days at a time, you don't need to charge quickly. Yeah. Just trickle trickle it in. So
Gregg:So you're pulling the same amount of power Exactly.
Glynn:We're only pulling, like, 10 amps or less. So Yeah. It's and the hookup's all rated to 16 amps. So it's it's well below what, you know, what would be the maximum amount on hookup. But it's it's quite cool though that more and more campsites now are fitting EV chargers.
Glynn:So if you do want to charge fast or if you're just going for one night, you know, you you can plug into an EV charger there and get a decent amount of charge. But we've also done if we're traveling a long distance, we often just stop overnight and just plug into a public charger, you know, like a type two seven kilowatt charge point, and we just spend the night, you know, find find one in, like, a nice quiet car park and just spend the night on the on the charger. It's great because you can it's very efficient because you'd wake up in the morning, your battery is full, and you're ready ready to drive again. Yeah. And you can run the heater all night, and so it's quite a, yeah, quite quite convenient thing to do.
Gregg:I'm envious. I won't get I mean, they they don't no longer manufacture ANV 200, but the, you
Glynn:know Yeah. The NV 200 is not I wouldn't recommend anyone go out and get an NV 200 now. I mean, they're very reliable vans in terms of, like, EV tech. They're quite they're quite old. It uses Chano as as the rapid charger, and it's got a only 40 kilowatt hours, which, you know, in a van with the aerodynamics of a brick doesn't get you that far.
Glynn:Maybe a 20 miles rep max, which, I mean, actually, which is quite small, my my modern EVs, but for for us, it's quite a big upgrade because it's the van when we've when I first got the van, it had a 24 kilodal battery. Wow. And and believe it or not, we did manage to do some pretty long trips. We even I think our longest trip was, like, to Slovenia and back with a 24 kilowatt hour and south Tulsa, Spain as well on a separate trip. And they were quite they were quite challenging trips.
Glynn:If you go back and look at my YouTube channel, you'll see some early trips through the middle of Spain in in winter with 24 kilowatt hours. It was quite a challenge. Had to basically stop at random random gas stations and ask if we could, like, use their outdoor pooping plug because there was there wasn't enough rapid charges to sort of get us get us to our destination. But that was going back in, like, 2016 or so, 2017. And now there's many more rapid charges, but but still, I don't think having it now I've gone to a 40 kilotour, I'd never go back I would never go back to a 24.
Gregg:No. No. No. I've I've got some friends who still have a 24 kilowatt hour ENV two hundred van, but they only do, like, local gardening, so they yeah.
Glynn:Yeah. It's fine fine for
Gregg:the purpose. And it's a van, so it's not as heavy as presumably as a as a company.
Glynn:It's a very reliable van, the MB 200. It's probably not the best van for, like, long, you know, long distance trips because of because it's Chathamo, it charges quite slowly. And also the battery pack does tend to get a bit warm if you do lots of rapid charging in a row. So, yeah, we tend to you you can't drive at, like, 70 miles an hour because the battery will get too hot. Yeah.
Glynn:So we generally drive at, like, 55, 60. And then we, you know, after maybe two or three rapid charges, when the battery starts to get hot, that's a good time to, like, take a break and maybe cook cook dinner. And because it's a camper van, whenever you're plugged into a charging point, if it does charge a bit slowly, you just I just spin the silver swivel seat around and turn induction knob on and just cook dinner. So if it takes, you know, forty, fifty, fifty minutes to charge, it's not a big not a big problem.
Gregg:You can relax it in your own living space.
Glynn:Exactly. Yeah. You're you're basically in your living space, so it's you just hang out for a bit, and fast charging is not so much of a problem. Although recently, we have just got a a Chathamoto CCS adapter, which is quite an exciting development. I never thought when we got the van all those years ago that it would be possible for us to use Tesla Superchargers.
Glynn:To drive it down here for to fully charge, I actually used used the Supercharger, which is really cool and quite a novel experience for me because, obviously, one, which it's Chano boat Chano boat. And two, Tesla Superchargers never used to be open to other vehicles. Yeah. But now with this adapter, it is possible to use CCS CCS. So we can now use, well, any CCS rapid charger rapid charger, including superchargers.
Glynn:So I'm really looking forward to our next trip away. I think we're gonna go, hopefully, to Portugal this winter. I'm looking forward to using superchargers because they're very cheap. Yes. And they're all over Europe.
Gregg:Yes. And there's, yeah, there's plenty of them, so you can just stop openly. And I think most of more of them are open in Europe to non Tesla drivers.
Glynn:They are. Yeah. Only a quite limited number are open, I think, in The UK.
Gregg:Yeah. I mean, they said that they're gonna open them up eventually. They're just kinda trialing it. But do
Glynn:you Yeah. I think there's quite a lot of there's quite they're quite busy sites in The UK. Yeah. So I think they're quite hesitant, understandably, to open up, like, a busy site to all EVs. It'll be, yeah, busy they're busy enough with Teslas already.
Gregg:And all your adventures are always, you know, filmed, and you put them up on your YouTube channel. Because I've been watching your content, you know, forever. So I remember watching the your trips to various countries in in your EMV 200.
Glynn:Yeah. Yeah. We've done quite a few quite a few trips in it now. Yeah. They're they're just little little videos for, like, to so we can remember the trips.
Glynn:And also some of those early trips, especially, we had to do I had to do quite a lot of research to work out how to activate a rapid charger in Italy or how to use a rapid charger in Spain. I thought, oh, it's quite nice to share this information with people. So I sort of tried to do to do that through the videos, but, you know, these days, it's got a lot, lot easier. I I say to people now, just get yourself an Octopus, Electrovus, or RFID card, and that will basically activate, you know, 9095% of the charges in Europe. Up until Spain, actually, Spain's still a bit slow, a bit backwards when it comes to EV charging.
Glynn:Once you you get as far as Spain using Octopus, let Traverse, and by then you need to start using, you know, proprietary network specific apps. And some of them, you need to do tricks like make up a Spanish address just to get past the verification process or make up a Spanish ID number just so you can create accounts. It's ridiculous.
Gregg:Well, if you need to charge, you need to charge. Right?
Glynn:Exactly. You gotta do what you gotta do. But there's one or two networks in Spain, like, I've still not managed to even use because you need a Spanish mobile phone number.
Gregg:Okay.
Glynn:So it's like not particularly friendly to follow us, but there's there's enough rapid times these days. You you just use the ones that you can use and just ignore the
Gregg:The other ones.
Glynn:All the rubbish ones. Yeah.
Gregg:I mean, yeah. I don't wanna keep you too long, but this, you know, I hope this is an interesting conversation, and I hope people will look at the Open Energy Monitor and, you know, subscribe to your YouTube channel to actually see your content, and, you know, I've enjoyed this I'm sure we can have another conversation about converting things and other things. But thank you for appearing on Techie Live Eaglin.
Glynn:Good shot here.
