Spot Solar Charging routes the customer's real-time PV surplus into their EV: when the sun is producing more than the household is consuming, Gridio charges the car from the excess instead of letting it flow to the grid as feed-in.

Overview

For locations that own a PV system, this means:

• the customer's own solar generation is consumed at home rather than exported,
• the EV pulls less from the paid grid, and
• no scheduling is required — the engine reacts to current conditions every 30 seconds.

Spot Solar Charging is distinct from Solar-Aware Charge Planning. Spot Solar reacts to the right-now state of the inverter; Solar-Aware Charge Planning reduces tomorrow's overnight grid hours based on the forecasted solar. The two are complementary and work together when both are active — Spot Solar handles today's surplus opportunistically; Solar-Aware reserves overnight grid hours for tomorrow.

How it works

The charging engine runs a planning cycle every 30 seconds. For each location that has both a vehicle and an inverter:

1. Reads the current PV state — instantaneous PV power, household total load, smart-meter feed-in and feed-out (if available), and current EV charging power.
2. Computes excess solar. Depending on the inverter's capability, the formula is one of:
   • Smart-meter aware: excess = current EV charging + to_grid − from_grid. Even in this mode, if a solar_start_level is configured the engine only treats the surplus as chargeable once it exceeds that level — the threshold used is the larger of solar_start_level and base_load. With neither set, any surplus is used (subject to the 1 kW threshold in step 3).
   • Base-load mode: excess = current PV − configured base_load
   • PV-only / start-level mode: excess present whenever PV exceeds the configured solar_start_level
3. Decides what to do with the excess. If the excess is above a 1 kW threshold and the vehicle is plugged in, not opted out, and at the home location, start — or continue — charging at the excess rate.
4. Modulates as the sun varies. Each cycle re-evaluates the excess; the charging setpoint goes up or down to track current production.
5. Stops when there isn't enough sun. When excess drops below the threshold (cloud cover, evening), the engine stops the car so it doesn't start pulling from the grid.
6. Respects the customer's schedule. If the vehicle's weekday schedule marks the current time as an "inactive" period, no Spot Solar activity happens during that period — the engine leaves the car alone.

If the inverter's most recent reading is more than five minutes old, the engine holds state and issues no new commands until fresh data arrives. This prevents flapping when the data link to the inverter is intermittent.

Requirements

Vehicle

Location