If you chargers are installed at a place of work, or a business, you may want to limit access to during business hours. We don't recommend this for chargers that are available in public places, but every organization views this issue differently. This article shows you how to setup groups of chargers to not operate during particular times of the day.
Example: Mon-Fri 9am - 5pm.
For this example, we are going to show you how to stop charging between 5pm at night and 9am in the morning.
Step 1: Define the chargers affected
Firstly, we are going to create a group that will contain the chargers that we are going to apply this restriction to.
Click on the New Group button, on the Groups tab:
Next, we are going to give a name to the group. For this example, we want to apply this to all chargers that are at HQ, in the Employee Parking lot:
Now that we have the group setup, we want to add the chargers in the Employee Parking area to this group. Double click on the group to open the group folder up. For example - double click on the HQ Employee Parking group folder:
The folder will then open (as below). Click on the "Add to Group" button:
Next, select all the chargers you want to add into the group and hit save:
This will add the chargers into the group, as seen below:
Now that the group has been created with the chargers within it that you want to control, it's time to setup the charger control!
Step 2: Stopping Charger Usage Mon-Fri
The first step is to create a control which stops charging from happening between 5pm and 9am Monday to Friday. Go to the Controls page and hit the New Control button, highlighted in red below:
Next, enter the details about what you want this control to be called, along with a description. We've entered a description of the M-F 5pm-9am control:
Hit Next, and then choose the "EV Interrupt" choice from the dropdown:
Hit Next, and choose the schedule. Here we have chosen to switch OFF every M-F between 5pm and 9am, Central. This control has been set to never expire, unless we cancel the control:
** REMEMBER ** - We are defining the period that we want the power to SWITCH OFF.
Hit Next, and choose the group that you want to apply this control to:
Hit Save, and you'll see the that the control is created.
An orange timer notes that the control is waiting to run, and during the time that it is running (M-F, 5pm - 9am) you will see a green running man, to denote the control is running!
Step 3: More Complicated Use Cases
To also control this charger group over the weekend, or at lunchtimes also, you can run through Step 2 again, apply it against the same group, but define a different schedule. The ZEFNET system will run all controls the you define, even if it is multiple controls per day.
Isn't that flexible?!