A smart charging box is a smart investment

Would you also like to charge your car more cheaply? Imagine that you have a charging station at home, which can work out for itself when the electricity you use to charge your electric car is cheapest.

Charging an electric car at home is basically very simple, and you generally do it when you have finished for the day and parked at home.You plug in the charger and trust it to do its job – as cheaply as possible.The next day, the car has a “full tank” and you are ready for the day’s travel. 

Avoid price spikes with a smart charger 

The brilliant thing about a ‘smart charging box’, of which there are now several models on the market, is that it retrieves the price of the electricity on its own. 

“What the smart charging box does is to retrieve prices beforehand from the Nordic electricity exchange (Nord Pool) via the internet. It then makes sure to charge your electric car when the electricity is cheapest at the time when the car is plugged in.That way, you avoid the price peaks, and charge when the electricity price is in the troughs,” says Espen Skaar, who is responsible for home charging in Fortum Charge & Drive. 

A smart charging box is also an online charging box, and an online charging box is much easier to upgrade in the future.It can be debugged externally, so you don’t have to book a home visit by a repairman, for example.Everything is done online. 

“The charging box is connected to the internet.This makes it fully upgradeable, and ready to be updated anytime, anywhere.It is also much safer than charging from a regular socket, for example – and usually several times faster,” says Skaar. 

A smart charging box – a smart investment 

A lot has happened in the electricity market in recent years, with the rollout of smart meters (AMS) and hourly pricing of electricity.With an hourly-billed electricity contract, you can now move your electricity consumption to the hours when it is cheaper.This can make a smart charging box a smart investment. 

The best thing about smart charging is that the whole process is fully automated. 

“Smart charging is a completely automatic process.The only thing you have to do yourself is plug the cable into the car,” says Skaar.“You have to look after the connection yourself, but the rest is controlled by a smart charger and an app on your mobile phone. 

With Fortum electricity in the wall, you can now access smart solutions using ourSmart Charging package, which is tailor-made for electric car owners.