As societies around the world shift to electric mobility, more and more people are discovering the benefits of driving electric and the comfort of charging a car while it is parked. According to our research, over 67 percent of EV drivers currently charge their electric vehicle at home, and why shouldn’t they? Charging a car while it’s in the driveway is cheaper, easier and more convenient than searching for a public charger.

Regulating the power supply, however, is a different story. EV charging is a high energy application that can quickly put an electrical circuit under strain if not managed properly. Luckily, there are a number of smart EV charging solutions available to help optimize energy demand (and your electricity bill). One such feature for the home is dynamic load balancing. 

Avoid power overload

To understand what dynamic load balancing does, it’s helpful to first look at the problem it seeks to address. While you may not think about it in everyday use, electric circuits have a limited capacity and can get overloaded if too much power is drawn. 

To protect circuits from overloading, the electrical supply in a home is fitted with circuit breakers, which will cut power if energy use exceeds safe levels. You might have experienced a circuit breaker tripping if you had multiple high-energy appliances working at the same time, such as an oven, dishwasher, and washing machine. 

Of course, power can be restored by reducing the load on the grid, for example by turning off some appliances, but having to do so is inconvenient and disruptive. This is where dynamic load balancing comes in: by monitoring power loads on your circuit, it can intelligently allocate the available capacity to appliances that need it the most, allowing them to run simultaneously without overloading the circuit. 

Dynamic load balancing is a feature that constantly monitors changes in energy use on your circuit and automatically allocates the available capacity to different appliances. It balances the energy used and adjusts the charging output to your EV in response to changes in electricity load. 

For example, if a washer, a dryer, and a car are connected at the same time, dynamic load balancing may decide to stop or slow the charging process of the car to free up capacity for the other appliances. Once they are switched off, the charger resumes or increases the EV’s charging speed. 

This also applies if you own multiple electric cars and charge them from the same electrical circuit. In that case, dynamic load balancing automatically distributes the available energy between the two vehicles or prioritizes one of the cars based on your preferences. In the second scenario, dynamic load balancing will direct more power to one of the cars, while slowing or stopping charging for the other one until more energy becomes available.