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 Hi All, please be kind this is my first post.

I am a proud owner of a Mitsubishi PHEV and have just come home from a trip around Europe with a caravan. Most times in the UK I can use the camping site power supply to charge the car (10A over 5 hrs) Problems arise in Europe when the campsite power trips at 6A, sometimes 4A. Often I am unable to use the electric kettle.

I would therefore like to know if an EVSE has ever been created to only use a low current, say 4A. I would be happy to use it in the above circumstances by charging overnight for 8 hrs or more.

 Thanks for that info. I see on your site that there's a Panasonic unit that is adjustable down to 6A, I may give that a go next time I'm in Europe. Most of the sites that have 4A trips installed are down south - where caravan heaters aren't used much, the rest are mainly 6A but.

Hi I have a related question. If the power is coming from solar? 1000w of solar DC produces ~ 18v through solar controllers that come on backside of panels --> 1500w pure sine inverter --> a 12A J1772 120v adapter plugged into the inverter and the J1772 end directly into a plug-in Prius designated at flow rate of 8A, if it gets 'cloudy' and amps fall below 8A, any harm to the Prius batteries? Thanks for any help:) 

Afaik, the J1772 std allows 120V operation. e.g. as in USA. So there's nothing I can see in principle to stop someone using a 230->115V step-down transformer, and running  a 6A EVSE off that. Power draw would then be about 3 kW. Presumably if all EVs obey the standard, they shouldn't mind only being offered 115V or thereabouts?

The CCS simple protocol (AC charging) specifies the the EVSE can signal the car of charging currents from 6 to 80 amps.  So you can't send a number below 6 to the car. 

Whoops, miscalculation by me above, and I can't see how to edit my own append! Running a charger at 115V AC and 6A (the minimum the spec allows) would be drawing 690 Watts, and if powered from a 230->115V transformer, this would mean 700W at the 230V side (assuming 98.5% efficiency for nice round figures!). That's 3.04A at the 230V side, which might be doable for a campsite maybe?

Thanks for the interest Andy. This solution sounds as if it will work, I shall try it on my next foray into Europe.

Although this should work you may find that the inrush current to the stepdown transformer will trip the breaker. As long as you can reclose the breaker (it might take a couple of attempts before it latches) you'll be fine.

Don't give up disappointed if it trips out right away.

Is it possible to build a system that charges a Tesla Model 3 using 120 volts L1 charging that is variable from 6 to 16 amps?  What I want to do is to have the Tesla charge rate track the suns output.  My panels can put out 1800 watts see https://egpreston.com/AMnoonPM.jpg however when clouds come over I would like to have the solar inverter supply less power to the Tesla when less sunlight is available.  This allows the use of a smaller 24 volt battery on the MPP LV2424 inverter since the load would throttle with the solar power.  Right now in the winter time I can get on average about 120 miles range per week off this system from sunlight.  I would like to make it more automatic using the J1772 in these articles.  Is this possible?  my web page is https://egpreston.com 

Should I load the Raspbian operating system on my new raspberry pi computer?

I was wondering if openevse is best set up using raspberry pi OS?  The default OS?  Im going to assume this is the case and start there.  The reply isn't useful because it contains no info on which op systems would be useful to use openevse.