Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:48:27 +0000Grizz

I spent a lot of time deciding what L2 charging station to buy for the EV9.  I thought my requirements were pretty basic:

 

* Tough enough to live outside through Wisconsin winters (getting easier every year)

* NACS connector for the vehicle

* Plug-in (so if it breaks I can swap it out without cutting the power)

* 40A or more

* Doesn't require the Internet to work

 

I thought I could take advantage of our utility companies offers to get a discount but they offer a limited selection and of the two that met my requirements, neither was in stock.  On the up-side, I had a lot more devices to choose from, even if I was going to have to pay full price.

 

I decided to go with Grizzl-E, and after using it for about a week, I'm very satisfied with this choice.

 

As you can see, physically you couldn't get much simpler.  It is a sturdy metal box with one indicator.  It comes from Canada so while I'll have to wait a few months to see how it holds-up in the winter myself, I'm pretty confident that anything which can endure Canada's winters will do fine here.

 

I was planning to get the non-connected "Classic", but they don't offer it with a NACA connector.  Since I don't want to have to deal with an adapter at my own charger I bit the bullet and went with the "Classic Connect", figuring that if I don't want to deal with the "Connect" part I could just refuse to give it access to the network.

 

Installing the charger was straightforward and configuring it for charging was simple.  All the necessary hardware was included and the hardest part was deciding on exactly where to put it.  Once it was on the wall the electrical task amounted to plugging it into the outlet we had installed as part of a larger service upgrade.  Configuring the device for charging amounts to unscrewing four hex bolts and setting a DIP switch to set the maximum charging current.

 

That's all you need to do to start using the charger, and it works great this way.

 

Of course I got curious about the "connected" part so I worked-through the process of getting it on the network and used the provided app for monitoring.  The app is surprisingly simple and easy to use, but you want to play with it when it's OK to interrupt charging because some actions will do that.

 

This got me wondering if anyone has experimented with connecting this to Home Assistant, and sure enough, someone has.  I can't use their integration due to limitations of how I have HA setup (that's a whole 'nother post) but I did learn that it's trivial to get data out of the charger, and you can do it using curl.

 

 

 

 

Not only does this give you data, it's a nice JSON structure that is easy to parse instead of some proprietary thing stuffed with crud you need to ignore/discard!

 

 

 

I was very hesitant to get a charger with any "cleverness" because I didn't want to rely on it and I definitely didn't want to be locked-in to using some cloud/app/etc. to charge the car.  If they offered the "Classic" with a NACA connector I probably would still have gone that way, but it's pretty awesome that they make it this easy to interface with the unit, and with a little more digging I'm sure I could control it as well.