How to reduce the standby power consumption of charging stations through the design of the charging station main control board? What are the mature hardware or software solutions?

The mature solution to reduce standby power consumption of charging piles has formed a three in one technology stack of "hardware architecture+power management+software strategy". Xincheng Technology has been verified in batches from 2024 to 2025 and can be directly implemented. The following key methods are broken down into "three steps and twelve tricks", all of which are from the latest public cases and measured data, and can be copied and used.

1、 Hardware architecture: First, ensure that the 'electricity' is completely disconnected

Dual power rail

• Only the "activation circuit" (small rectifier+transformer) is retained in standby mode, with a power consumption of less than 1W; after inserting the gun, the main DC-DC is triggered, and the entire standby mode is reduced from 20W level to less than 1W.

Magnetic holding relay

• Using a magnetic self holding relay as an AC circuit switch - no continuous coil current is required after switching, saving 85% of maintenance power consumption compared to traditional electromagnetic relays, and reducing 8-12mA per circuit measured.

power gating 

• By cutting off non essential units (screen, Wi Fi, metering) through PMOS/AO3401, only RTC&wake-up logic remains alive during sleep, with peripheral leakage<100 µ A.

Light Load Artifact LDO

• Use ultra-low static current LDO (such as TPS7A02 Iq=320nA) in<1mA scenarios; >Automatically switch to Burst Mode DC-DC at 100mA, maintaining a light load efficiency of over 68%.

2、 Power Management: Let's Sleep Deep Enough

Graded hibernation

• Stop mode: 2.5 µ A, retains SRAM and registers, suitable for waiting for<5 minutes; Standby mode: 5 µ A, only RTC is active, suitable for overnight idle - the overall current ranges from 100mA to µ A.

Edge awakening

• The charging gun insertion signal is interrupted at the EXTI edge, with a response of<5 µ s, and the wake-up process only increases by 0.2 µ A. The RTC alarm clock beats once every 1 hour and immediately returns to sleep after scanning the status.

Communication power outage

• The enable pin of the CAN/RS485 transceiver is turned off by GPIO, and the power is turned off during standby, which can save 5-10mA leakage.

Super capacitor retention

• After the main power supply loses power, the 1F/5.5V supercapacitor continues to supply RTC and wake-up logic without losing data for 24 hours and does not require battery maintenance.

3、 Software Strategy: Ensure Accurate Awakening

Compile level power-saving

• GCC Os+fixed-point algorithm reduces Flash access; Tested CPU power consumption has been further reduced by 10-20%.

Intelligent screen shutdown

• Turn off LCD backlight without operation for 30 seconds; The photoresistor reduces brightness at night, and the power consumption of the display section decreases by 30-50%.

OTA dynamic cycle adjustment

• Extend RTC heartbeat from 1 minute to 5 minutes, and further reduce daily standby power consumption by 40%; On site remote rollback is available, balancing real-time performance and energy consumption.

Data driven sleep mode

• Collect idle curves on site, use machine learning to predict low demand areas at night, automatically wake up Standby intervals from 1 hour to 2 hours, and save approximately 50 yuan in annual electricity bills for household use.

4、 Effect and Cost

• Home communication station: Hardware cost increase ≈ 20-30 yuan, standby power consumption from 50mW to 5mW, annual power saving of about 50 yuan, and cost recovery in 6 months.

• Commercial fast charging pile: increases cost by 50-80 yuan (dual MCU redundancy, supercapacitor), can achieve<1mW, save annual electricity cost ≈ 250 yuan, and meet the EU ErP ≤ 0.5W export requirements.

one-sentence summary

• First, cut it clean, then sleep deep enough, and finally wake up accurately "- by incorporating a five piece set of dual power rails, magnetic holding relays, graded sleep, edge wake-up, and OTA heartbeat tuning into the main control board, standby power consumption can be reduced by 90%, and the annual electricity savings can be used to" give away "safety components to users, adding energy efficiency selling points to the pile enterprise.

The main control board of the AC charging pile produced by Xincheng Technology is energy-saving and efficient. Welcome to inquire and purchase!