VO4Home set reduction v Vphase's solution

[brman]

Haha, nothing like a good old fashioned skeptic Worcester ;-). Sorry, I am not generally one to use forums and just came across this after doing a bit more post installation research hence no introduction and in with both feet! I can only go by what I have experienced and that is that the Vphase came out on top in my comparisons. I did a fair bit of umming and arring before deciding which to go for. They all have their pros and cons and it seems the lower capicity of the VPhase is it's main downfall but shouldn't be a problem in the majority of homes. The reason I decided against the Voltis was the fact that it doesn't optimise below 300W and the fact that it and the V04 home are essentially just step down transformers and also cost (and weigh) a fair bit more. It is true that the Vphase can't be installed straight from the meter but why would you want to try and optimise a heating element? My son installed our Vphase (He's the electrician) and found no problem in splitting the board.

A slight correction to this. The Voltis (VH60HD to make sure we are talking about the same unit) apparently optimises at any current above 0.5A by default, this is user settable to 0.2A. So I make that about 115W down to 50W or there abouts. It is also 40A max continuous, 60A for 30 minutes before dropping to bypass mode. This isn't entirely obvious from the tech info on the website but I have had it confirmed by their technical support.
There does seam some slight advantage to splitting the CU in that you don't end up optimising cookers and immersion heaters (which is counter-productive) but I guess you could still split off the cooker/immersion to a not optimised board with the voltis if you wanted to.

I take it from what you are saying the vphase is not tranformer based. So must be a switch mode design? I can see an advantage in that in that it could maintain a constant output voltage for variable (within limits) input voltage but I think you would struggle to get a switch mode as efficient as a transformer so I am not sure it will really gain anything in reality. That is assuming my knowledge of smps design is not too out of date anyway!

I should add that this is all theoretical, I haven't actually installed any of these beasts but I have been looking at whether they are worth installing.