While it’s great (read: essential) that you can pull your NIUs battery and take it with you to charge it wherever possible, a static solution can be very convenient.

Clever stuff

Piet, one of our many nice myniu.org readers provided me with some pictures of his clever DIY “Wallbox” solution I’d like to share with you.
So here’s the wall-mounted original NIU charger – so far so good:

The clever part is what’s behind the socket in which the charger is plugged in. So the socket itself is connected to his switch-cabinet which again uses a Sonoff POW R2.

That’s a Wifi controlled switch with quite some cool features:

• Remote Control  –Turn electronic devices on/off from anywhere
• Monitor Energy Usage  –Keep track of live power, current and voltage of your appliances inside the App
• Historical Energy Consumption  –100-day daily/monthly energy usage data and total electricity cost
• Overload Protection  –Set power, current and voltage threshold values to let appliances auto-off
• Measure Power Usage for a Period  –Measure your appliances’ power consumption for a specified time
• Sync Status–Real-time device status provided to App
• Timing Function –Supports 8 enabled scheduled/countdown timers
• Smart Scene–Triggered on/off by temp, hum or other environmental conditions from a sensor
• Free iOS and Android app
• Compatibility – Works perfectly with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT, Google Nest

So that’s definitely something I have to have a deeper look into… just think of e.g a Bluetooth beacon attached to your NIU. As soon it’s out of reach, the power’s cut.

The simple way

My current setup is a bit simpler. A lame socket mounted to the wall next to my NIUs “corner” – because it’s a semi-public garage, I don’t leave the charger there permanently :

The power-line goes to a locked place and there into the ANSMANN plug described in this FAQ entry. It cuts off the power as soon the consumption goes below a programmable level.

Do you have a static charging solution, too? We would be happy to hear about it in the comments!