EV Chargers for Your Home

It’s probably the question that we get asked the most by our customers so we’ve tried our best to answer it below – have a read and of course if it doesn’t quite answer your questions please just get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk through with you on the phone… or email if you’re not a phone person.

So, the first thing to remember when choosing a home charger for your car is that all home chargers will charge your car at the same rate. There are one or two exceptions to this but over 95% of our installations are for 7kw chargers using 32amps of current which equates to roughly 30 miles of charge added to your car’s battery for each hour of charge. You might see some chargers for sale that are advertised as ‘3.6kw’ or ‘22kw’ but these are very rarely actually installed and, in the case of the 22kw chargers <1% of domestic properties in the U.K. can support these (plus if you’re charging overnight like most people a 7kw charger will comfortably give you a full battery in the morning).

The second thing to remember is that almost all home chargers work for almost all makes and models of electric vehicle. With the exception of the pre-2018 Nissan Leaf every widely available EV from the little Renault Zoe to the big Tesla Model X uses a Type 2 charging cable and every home charger either has a Type 2 charging cable permanently attached (‘tethered’) or has a Type 2 socket which your vehicle’s charging cable plugs in to (‘un-tethered’).

So, given that they all largely charge at the same rate and are all suitable for nearly all vehicles what is the difference between them? Well we find that for most customers their decision is swayed by a combination of how the charger looks, how much it costs, how suitable it is for their property, whether the charger will work elegantly with the more advanced electricity tariffs such as Octopus Go and, finally, whether it will play nicely with their Solar PV to allow a cheap, green charge.

If your charger is going to be installed on the front of your property you will likely want it looking neat and unobtrusive. The smallest charger available is the Ohme ePod which is 17cm x 13cm x 10cm (about the size of a bag of pasta) for the untethered version.

Tethered chargers such as the Hypervolt or the Ohme Home Pro are a little bulkier as they have the charging cable permanently connected. They all come with a holster for the cable and you can wrap the cable around the unit to keep it neat and tidy.

We try to supply and fit a range of chargers at different price points and a standard installation typically costs between £899 and £1199 depending on the charge point you choose. We’ve installed over 8,000 charge points up and down the country and 92% of these have been ‘standard’ installs which means the price you see on our site is what the install costs.

Sometimes installs do cost more than this though, for example if we need to dig up your driveway and install a post for the charger or if the route for the power cable is particularly long. We always check and discuss these things with you beforehand though and our quotes are always fixed so you know exactly what you’re paying.

Most properties in the U.K. have either a 60 Amp, 80 Amp or 100 Amp main supply fuse. When having a new home charger fitted the ‘Maximum Demand’ (which is another way of saying ‘the maximum amount of electricity that a property is likely to use at once’) increases by 32 Amps so all home charger installs need to be approved by the relevant DNO as part of the install process.

We look after all of this for you of course and because all the charge points we install come with a CT Clamp that allows the charger to dynamically control its power output there isn’t normally an issue installing a new home charger.

Every home charger that we supply and install comes with the ability to schedule charging to suit your electricity tariff. This is normally done through an iOS or Android App and this means that if you are on a tariff that gives you better electricity rates at certain times (e.g. Economy 7 or some of the other tariffs that work alongside a Smart Meter such as Octopus Go) then you can schedule your car charge to coincide with this.

Charger points such as the Ohme ePod, Ohme Home Pro, MyEnergi Zappi and the Hypervolt have direct integrations with the energy providers who can then control your EV charger to suit the cheapest charging times on your tariff.

If you are lucky enough to have Solar PV on your roof then you will probably be wanting to use this to charge up your car – it’s a great feeling driving around on your own free power! Technically all chargers will run off a solar PV system (just like your kettle) but the myenergi Zappi is definitely the best charger for a solar integration. It will let you prioritise charging for the sun is shining and will also let you ‘trickle’ charge when it’s a little more overcast.

Do bear in mind though that if you are on a flexible tariff and you have an export tariff for your Solar PV then you might be better off exporting any excess solar during the day and waiting until the cheap overnight rates kick in to charge your car.