EV charging: everything you need to know

EV charging: charging at home

You can charge your car using a slow three-prong plug and the adapter supplied with your EV, or go the more sensible route and install a wall box charger. A wall box charger is dedicated to charging your electric car at 3kW or 7kW. For faster charging, you’ll probably need to upgrade your house’s electrical system from single to three-phase, allowing for 22kW charging speeds. 

Smart chargers are a more advanced type of charger. They can be programmed to take advantage of cheap, off-peak charging times. Smart chargers have a WiFi connection that allows you to manage your car’s charging on an app remotely. They can be programmed to charge your battery to a certain level – 80 per cent, say – to maintain the health of your battery. 

Charging your car at home has many advantages, but convenience is overriding. What can be handier than having a fully charged battery every time you use your car? You could say it’s even handier than petrol. And, if you can get away with exclusively charging at home, you’ll not have to worry about problems like broken chargers or long queues for use. 

If you’re lucky enough to have a space at home to charge your EV, then you’ve already cleared one of the biggest hurdles to electric car ownership; charging remains a big problem if you live in a flat with no on-street charge points. 

Charging at home will also save you a fortune against petrol, diesel, or EVs you charge publicly. Many electricity providers offer cheap EV charging tariffs so you can top up the battery at night time when the national grid is ticking over using minimal capacity.

Battery health is a final but essential advantage. Depending on the chemistry of your battery, it might prefer a slow charge to a fast charge. If that’s the case, too much of the latter can harm the usable capacity of your battery and slowly chip away at your car’s range. 

Charging at home does have its downsides, though. You’ll have to pay to have a charger installed at your home (unless there already is one), although it shouldn’t take long to recoup the (roughly) £1,000 install cost in fuel savings. 

The Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV), through the Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme (EVHS), provides a grant of up to 75% of the eligible costs of a charge point and its installation for EV owners (capped at £500, including VAT). 

You could take the nuclear options, avoid the costs and charge using a three-pronged plug, but this wouldn’t be advisable as a modern EV could take days to charge fully. 

Speed, or lack of it, is another issue. Compared to 350kW public chargers, home chargers offer maximum charging speeds of 7kW, meaning it’ll take hours to charge your car at full rather than minutes. 

EV charging: using a public charger

Speed is the main reason you choose to use your public charger over the one you have at home. A new EV mated to a fast public charger can add around 150 miles worth of charge in less than 30 minutes, which would take several hours at home. 

Having said that, if you have a home charger, you’ll probably only ever use a public charger because your battery doesn’t hold enough charge to complete the trip. Public chargers tend to be conveniently located at shopping centres, service stations, and petrol stations, so you can grab a coffee, eat, or shop while the car is charging. 

While the fastest electric charges tend to be expensive, it isn’t always the case. Council-operated chargers often offer desirable rates that could be even cheaper than home charging.

However, fast chargers at popular locations tend to be expensive, costing close to petrol prices. There are other disadvantages to public chargers; they might be out of action or in use – sub-optimal if you’ve planned your trip around using that charger – and they might also struggle to reach the charging speeds claimed. Fast charging can also deplete the battery capacity of some cars. 

Types of charger connectors

You get three types of public chargers: slow, fast, and rapid. 

Slow charge points are similar to a home charger. They’re cheap but will likely take several hours to charge an EV with a dwindling battery. Fast chargers are the happy medium of charging; not too expensive but not too slow either. Rapid chargers are the quickest, but you pay a premium for the speed. 

Finding a charge point

Finding a charge point shouldn’t be difficult. Most electric-car sat-navs, as do apps like Google Maps and Waze, highlight charge points. You can also download specific EV map apps like Zap-Map, Plugshare and Open Charge Map. 

Planning longer trips

One of the most stressful parts of EV ownership can be range anxiety, the creeping feeling that your EV will run out of juice, stranding you in the middle of nowhere. It’s worth using an app to plan your trips to avoid it happening. 

ABetterRoutePlanner (other route planners are available) is one of the best. Using it, you can plan your route to your destination around charging stops, taking into account charger speeds, the consumption of your EV, and the weight of passengers and luggage. You can also use it to plan how much electricity you want in reserve when you reach your destination. 

Cross network cards

Cross-network cards like Chargemap Pass or Shell Recharge take some of the hassle out of charging your car. These cards can be used with multiple providers, using a single card rather than numerous cards, apps and logins. They give you access to hundreds of thousands of chargers and a bill at the end of the month that records your use.

What is vehicle-to-grid (V2G)? 

With more than a million battery electric cars in the UK, the country is potentially sitting on a gold mine of surplus electricity dormant in the batteries of EVs. V2G opens the mine, selling its cheap electricity back to the grid at its peak and avoiding expensive infrastructure investments. It could also have the more tangible benefit of powering your house directly in a power outage.