Electric cars - Driveway essential?

AnotherJoe

Mgman1965 wrote: »

When i was on holiday last year at a Haven caravan site I saw more than a few with their cars charging leads trailing across the grass and into their vans.

Remember thinking at the time its only a matter of time before they ban this on the grounds the cables are a trip hazard to pedestrians and could be downright lethal if the guy cutting the grass doesn't see one.

Plus the fact their caravans electricity is unmetered, they won't want everybody charging their cars day and night at Havens cost (be like me filling my cars LPG tank off their unmetered gas supply).

How about something radical like put charge sockets for cars in the car parks. With a mechanism to charge the electricity to the user?
I doubt they'd be charging their cars night and day since they'll either be out, or the car would be full !

Uxb1

Its all pie in the sky.
Together with all gas boilers going to be ripped out and replaced with ...err electric I presume.
Its not so much the generating capacity - its more the local electric infrastructure.
That means all the transformers in local substations plus the cables feeding the houses which were never sized up for the sort of loads now being envisaged.

A few months ago an area had a gas failure. N.Grid handed out some fan heaters probably 2KW to people to manage with to keep warm. The result - the local substation fuse blew: and that was just a load of simple fan heaters!

Output from a local substation is probably fused at around 750 amps in each of the 3 phases to protect the supply cable. (House cutout fuses are usually 80 or 100amp)
So each phase can supply 180 KW at 240Volts.
It only works OK at the moment as not everyone is going to be switching their 10KW showers on at the same time.
Its comedy gold to this think this is going to work without huge expenditure on upgrades and lots and lots of digging.

Mickygg

In answer to your question OP I would say yes it could be an issue. If the standard in years to come is to charge cars at our homes then the obvious place to put a station would be on a driveway.

My view is that something will come to challenge electric cars. If everyone has an electric car there won’t be enough electricity to supply them all. Just imagine the cues at charging points and the call outs needed to AA should the charges not be extended to enable many more miles to be covered.

mj2014

I’ve been reading this thread with interest...I would like to get an EV in the next few years and am in the process of purchasing a property with 2 allocated parking spaces right near the house, but separated from it by a small garden and a short path leading up to the parking spaces. The property also comes with a garage which is in a row of 3 garages about 30 m away- one side of the garage is attached to the next garage, the other side is attached to a neighbors house.

The garage has electricity and I think the vendor said there is some sort of cable running underground to our house from the garage which may pass under the parking spaces. I perhaps naively assumed I could get an EV charging point in one of the allocated spaces...I guess we could have a charging point in the garage, but we were planning on mostly using that for storage.

Can anyone tell if it would be feasible to have an EV with this setup? It’s a little hard to explain...property ref on Rightmove is 29409633

davidmcn

mj2014 wrote: »

am in the process of purchasing a property with 2 allocated parking spaces right near the house, but separated from it by a small garden and a short path leading up to the parking spaces.
Can anyone tell if it would be feasible to have an EV with this setup?

I wouldn't expect that the allocated spaces include any rights to start installing charging posts etc (and it would seem too much of a coincidence for your own personal electric cable to be running under your allocated space).

It’s a little hard to explain...property ref on Rightmove is 29409633

Not https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-29409633.html obviously - want to try again?

mj2014

Oops! Wrong one...here is the link with spaces.

https:// https://www.rightmove .co.uk/property-for-sale/property-76909837.html

So you don’t think the parking spaces allocated to the house would be allowed to have a charging point installed if there is access to the electric underneath? He told me the cable to our garage is underneath the ground there or something...

I guess the only option would be to have a charging point inside the garage as there’s no space on the outside of the garage to put a charger...

markin2

mj2014 wrote: »

Oops! Wrong one...here is the link with spaces.

https:// www.rightmove .co.uk/property-for-sale/property-76909837.html

So you don’t think the parking spaces allocated to the house would be allowed to have a charging point installed if there is access to the electric underneath? He told me the cable to our garage is underneath the ground there or something...

I guess the only option would be to have a charging point inside the garage as there’s no space on the outside of the garage to put a charger...

What is the chance that they sized the cable to the garage to charge a car vs just lights? And no i don't think its possible to just tap into the the wire, you would need to run a new wire to the parking spot.

davidmcn

mj2014 wrote: »

So you don’t think the parking spaces allocated to the house would be allowed to have a charging point installed if there is access to the electric underneath? He told me the cable to our garage is underneath the ground there or something...

Can't really work out from the ad what the arrangements are, but normally an "allocated" space isn't a rectangle of land you can do anything you like with, it's merely a reserved space in a communal car park, and all you can do with it is park your car on it. So I wouldn't expect you to have any rights to start installing charging equipment on it. But you'd need to check the titles.

mj2014

I guess I would need an electrician to come look at it...I think there would be a way to at least put one in the garage. I checked the title plans and there is a red outline of the house which also extends around the parking spaces, the small path up to the parking spaces and the parking directly in front of the garage - maybe this means there are some rights over them that would allow a charger to be installed. It seems close enough we might be able to get electric right from the house and have a cable go along the path up to the parking spaces...
I'll check with the solicitor anyways. 

AnotherJoe

Thrugelmir said:

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Gradually increasing to match, just like happened when electricity was first rolled out and when gas was first rolled out. No big deal, no big drama. It is currently lagging behind where it needs to be though.

Estimated cost is the region of £700 billion for the UK alone. Will need 4,000 charging point installations a week. The 2050 objective is going to require a fundamental shift of attitude. Then there's the question of ethical mining to be addressed along with the disposal of old battery waste. Going green isn't all enviromentally friendly.
Batteries are good for 20 years (car and then second use) before they need recycling and then the valuable materials will be recycled and reused. We are after all told how rare and expensive they are by those argiung against E cars so they wont just be chucked away.
Considering the entire population of Norway is half that of Los Angeles. A drop in the Ocean so to speak when it comes to global change.

Not the point. What Norway can do, so can we .

700 billion? LOL. Million, maybe. 

Those numbers are nonsensical. Do the math. 4,000 chargers a week to 2035 is 3 million chargepoints.

700 billion divided by 3 million means that  each chargepoint costs 233,000 pounds.

Mine at my house was maybe £750 (gross, before the grant)

Perhaps some FUDster decided to take the cost of a supercharger (not a home charger but the type of charger you'd see at a Motorway services) and decided we need 3 million of them?

Since there are (according to govt) 245,000 miles of roads in the UK,  3 million chargers woudl mean one roughly every 150 yards. Which would certainly be very convenient. But perhaps overkill ?

FWIW National Grid (yeh the folks that actually know about electricity) reckoned it could be done with 50 major charging locations (big ones with 50 chargers in each). Even if they are off by a factor of 10, thats 25,000 chargers (fast ones) which is again somewhat off your 3 million, which at 250k a pop is 6 billion. Or 6% of HS2.

I dont know if you noticed but the times posted last week how we'd need "an extra 20 nuclear power stations". They retracted it a day or two later  after discovering their maths was off and actually we didnt need any.

But again the FUD sticks, people remember the headline, forget the retraction on page 27 in font size 2.

There's a lot of FUD around from people who have a vested interest in keeping us breathing in carcinogens and making carcinogen producing machines.