Help please! £3000 to Install home charging point for electric car

thevilla

Regarding the £1500 charger price: I just had quotes for a zappi of £850 to £2k.  The difference was fitting into the meter box which is cheaper but frowned upon or a new CU. I went for the former assuming if the DNO cut up about it the price to resolve the issue would be around the difference in price I just saved.

shane2k

this is why people dont want electric car its many years before its ready

AdrianC

AdrianC said:

Ectophile said:

Rural transformers are often weedy little things, feeding a group of houses through very long, but equally weedy wires.  The moment you ask for an upgrade to your power supply, the electricity company will want you to pay for any upgrade work they need to do.

We have a transformer behind our garage, serving our little cluster of eight houses and a small farm.

It was replaced 6-7yrs ago, when the garage was being built, because access was good at the time. They installed the same rating as came out - 300A, fused at 200A. Single phase, even though all three 11kV conductors come to it. Same size as had been installed in the 60s, when AC first came here.

I asked why - the answer was that the upstream network was so finely balanced that they simply weren't upgrading anything unless they absolutely had no choice, just replacing like-for-like.

So even if we wanted 3ph, it wouldn't be as simple as just paying to upgrade the transformer.

Talking to somebody who lives three doors (and about a mile and a half) away the other day, he's trying to get Western Power to upgrade to 3ph. He's wanting a 22kW x 2 charger, plus he's wanting a serious-size solar array in a field.

His transformer will almost certainly supply his property only - there's no other property within 500m of him, and only a handful within 1km.

Be interesting to hear what they say, and how much...

ElefantEd

shane2k said:

this is why people dont want electric car its many years before its ready

That's odd, I've had an EV for 7 or 8 years now, and after about 150,000 miles they certainly seem ready to me! As for people not wanting them, according to https://www.ev-volumes.com/ sales have increased by 168% in the first half of 2021 compared with the previous year. So some people do, apparently, want them. Not everyone, I grant you that. But 2.65 million new owners isn't nobody either.

SingleSue

ElefantEd said:

shane2k said:

this is why people dont want electric car its many years before its ready

That's odd, I've had an EV for 7 or 8 years now, and after about 150,000 miles they certainly seem ready to me! As for people not wanting them, according to https://www.ev-volumes.com/ sales have increased by 168% in the first half of 2021 compared with the previous year. So some people do, apparently, want them. Not everyone, I grant you that. But 2.65 million new owners isn't nobody either.

Certainly not ready around here, only a couple of charge points and they don't all work either!

I can't go plug in, the infrastructure is not there to make it a viable option and I can't charge at home as I don't have a driveway.

Advocado

ElefantEd said:

shane2k said:

this is why people dont want electric car its many years before its ready

That's odd, I've had an EV for 7 or 8 years now, and after about 150,000 miles they certainly seem ready to me! As for people not wanting them, according to https://www.ev-volumes.com/ sales have increased by 168% in the first half of 2021 compared with the previous year. So some people do, apparently, want them. Not everyone, I grant you that. But 2.65 million new owners isn't nobody either.

I know four people who have gone EV.  Two have gone back to petrol, one has gone back to a hybrid and the fourth hasn't long had their ID.3 but they're not too impressed and are already talking about going back.

They had to do a long journey the other week.  They planned their charging points but they were all out of service (which apparently you only learn once you arrive and plug in).  They spent a large part of their day driving looking for working chargers and the ones they found charged really slowly.  

The journey took something like 10hrs instead of 6.

I've seriously looked into it a couple of times, but the cost and inconvenience are still too much for me to bear.  Electric cars are great for a particular use-case, but for most they just don't work.