EV Charger Installation & Tariff

matt_drummer

I stand to be corrected but as far as I am aware none of these chargers are actually chargers, they are just power supplies, the chargers are within the cars.

I think there is more risk of a problem with the use of extension leads (of perhaps poor quality) to enable use of the granny `chargers'

We have two Zappi chargers at work, five were needed on initial installation to find two that worked properly.

One has now failed after three years. It can't be repaired.

They want £420 for a reconditioned one with no warranty and £840 for a new one with warranty.

That is supply only.

They're not great for the money for what is essentially a power supply with a timer.

FreeBear

born_again said: While I do not disagree with @Reed_Richards That granny chargers can be cheaper for many. 
It needs to be tempered to warn people to fit a proper dedicated 32Amp supply for them.

A dedicated 32A circuit is not needed for a granny charger. What would be a better solution if there are concerns about using a 13A plug & socket is to install an industrial 16A socket (blue round type).

SuzeQStan

Reed_Richards said:

Thanks @FreeBear, that OpenEVSE kit does look quite tempting.  And the point about the availability of an outside socket is fair enough.  But my point is that people have been conditioned into thinking "Have EV, must get wallbox charger" and that just isn't true.  

We ran a PHEV off a 3 prong plug for 4 years and melted 2x extension/surge protection devices. Luckily I’ve a good sense of smell and sniffed it out before anything too bad happened.

we got a Ohme epod installed when we got
our EV6 about 6 months ago - by Octopus - and it would have all been straightforward were it not for our solar battery which kept discharging to the EV instead of from grid during cheap tariff times (they did do the workaround fix we found online for them eventually.)

we are low users like @Reed_Richards alludes to (less than 30m per day total) but our payback date is still 2.5 years on our Octopus installed Ohme (£895 sup+ins) 

one thing I will say is that Octopus sent 2x trainees with the person who was there to install our charger. I don’t think that someone can learn
properly if it’s not one on one and it did make me wonder the pressure they are under if they are
training like that.  

Also they used fob off lines on us like ‘that problem will be sorted by the next software update in a few days time’ and ‘it can
tale a few hours for it to start working / registering as it should’. 

Recommendation to anyone proceeding with charger install - don’t be fobbed off - be the squeaky wheel till everything works as it should and be prepared to have to tell them how to make it work once you’ve looked online.

still worth it to my mind 

Reed_Richards

SuzeQStan said:

We ran a PHEV off a 3 prong plug for 4 years and melted 2x extension/surge protection devices. Luckily I’ve a good sense of smell and sniffed it out before anything too bad happened.

Any reeled extension cable should be completely unwound before connecting any high-power device.  I'm not clear what you thought the surge protection device was protecting; it's not as if you couldn't charge a car with much more power than you get with a granny charger.  I think the moral is "don't use a granny charger if it has to be on the end of an extension cable".

SuzeQStan said:

we are low users like @Reed_Richards alludes to (less than 30m per day total) but our payback date is still 2.5 years on our Octopus installed Ohme (£895 sup+ins) 

No it isn't, you are making the wrong comparison.  You should be comparing Ohme (£895) against Granny Charger (about £100) plus Outdoor socket with dedicated wiring to consumer unit (guess £250)  Both would do the job, so from my perspective you just paid about £545 more than you needed to.  But you're welcome to show your working about how you arrive at that payback period.  
  

SuzeQStan

It was plugged into an outdoor socket with the end of granny charger in a waterproof box due to distance from car to outdoor socket.  It was a bad situ and potentially dangerous was not expecting things to melt but they did.

if you want to take 24 hours to charge your EV to full be my guest. 

Reed_Richards

SuzeQStan said:

It was plugged into an outdoor socket with the end of granny charger in a waterproof box due to distance from car to outdoor socket.  It was a bad situ and potentially dangerous was not expecting things to melt but they did.

if you want to take 24 hours to charge your EV to full be my guest. 

But I almost never need to charge my EV to the full, and, by your own admission, neither do you.  If I have been on a really long journey and it's "empty" and I charge it to one third full overnight, it's very rare indeed that that won't be more than enough to cover my needs the following day.

Buyer's remorse?    

Exodi

I had seen a lot of discussion and content online that that suggests granny plug should only be considered as a 'backup' or for emergencies (of course, some of these sources could be EV charger suppliers). I think the gist from this thread is that this solely as a consequence of people using extension leads or adapters?

I would have thought inevitably charging by granny plug would cause more charging cycles, which in turn would degrade the battery (but of course one could argue the cost of this degradation is countered by the upfront of installing a dedicated charger).

I installed a dedicated charger - I think at the time I was in cloud nine at the fact I was saving £200 a month in my pay packet having an EV. Now I have it, I think I enjoy the convenience of only needing to charge it once a week or so,  I think it would probably be annoying having to plug it in every other day (as I usually reverse onto my drive, but I have to park forwards to charge it from the port on the front). Who knows, maybe that's my brain trying to rationalise the purchase as I already own one. If I could go back in time, I don't know what I would o. I've put 6000 miles on the clock in 9 months so about 22 miles a day (in theory this averages to granny charging once every three days or dedicated charger every 9 days). In reality there are occasions I've needed to use the dedicated charger multiple days in a row when my wife has me driving around the country picking up nursery furniture. It would have been a nightmare paying nearly 10x what I do at a service station EV charger (but I don't know if it would have been enough to outweigh the install cost).

Food for thought. I don't have a plug on the front of the house so I would have had to run an extension lead from somewhere, so it probably wasn't an option for me to begin with.

SuzeQStan

Definitely not 😊

because of the charger we have been able to make use of 🐙 intelligent go which gets us 6 hours of 7.5p per kWh per night. Without charger we would only get 4hrs of charging at 8.5 per kWh.

based on that alone for the 4 year duration of the company car EV that adds up to £232 of savings on charging which by your calculation reduces our ‘overspend’ to around £300.

there are safety considerations as per my original post (charging at night not great time for something to go wrong) and also convenience factor.

we have a friend who doesn’t go anywhere at the weekend in his EV as he has to spend the whole weekend charging his EV on the granny charger. And he’s worried he won’t have enough to drive to work if he doesn’t. That just doesn’t seem right to me.

we like to have weekends away and travel - if we only had the granny charger we would have to charge at expensive fast charging points which further erode the savings you have identified.

 

Exodi

SuzeQStan said:

Definitely not 😊

because of the charger we have been able to make use of 🐙 intelligent go which gets us 6 hours of 7.5p per kWh per night. Without charger we would only get 4hrs of charging at 8.5 per kWh.

based on that alone for the 4 year duration of the company car EV that adds up to £232 of savings on charging which by your calculation reduces our ‘overspend’ to around £300.

there are safety considerations as per my original post (charging at night not great time for something to go wrong) and also convenience factor.

we have a friend who doesn’t go anywhere at the weekend in his EV as he has to spend the whole weekend charging his EV on the granny charger. And he’s worried he won’t have enough to drive to work if he doesn’t. That just doesn’t seem right to me.

we like to have weekends away and travel - if we only had the granny charger we would have to charge at expensive fast charging points which further erode the savings you have identified.

Of course you could switch supplier to someone like EON Next and get 6.9p/kWh for 7 hours with or without a dedicated charger.

BarelySentientAI

Exodi said:

I would have thought inevitably charging by granny plug would cause more charging cycles, which in turn would degrade the battery 

I'm not sure it would.  The amount of charging is surely based on the mileage of the vehicle?

If anything, faster charging, which allows a vehicle to be driven further and/or more frequently, would promote a higher number of cycles.  Or perhaps you mean that people would plug in more frequently to keep topped up because if their battery drained it would take too long to fill?  So not charging 'cycles' but rather charging 'events' (which mean something a little different to battery designers).

Generally with batteries, charging rapidly at either end of the state of charge and/or at 'extremes' of temperature are the most damaging for the battery - although that's what the battery management system on the vehicle should be dealing with anyway.