Is it possible to fit an EV charger in my garage if it's away from the house?

@EverythingNeedsAUserName I'll draw a diagram how mine is done and it's still under the guidelines 

Erm… I don’t see a problem here.

You just need a SWA (Steel Wire Armoured) cable from your Distribution board to the garage.

If you don’t want to dig a trench between the garage and the house, then run the cable overhead and design yourself a climbing-rose arch to hide it!

Nor do you require two separate cables. You could use a four-core SW cable with the trips at the Distribution Board end. Or you could run a (thicker) 2-core cable and put the trips in a new sub-board within the garage.

Have a look at this helpful explanation and cable-calculator from the website of TLC Direct. Their SWA cables and prices are here.

Thanks @Transparent 

The practicality of getting enough electricity to the garage is solved. 

The next thing is how do I physically fit a wall charger somewhere accessible. There is not enough space on the walls outside the garage (37cm). There might be space inside, but the cable(s) would then drape over the top of one of the cars to plug it in. I can see needing a suspended system to hang said cable from the rafters. Then all I need is a car that has its socket on the offside, as I can’t even reach the front of my bonnet when the car is parked.

It will need a survey to be sure, so when I am ready to change my present car, that is probably going to be the first step. No doubt things will have moved on by then.

I hate architects. I hate house builders more, as they cut corners.

Ah… progress is being made @EverythingNeedsAUserName 

I have all sorts of ideas about suspending cables beneath rafters. As a self-builder of many years, I’m well used to devising solutions where none seem to exist!

The key point is to obey the rules for heat-dissipation from a cable. Running it in free air is better than using conduits or going underground.

Feel free to post a photo with arrows pointing to where you think the connection board and chargers might be sited within the garage.

Interesting stuff this, I feel there might be more to come from @EverythingNeedsAUserName 

Out of interest, do these cables really get that warm when in use?

As always, this is going to help anyone else with he same dilemma so please come back to us with the latest! 

@Tim_OVOwrote:

Out of interest, do these cables really get that warm when in use?

You mean the cables from house to garage?

In a word - yes! If you bury an SWA cable in the ground, then you must de-rate its current carrying capacity, or (more likely) increase the size of the conductors..

That’s why I thought I should provide a link to the cable-size calculator on TLC’s website.

To see how much heat it dissipates, enter the figures into the calculator and look at the Voltage-drop it reports. Multiply that by the current, and you’ll have a figure in watts of the losses which will be radiated as heat.

For @EverythingNeedsAUserName to run two 7kW chargers, an overhead SWA 2-core cable to the garage would need to be 10mm² but if he runs it underground, then he requires 16mm². That’s a price increase from £2.60 per metre to £4.64 /m (plus VAT).

And now we begin to see what Kaluza found out when they started installing V2G chargers for the current trial. Once you survey a real house and find a route between the Consumer Unit and the optimal position for a charger, you can quickly gallop through many metres of hefty copper cable!

And if you think we’ve got problems, what headaches do you think the DNOs are facing?

The underground feeds from the local substation to the pavement outside our houses were laid down many years before anyone thought we’d want to be charging Electric Vehicles.

To save money, those Feeds were sized such that they could get hot during the evening peak, and then use the cool hours of the night to radiate that energy back into the surrounding soil. If we now want to charge EVs overnight, that strategy has been blown wide apart .

Since the UK can’t afford to dig up and double the size of all its 440v Feed cables, we need to consider alternative strategies…

That’s why we need someone knowledgeable on this subject from Kaluza to present themselves to our next Forum AMA Topic. The one that comes to my mind is Conor Maher-McWilliams… or possibly Tom Pakenham.

And now perhaps you’ll see why I broached the subject of phase-balancing within the AMA round we’ve just concluded?

It’s not just the substation transformers which get hot; the underground Feeds are equally susceptible to thermal breakdown.

The key to this is to set a levy for customers who insist on using electricity in the evening peak, and ring-fence that to deploy OpenLV monitoring within all 230,000 ground-mounted substations.

The money gets recovered by the DNOs being required to credit back to the electricity accounts of consumers who put their EV chargers at the disposal of the Kaluza Platform. When the substation monitor detects a Feed heading into overload, then it can decouple devices via Kaluza’s smart control system and save the cables from destruction. The credit is due because it’s those customers who have saved the DNO the cost of replacing the Feed cables.

That financial arrangement enables the DNOs to meet their forthcoming RIIO-ED2 revenue-cap targets and everyone’s happy, including their shareholders.

The alternative is dire - a meltdown of our underground Feeds across the entire nation as we all invest in EVs.

Now I realise I’ve gone off-topic from what @EverythingNeedsAUserName wanted to know about putting two EVs in his garage…

… but what he’s facing is a microcosm of the problems we need to resolve nationally.

And I’m just going to tag @D10hul here because he may wish to flag this Topic to others on his V2G FB site.

Thanks @Transparent , yes I have a 10mm cable to my v2g and yes after being plugged in a while even the chademo handle gets hot but the cabling (all out in open) still gets warm! And thanks for the links, are these more links for a handy reference page again? :)

I want to install an EV Charger and take advantage of OVO’s charge anytime tariff.

The location is on the side of a garage some 40m from the electric meter. However the garage has a 40 amp supply (according to my Domestic Electrical Installation Certificate), and its own consumer unit. It powers a number of sockets and lights and also supplies an outhouse with solar panels/inverter and other lights/sockets (used for a freezer and DIY tools).

Does anyone know if the Charger can be connected directly to the garage consumer unit, or must it be connected to the meter? If the latter it will need to avoid existing cables/pipes and be routed through garden & gravel paths and hardstanding. 

Could you clarify a little ​@Kazadilly . I’m presuming that the CU in the garage connects back to your meter anyway?

If that is the case, then it would come down to cabling already installed .. if that is able to take the current consumption required by the EV charger (on top of the existing circuits), then it could have the extra connection added. However, as the EV charger is a high consumption feed, it is probably unlikely that the cabling is sufficient. Most (all?) have their own high current isolator. 
Another consideration might be internet connection. Many of the chargers require a data feed - although your set up might not.

Thanks for your reply. Yes the garage CU is connected to the meter via the house CU and has its own breaker. I’m only planning to charge the car overnight so the only other appliances using the garage supply would be a freezer and small radiator. My electrician has agreed to come by and check the capacity of cabling supplying the garage.

Yes internet connection maybe an issue as the house wifi doesn’t reach to the garage although I think the proposed charger can use 4G. Something else to check.