Electric vehicle home charging points

What I don’t understand about charge points: supposedly they are all required to be smart now. But which ones are really smart, where can you program charging times, or even connect them to a variable rate tariff? This should really be standard now, but it seems that the software is still not properly developed. 

I know that Zappi, EO and Ohme can do at least some of this, but again it seems to be a patchwork of incomplete solutions. 

I just wrote an enormously long post (tedious on a phone) and just had an error message and lost the bloomin' lot.

Sorry about that @Gingernut49 !

I’ve had that happen quite a few times, since Tim changes my permissions on a fairly regular basis.

The way that the forums work when your permissions get changed is a bit clunky and sometimes a bit too forceful. It shouldn’t happen again though as long as Tim doesn’t fiddle with the settings.

I’ve got some ideas that might help to fix that, which I’ll discuss with Tim.

I’ve just realised I never did write my reply! I had the Project EV charger installed by ChargedEV in late March and it’s absolutely superb. After having faffed around with the granny charger through my open window between the beginning of December and when it was installed, I decided to upgrade my charger to a tethered one and I’m very glad I did.

I particularly like the fact that it charges overnight when demand is low, even though my tariff doesn’t have a nighttime lower rate. It’s at 100% by morning so that’s great. 

I changed to the EV Everywhere tariff but then I realised that I was actually paying 3p per KwH more than the Better Energy tariff which made no sense at all so I changed back. That started months of nightmare when Ovo managed to delete all my bills. I’m on the Heat Pump trial so that meant I wasn’t able to compare usage and costs from the previous year so that was an absolutely nightmare - fortunately now resolved.

Thank you. I'm thrilled with my car and I'm delighted I went for a tethered charger. 

I hated the granny charger. It went out of the window next to where I sit between December and March so was bloody freezing and a nightmare to coil it up back into its bag!

Fortunately I went for the Ovo recommended SmartPro charger which has the Kaluza app with it. Together with my Smart Meter that’s meant I’ve been able to go onto the Drive+Anytime tariff this month so I’m only paying 5p/kWh overnight. Win-win!

Not sure I’m best placed to comment on how Kaluza’s Flex platform would manage multiple EV chargers, @Transparent.

This might be one to keep in mind for a future AMA perhaps (fingers crossed we can get that Kaluza expert booked in)

This might be looking at things on a more macro-level, @Transparent  but I was really interested to hear about how the grid is anticipating the future of EV ownership on The Future of Energy Podcast - The road to clean.

Interesting to hear about the behavioral changes they’re suggesting too - Having access to a vehicle rather than private car ownership perhaps? 

Thanks for linking that one, @Jeffus.

I was actually surprised by how few public EV chargers there currently are - less than 26,000 serving the whole UK! Really highlights the current issues our EV members have described especially when heading into sparser EV areas.

On that topic - How did you find the charging availability on the Isle of Wight in the end, @juliamc? Better or worse than the picture painted by EV charging apps?

We’re still in the sunny IoW, back tomorrow. Thankfully we both agreed we’d need to factor in opportunities to charge, so we used the rapid chargers (43kW) at the Wightlink terminals at Portsmouth and Fishbourne. That meant we had 100% battery to begin the holiday.

There are 2 other rapid chargers on the IoW but neither of them work, they’re shown by pink markers on the ZapMap map: a red edge to the marker shows it’s not working. NB there are far more chargers than are shown here but I’ve filtered to only show ones we would consider.

We’re staying in Ventnor and there’s a ‘Fast’ charger nearby (7kW) but although it seems to be ok now it appeared to be out of service when we walked past it a few days ago. However we had top-up charges at Ryde and again at Freshwater, both at 7kW so a few hours each time, but both while we went off doing holiday type stuff.

The lowest the battery has got to is 55% which would still give us 93 miles, plenty for here though not quite enough to get us home.

So, in short, take @Jequinlan ’s advice and plan ahead. Also be in agreement about the fact that an EV needs charging and it’s going to take some time. Don’t believe that the ZapMap negative comments are necessarily current, and leave an up-to-date positive comment on there when you have a successful charge, so other people know things are going well.

This is what the government says about the transition:

Following the publication of this document, the Government will lay the required regulations in Parliament in 2021. The Government has decided that there will then be an adjustment period of no less than 6 months from the date of the laying of the regulations in parliament and the regulations coming into force, during which properties which have their initial/ building notices or full plans deposited will not be legally required to meet the new regulations. Properties that have their initial/ building notices or full plans submitted in this period must begin building work by no later than 12 months after the coming into force date, otherwise the new regulations will need to be met.

After only collecting our new first electric car at the weekend we are regretting our purchase.

After not getting through to our electric company for 5 days and finally getting through paid for the electric home point then finding out after everyone is purchased that we cannot have our home charger unless we have electric bonding in our house. Has anyone else had this problem? Is it easy to arrange?