I wouldn’t allow it. How safe is it? I keep hearing stories of charging EV vehicles bursting into flames.
Also if the EV company goes out of business you are left with a redundant piece of kit that you can’t have maintained.
what is the maintaining that you have in mind?
Love to see the actual stats on that
Since June 30, 2022, all new domestic and workplace EV chargers sold in Great Britain must have smart functionality. This means they need to be capable of being connected to a network and offer features like scheduled charging and demand-side response.
The units come with a CT Clamp that clips onto the outer cables feeding your consumer unit (Tails).
The reason for this clamp is that with a Smart Charger, the unit will adjust the charging current drawn by the vehicle during charging depending on the amount of load the building is using.
So if for example, the shower, cooker and car charger are all on at the same time, the Smart Charger will ramp down the car charging current until the building load is reduced and ramp it back up again once it is safe to do so.
This is why it is important to have the charger installed correctly, which I am sure if Scottish Power is having it installed, then this will be done to current electrical regs.
The minimum main fuse of some of the older properties are actually rated at 60 amp in some parts of the country, so this must be upgraded by the board to a minimum of 80 amp or even better 100 amp if the board says the underground feeder cable can take this (most can).
But the new Smart Chargers need to be set up by the installer in the Maintenance Menu for the correct size of load the property has i.e. 80amp or 100amp for the CT Clamp sensor to work correctly and balance the load on the system at high usage times.
Hope this helps.
Andy (Electrician and Landlord) Blackpool
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andy45 really knows his stuff, that is great advice. Again definitely go for 100A upgrade, consider where the charger will go. protection from elements/ security/ if there was an electric car fire what’s your escape route, they cant easily put them out so several metres away is ideal/. lastly if you do have a smart charger then go for a higher rating, a 7kW+ unit can buzz away between 2400 and 0500 and is more suitable for a BEV
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Thank god i got mine done for £250 before all that came in. But i did have a lot of problems with tripping until I (not the installer) got UKPN to upgrade the main fuse. The tripping problem wasnt obvious for weeks following the installation as depends what else you are using. Maybe things are better now, that was 2017
anyone buying now would be hard pushed to find an EV charger that isn’t smart. It’s really not that big of a deal. And er… £250 in 2017 is worth pretty much the same as £950 now so there’s that too. Things are a lot better since we installed our smart one in 2019. There’s a lot more regulation which, IMO, is essential for safety.