My loopy home charger tale
On the first of February 2020 hot off the heels of buying my first electric car i proceeded to upgrade my energy supplier account to their EV charging tier.
They were for a limited time back then the only provider that would install the charger for free, the usual extortionate rates are about a grand out of which the ‘OLEV Grant’ also known as Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme (EVHS) provides 75% off the cost of purchasing & installing a home charging point upto a maximum of £350.
Now, the car i bought came with a 3 pin socket charger that i could just run trough the window and get a 3.6kW charge so having the new one installed especially on a rental property was by no means a necessity, but as it would not const me anything i thought it's worth the convenience of charging at 7kW and not having to mess about with windows.
For half a grand more and in the unlikely case you are lucky to have a three phase power supply you could get a 22kW charger, now that is what i would consider a charger, not just marginally faster than what i can get from a socket, the 7kw one is basically a glorified power socket extension with a Type2 connector, nevertheless i went for it.
This is going to be a recollection of what followed in the hope that it will help potential charger buyers make more informed choices and get a idea of the time scale and work needed from start to finish.
Step 0: Make sure you have smart meters if the instaler requires it, it's somtimes a prequisite and a separate team handles that so you cant have it all done in one go.
Step 1: choose a charger, 3.6, 7 or 22kW, tethered or not, i advise tethered so you dont mess about with cables and 22kW if you can
Step 2: chose a location close to the power box, take a photo of it and sketch where you want the box to be, take more phothos of access etc
Step 3: send the phothos to the installler and wait, i've sent mine on 13 Feb and had a booking for a instaler to do the work on 16 Mar
Step 4: EV charger installer arrives, they might need a separate team to upgrade the part that sits between your meter and you power supply, that took a hour or so, it belongs to the power grid.
Step 5: actual charger installation, conecting to your router, placing the charger, connecting to the power, could take half a day, mine was aborted half way through
So here comes the rub, even after all these steps and all this pereparation it turns out i had a "looped power supply" quite comon for terraced houses it means the power cable does not run from your house to the street, instead it runs from neighbor to neigbor to neigbor then to the street at the end.
If you have a looped power supply you can't have the charger installed unless the UK "Distribution Network Operator" consents to a looped instalation, otherwise the DNO needs to be called to dig up the street, disconnect you from your neighbour and connect you directly to the street power line, this needs permission from neighbours and it all done on your charge.
Now i have no ideea if the DNO will ever consent to a looped instalation at all or what are the costs to un-loop a power supply, all i know is that the purpose for sending the phothos to begin with is to make sure the charger can be installed, which by the looks of it can be overlooked so long storry short, make sure you dont have a looped power supply.
Here is the photo that i sent to my installer before the attended the property, wether you can tell or not that its a looped power supply i don’t know, i suspect that if there’s two cables going into the bottom part of the black box then the supply is looped..
Top white box is the smart meter, bottom black box is the one owned by the grid
Long story short i did not feel like a measly 7kW charger is much use anyway so i’m sticking to my portable charger that just plugs into a power socket, in a future post i’ll detail my experience with it after a year of use.