Charging at home. Brace yourself. There are two main options fro charging at home, a box on the wall or a 3 pin plug. The slowest is the 3 pin plug option. Running at 10-13 amps maximum draw the charger will take a long time. From empty a 50 kWh battery is likely to take 15 hours or more. The bigger the battery, the longer that becomes. It also has some safety considerations. You’ll be drawing the maximum power a domestic plug was designed to draw over a very long period of time. That means that if there’s any weaknesses within the house’s electrics this might find them and bad things could happen. Also, if the connection isn’t perfect then this level of power will cause the electricity to jump between the connectors – known as arcing – this is very bad and will generate a lot of heat very quickly. I’ve seen plugs outdoors melt and plugs indoors cause fires. If this is the only option to you, I would start by getting an electrician to install a dedicated cable from the main fuse board through to the wall nearest where the car will charge. I’d then put a high power socket in a safe box (with a lock if possible and if accessible to the public) and charge from there. The quicker option is an installed box. This runs at a greater rate with a dedicated cable from your main fuse box. This can charge a car overnight from empty to maximum charge. I’ll not go into all the different brands and stuff, it’s a huge market and there’s limited differences. All should work on a timer basis and most will operate from an app on your phone. They’ll also be smart boxes, so will connect through your wifi to the internet and onwards to the manufacturer and, potentially, your power supplier. This will enable a process known as throttling, where the power fed to the car through the box is reduced or even stopped when demand for electricity is at it’s highest (dinner time, for example). This is one of the government’s strategies to guarantee that the national grid doesn’t collapse under the increased demand. Whatever option you have, you need to be off street. You can not leave a cable across the pavement or a public access throughway. If anybody trips over your cables, you’ll be liable for injuries. You can, depending upon your council, have a gully cut into the pavement for a cable to run safely and you might be allowed to use a cable guard (rubber mat type thing) to enable the cable to be trip proof and allow wheel chairs/ pushchairs to pass without difficulty. With a domestic electricity supply you might have a cheap rate of electricity, if you have a smart box, time your charging to make the most of this reduced cost power. Here’s where your ‘fuel’ needs to be treated differently. With an ICE, you fill up and then use at will, until you hit a point where you go to a petrol station and fill up again. With an EV, you don’t need to do that, most cheap rates are 4 hours, which won’t get you from empty to full. It will, most likely, put in more than you would use in your normal day. So, you park at night, plug in and forget your car. In the morning you unplug and you’ve more than enough for your normal day’s use. If you live more than 100 miles away from where you work, this might need to be treated differently but as most people commute for 45 minutes or less and drive 30-40 miles at most to get to work, you’ll be fine. You will quickly get used to the concept of charging when you need, as governed by the amount of miles you do daily and whether you’re going on a long trip anytime soon. It won’t be long before the idea of stopping off somewhere to refill the car feels wasteful. Remember, most cars are only in use for 1-2 hours a day, for the other 22, they’re sat doing nothing.
I was under the understanding the 3 pin granny chargers we limited to 10 amps
Unfortunately I have suffered a brain injury and occasionally I get confused and often say the wrong thing.