After Ohme decided they couldn’t install a charge point at my address, I decided to try and get permission to have it done myself.
British Gas have got quite a nice deal going, it does cost about £1000 to have it installed, but you get free charging for a year.
So I contacted my Council and got the usual double speak, despite it being central govt. objective to get us to all use EV cars and phase out petrol and diesel, which I think is great, the Council won’t allow the installation of a Charging point on my house.
Which makes the whole Motability point moot.
Although most people in my area park up on this green lawn in front of our houses it’s like public land not to be confused with communal land, according to the Council they can’t give permission to do it officially, which means that you cannot have a charging point installed because you are not allowed to park on the green grass, if everyone was unable to do this, I would have no problem with that, after all I don’t like to see the grass getting tyre tracks on it, but everyone already drives on it…
So I figured, why not run a cable 20 metres long to the residents parking bay and I can then charge my car, it’s a direct line, there is no one who would walk in that area, there is no traffic in that area, just flat grass with a footpath going around the lawn.
The official response to this was that I could not do this because it would “trail” a cable across it. When they cut the lawn they use an extension lead, seems a little bit hypocritical to be complaining about a fully insulated cable going across the lawn for 20 metres.
“We cannot allocate parking in the resident parking bay”, though there is not enough space for me to park my car, 10 parking places available, 10 houses, but 2 of the houses use 5 bays…really this Council.
Having been shot down on allocated parking space, I photographed the other cars all parked in the parking space, wtf where am I supposed to park, let’s see that ruling 🙂 – incidentally purely by coincidence, if your parking is allocated you are allowed to get a charge point installed there.
On the matter of driving on the lawn, they told me “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES CAN YOU DRIVE ON THE LAWN”even once a fortnight to charge your car, ofc everyone else does this, though not charging their cars, but they just don’t care about the grass, what the Council thinks and does seem to be two separate things, because it’s not official and they cannot give permission they therefore cannot give permission for the charging point, ofc if someone were to take a photograph of all the cars doing this, I wonder what the Council would say?