10 things you NEED TO KNOW before getting an ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING POINT installed at your home

hello jordan here from artisan electrics welcome back to the channel today i want to make a little video for you about the 10 things that you need to know if you want to get an electric vehicle charging point installed because we get customers coming to us all the time and they want a charge point installed but they just don't know where to start so hopefully this video will be of benefit to you if it is don't forget to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel for more regular video updates so we're here today we've been fitting this mayan uzapi charge point for one of our customers we've just finished and one of the first things that we need to know if a customer approaches us to have an electric vehicle charge point installed is what is the size of the main cutout fuse so when you approach an electrician or electrical contractor to get a charge point installed you'll need to tell them what the size of your main cutout fuse is and for most homeowners they don't even know that they have a main cutout fuse or where it is so i'm going to show you where the main cutout fuse is and how to identify what size it is so that you can pass that information on to your electrician and potentially you can then send them the photo of what they need to know let's go to the meter box because usually your main cutout fuse is located in your electricity meter box so we'll go there so this is the electricity meter box usually located on the outside of a house but sometimes it's inside under the stairs or something like that but generally where your meter is is where your main cutout fuse will be so this gray box here is called your service head this whole thing this is the incoming supply cable from the electricity supplier it goes into this service head and it goes through this thing which is called the main cutout fuse and it's usually got a couple of tags to hold it in place so that nobody can pull it out because if somebody pulled it out they would cut off all your electricity but it has a rating and that rating is in amps and in this case we can see it says 100 a fuse fitted that means 100 amp fuse fitted so usually these will be labeled especially if they're new and there is actually a label on the side as well i don't know if you can get in there and see that but just inside is this blue label which identifies the fuse that is held within the carrier now you might wonder why do we need to know what the size of the main cutout fuse is well it's all about the load that the electric vehicle charger will put onto your system because an electric vehicle charging point seven kilowatts puts a 32 amp load onto your electrical system constantly while the vehicle's charging and that's a lot of power when maybe your house would only have a 60 amp main cutout fuse that electric vehicle charging point is going to use half of all your electricity capacity straight away and there's a risk that if you had lots of other things going on in the house you could end up blowing the main cutout fuse and losing power to your whole house and having to have the distribution network operator come out and fit a new main fuse for you so as an a qualified electrician and installer of ev charge points we need to check what size your main fuse is and generally what we'll do if it's not 100 amp is we'll recommend that you contact your dno or distribution network operator and get them to upgrade it to 100 amps that's something that they usually do free of charge it's quite an easy job for them but for them to do it they'll need to do a couple of things so let me talk to you about that these things these brown and blue cables are what's called your meter tails so you've got meter tails coming from the main cutout into the meter out of the meter into a main isolator switch which this is to shut down the power for the whole house so that if anyone's working on the consumer unit they can do that safely and then out of this main switch it goes to the consumer unit all of these tails need to be 25 square millimeters cross-sectional area so that's the cross-sectional area of the copper inside the cables needs to be 25 millimeter squared if your fuse is only 60 amp and it's an older property it's quite likely that these tails will only be 16 millimeter squared and that means that you'll need to get the tails upgraded before the main cut-out fuse can be upgraded to 100 amp so that's something that uk power networks or whoever your dno is they can check that or you can get an electrician to check that and often your electrician if you send him a picture of this he will be able to identify from the picture the size of the main tails and tell you whether they need upgrading or not so that's one thing size the main cutout fuse you need to give that information to whoever's planning to install your ev charge point and if it's not 100 amps already it's worth just trying to get it upgraded the other question that you will be asked is do you have a looped service and again most people like what on earth is a loop service a loop service is where your supply cable here comes in and then potentially another one goes out to the property next door so you'd have a cable coming in and a cable going out that would mean that your house and the neighbor's house are both sharing the same main supply cable and if you do have a loop service and that can mean that there's a limit on the amount of power that you can actually take and they might not be able to upgrade your main fuse so when your electrician asks you do you have a loop service it's worth just checking do you have one cable coming into the cut out or do you have two if you have to you're probably on a loop service but you could be on the end of the line so you could have one cable coming in but your house next door could have two because you might be on the end of line so you won't necessarily know for sure whether you have a loop service or not just by the number of cables but it gives a good indication and you can ask your uk power networks or whoever your distribution network operator is you can ask them and they will know from their records if you have a looped service or not another bit of information that you need to give to your electrician in order for them to register your installation with the distribution network operator is your m pan number that's mpan and what that is is your meter point access number i think the a is i'm not sure sometimes they call it meter point reference number it's basically the identification number for your electricity supply and it will be on your electric bill and it's a number that's kind of like in a rectangular box divided into smaller boxes it's like an 18 digit number or something and quite long that is the number that you need so if you someone asks you for an mpan number then just get your electric bill out and take a photo of the number that's on your electric bill in the rectangular boxy thing and then send that to your electrician and that will satisfy that requirement the next thing that we need to talk about is earthing and bonding because any good electrician who's adding a significant load to your house will need to do a few safety checks to make sure that the existing installation is safe to connect to and one of those things is we need to make sure that the main bonding is installed to the water and gas pipes and any other incoming services so i'll show you how you can identify that now so we'll take the long trip to the gas meter we'll just open this gate here and we'll get this gas meter box open because we need to check if you've got gas at your property has the gas been bonded and the simple answer here is yes so this is what we mean by a gas bonding connection you have this green yellow cable which is quite thick it's 10 millimeter squared cross-sectional area and it has what we call an earthing clamp or bonding clamp installed to clamp on to the main pipe just after it leaves the gas meter sometimes it's done in the box here or sometimes it's done just where it comes into the property on the inside of the house so you'll need to check that and the great thing you can do to help your electrician is just take a photo of it and send it to him then he knows that he doesn't have to worry about installing bonding to your gas while he's there because that can add a significant cost to the installation if that has to be done at the same time as the charge point the other service that needs bonding is the water so we'll go inside and i'll show you the water bond so now we're inside we're going to find the main stopcock for the water which is the internal one within the house where you turn all the water off for the house and in this house it's in this cupboard here so you can see down here this is the main stopcock it's even nicely labeled in this new build property which is quite rare look mains water stopcock on off so you know if you turn that off it's going to turn the water off in the whole property now in this case it comes in a blue alcathean plastic pipe comes to here and then it goes to copper and we can see here there is a main bonding connection for the water which is exactly what we would expect to see and it's nice and tight and done properly so that's really good so that is another box ticked that everything is safe here for us to add a new circuit for an electric vehicle charge point now your main stopcock for your water is usually under the sink um in the in most houses it's under the sink so you probably have to clear all the stuff out and have a little look but somewhere within about a metre of that pipe there should be a connection like this and you just need to check that and send a picture of it to your electrician so the next thing that we need to check is your consumer unit which people might know as a fuse box it's basically where all the electrical circuits are going out from in your property so in this case we have the concealer unit here in the same cupboard as where the electric where the water stopcock was and we can lift the flap and just take a look now what your electrician will want to know is do you have a spare way in your consumer unit so as you look here this is the main switch then you've got various circuits here and at the end here we have one which says spare and it's just got a little blanking piece in it so that means that in this case there is a spare way in the consumer unit sometimes they're completely full they're all labeled up with various things and there's no extra space and that will make it a little bit more challenging to install a charge point now in this case we've already done the installation we've been able to shuffle things around in here a little bit to create a non-rcd way for the cons for the electric vehicle charger which is what we needed we've shifted everything across and we've labeled it all up again neatly but there is still a spare way for future capacity for example if the customer wants to install solar in the future he's got a spare way to be able to do that so that's important to know is there a spare way in your consumer unit and your electrician will want to know what type of consumer unit do you have is it a modern one or is it an old-fashioned one because if it's quite old if it's plastic maybe if it's got the old fuses that push in then you'll probably either need to get the consumer unit upgraded or you'll need a new consumer unit installing for the charge point only now this house is brand new build so it's a perfect example of what we would like to see which is that you've got a surge protection device here in the consumer unit that will absorb any surges from the main supply and send them down to earth which will stop items of electronic equipment being blown up in the event of a surge and when you've got an expensive vehicle plugged in with an expensive ev charge point you don't want that to get blown up so having a surge protection device is good and we usually recommend installing one when you have an electric vehicle charging point installed if you don't have one already but what if you've got no spare ways in your consumer unit what can be done can you still get a charge point installed well yes you can but probably what will need to happen is the electrician will need to install an additional consumer unit maybe just a small one next to your existing consumer unit so the question he would ask is do you have space near the existing consumer unit to add a new consumer unit and in this case you can see there's not really a lot of space because the gap here is too small there's pipes here on the other side we probably would struggle to fit something in below we might be able to fit something above but what your electrician will want to see probably is a nice wide angle view of this whole area where the consumer unit is so he can see if there's enough space to add an additional consumer unit there and if there isn't then he might need to think outside the box and try and find a different location to put the new consumer unit but that's important to give those kind of photos or obviously when he comes to do the survey if he comes to do a physical survey he'll be able to have a look at that and tell you what is possible and what is not possible so once we've figured out all the electrical side of things another important thing that you need to know is where do you want the charge point to be located so we'll go back outside and we'll talk about that now so we're back here outside and the question is where do you want your charge point to be located for most people they've got their own driveway or parking space and they've got a wall and they think okay like whereabouts on the wall should i put the charge point to plan the right location what you really need to know is what your vehicle is going to be and whereabouts on the vehicle will the charge port be located so for example on this job if you know what the vehicle is it's a tesla model 3 and the customer probably will be reversing their vehicle in like this into this parking space i've got my tesla here right now because i've been working out of it today and i've parked it the other way so the charge point is right on the far side but if we flipped it around and reversed in the charge point of the tesla is on the left rear which is about here so that is perfect for us to put the charging point here and then all we have to do is unwind we probably don't even need the full six and a half meter length of cable and we can just plug in to the rear charge left hand side charge port on the vehicle so that's ideal what you want to think about is where will the cable trail when you're plugging in the vehicle because you don't ideally want it trailing across anywhere that the somebody might trip over it so you need to think about that and ideally just keeping the cable length as short as possible from the charge point to the vehicle so there's a little bit of thinking behind that but then you've also got to think about aesthetics so where will it look nice in this case we've lined it up with the the sign of the house so that it's directly below the house sign there's a a rule about what height it needs to be so your electrician will have to fix it at a certain height he won't be able to put it super low like this or super high because that's not acceptable according to the regulations so this is about the height that it needs to be to be installed to the regulations then once you know where you want your charge point to be you've got to think about the electrician's cable route how they're going to get cable from the consumer unit to the charge point so we'll talk about that next so the electrician's going to have to figure out how to get a new cable from the consumer unit to the charge point and that varies massively from installation to installation this one is probably one of the easiest we've ever done because the consumer unit is just behind there it's about two or three meters of cable and we were able to drill through the wall at an angle come out exactly where we wanted it just below the consumer unit but most installations aren't that simple and there's a lot of thought that needs to go into the cable route to make it as neat as possible but also compliant with the regulations and safe so often what is needed is for the cable to be clipped direct to the surface so we would probably clip it down here and then along the outside of the house to where the consumer unit is and then we would drill in and come into the back of the consumer unit or the room where the consumer unit is and your electrician ideally if you want to make his life easier and make him love you to bits what you need is to do a little drawing of where you think the cable route should go and say take some photos of the outside of the house where the route would run or inside of the house if it has to run internally and that'll give him a really good idea of how much cable is needed what the route's like if he needs any additional conduit or trunking to hide the cables what type of cable he needs what size of cable he needs all these things have to be factored in and that will affect the price of your installation so it's really good if you can provide as much information and as many photos as possible that will really make your electrician's life easier so i have a lot of customers who say to me i want a 22 kilowatt charger i want the fastest possible charge for my house because i've got a volkswagen e up that i want to charge up within 10 minutes and realistically most people don't need a super fast charge this is a seven kilowatt charger so it will charge my tesla model 3 performance up overnight from zero to full 300 miles of range it'll charge that in about 10 hours so 30 miles per hour is roughly what you get about 28 to 30 miles per hour of charge with a 7 kilowatt charger now unless you are doing hundreds of miles a day and coming back and having to charge up really quickly and then go again you won't need a 22 kilowatt charger or even an 11 kilowatt charger because most people are only doing 30 40 miles say and then they're coming back and they're charging up overnight so you'll actually be topping up for an hour or two overnight with a seven kilowatt charger and you'll be absolutely fine you need to know about your vehicle though what capacity does the on-board charger have because the actual vehicle can only receive a certain rate of charge no matter how fast your wall charger is the vehicle is limited so for my tesla model 3 it's limited to 11 kilowatts so even if i had a three-phase charger here 22 kilowatt the vehicle would only charge at 11 kilowatts and most vehicles can only charge at a maximum of 11 kilowatts um for smaller vehicles like the vw e up for example and quite a few other vehicles they're limited to three and a half kilowatts so even with a seven kilowatt charger you're only going to get a three and a half kilowatt charge anyway because they've got a small battery and they don't need to charge up very quickly i recommend for most people that you go for a seven kilowatt home charger that way you future proof yourself even if you do have a vehicle that can only charge at three and a half kilowatts if you ever change that up then you've got your seven kilowatts of capacity but you generally don't need any more than that unless you're doing loads of miles so it's good to just work out your daily mileage and work out how long it'll take to charge if you're charging overnight seven kilowatts is good for most people so another question that a lot of people want to know and is important to know before you get your install done is what functions do you need with your electric vehicle charger because there are so many different charge points out there and they have different functionality there are what we call dumb chargers and there are what we call smart chargers a dumb charger is basically just like a socket that will provide power but has no internet connection no no far no smart capabilities whatsoever no app nothing like that you just plug your vehicle in and you go those chargers are not available under the grant scheme now because smart charging is required by the grant but for some people it's a cheap way of doing it and they don't want to claim the grant however having a smart charger like a zappy for example gives you extra functionality that might be useful for example this has solar integration so if you have solar panels you can set this up to charge purely on green electricity that is excess to your house capacity and rather than selling it out to the grid you can use it to charge your vehicle for free which is really nice function you don't have to have solar to have a zappy because it's got loads of other amazing features so we fit this as standard for most of our customers but it's good to know what the functions are for example do you need timed charging if your vehicle doesn't have a timer system set up on it then you might want to have a charge point that can do timed charging so you can set it up to charge at certain times of day some of our customers are on the octopus agile tariff and they want to be able to set the charge point up to synchronize with the cheap electricity that octopus agile provides and to be able to charge at those really cheap rates so there are various charge points that enable you to do that including the my energy zappy that has recently got on board with that as well so that's another thing that you might want to think about what functionality do you need do you want an app to be able to monitor how much electricity you've been using to charge your vehicle the my energy zappy does that as well in fact it kind of acts as a smart monitor for your whole house so you can see how much electricity your whole house is using and how much of that is being directed into your vehicle so smart functionality what functions do you want those are the kind of things that you need to decide before you go ahead and book an installation so what fit and finish do you want let's have a look so this is the miner's uzapi charger it looks pretty smart as you can tell it is not the most beautiful charger on the market there are more beautiful ones but it's pretty smart pretty neat and it comes in white or black tethered or untethered so four options basically for a seven kilowatt charger um the black option has a black cover here and a black plug so you might want to choose a black one if you've got lots of black accessories around your house or a white one if you've got lots of white accessories your preference and it doesn't really make much difference to the price of the installation the other options are tethered and untethered now tethered means this basically it's got a cable attached to it so that all you need to do is unwind and plug in and you're good to go untethered is where you've got a socket in the front no cable so you need to buy or use that you use your separate uh electric vehicle charging cable and plug it in the disadvantage of that is that every time you pull up you've got to get the cable out of the boot plug it in both ends and then you can charge unless you leave it just trailing on the ground or you hang it up around or something but often the color of the cable doesn't match the charge point and so it's a little bit tricky to um to to do it just makes life a bit more difficult so what i recommend a standard is just go for a tether charger then you just rock up in the vehicle you unwind you plug in and you're good to go and if it's raining or something like that you don't have to try and get cable out of the boot and faff around with that now there are lots of other options when it comes to fit and finish for example if you want a really beautiful charge point that matches the colors of your house there's the anderson a2 which is a kind of like a rectangular box the cables hidden inside and the front and side panels are customizable so you can choose different colors there are about 10 different colors and four different wood finishes and you can mix and match so that you can get something that matches the front of your house it's a little bit more expensive but it's nice for maybe listed buildings or houses where the aesthetics are really important then if you really don't care about what it looks like you can go for a lot cheaper charger that looks pretty hideous if you want to but usually we recommend that either the zappy or andersons are the best options out there at the moment so i hope that answers all your questions and you know a little bit more now about what to provide your electrician in terms of information when you want to get an electric vehicle charging point installed all these things are really important to plan your install to get it done properly safely so if this video's been of benefit to you share it out to somebody else who might enjoy it too hit a thumbs up if you haven't done so already and subscribe to the channel for more great videos coming soon thank you for watching and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Artisan Electrics

Views: 773,228

Keywords: electric vehicle charger installation, electric vehicle charger, electric vehicle charging, electric vehicle charging course, electric vehicle charging point, electric vehicle charging point installation, electric vehicle charging station, electric vehicle charging uk, ev charger installation, ev charger installation uk, ev charge point installation uk, ev charger, ev charging point installation, ev charging station installation, ev charging station, ev charging uk

Id: mzAi1hMUaDw

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021