Installing a Home EV Charge Point - Everything you Need to Know

our lease car went back in october last year so i thought this time around i'd embrace the electrical revolution and lease an ev instead but little did i know that just about every barrier that could have possibly existed to installing one of these charges did in my situation so i thought it'd be useful today to pass on to you everything i've learned during this process everything i've had to go through both financial and diy related to make this happen and i'll also be advising you on all the mistakes i made the things that didn't occur to me and the extra costs i've had to incur so that hopefully it'll arm you with all the information you need to decide whether you're ready to take the plunge [Applause] to keep this video completely impartial i've paid for everything you see in today's video including this charging point behind and the company charge dv who installed it didn't pay me anything to mention them but you might see this video has been marked as containing paid product placement this is because today i've taken the very rare step of bringing in a sponsor drayton wiser smart heating something i've only done a few times since starting this channel and i only do this where i've got experience of the sponsored product being brilliant and most importantly where it's got nothing to do with the video what can i say about the drayton wireless system well check out my vid from a year ago for a complete rundown but suffice to say it's been bulletproof since installation smart thermostats can be added to each radiator so you can set different room temperatures and heating schedules for each room in the house which they reckon can shave a good 200 pounds off your annual heating bills or a saving of 39 over a traditional timer and room thermostat system you've got geo fencing which switches off the heating automatically when the last person leaves the house and an eco smart mode which adapts your heating depending on the weather switching off sooner whilst maintaining the temperature the app tells me energy savings each month but bottom line i genuinely love this system and a lot of you out there seem to too judging by the comments below my video i'll put a link in the description below this video to where you can find out more well i've got quite a lot to get through today which i'll run through as quickly as possible you can see on screen now the areas that i'll be talking about there are two ways you can charge your ev firstly through a typical three pin plug socket which gives you a power of about 2.3 kilowatts and secondly a lot faster by means of one of these bespoke charging ports typically at seven kilowatts although if you're lucky you've got a three-phase supply 22 kilowatts so a friend of mine has one of those golf id3s and he was charging it through his kitchen window so i thought i could go one step better and plug it into an old three-pin plug socket here in the garage but unfortunately it's just not that simple firstly with a three-pin plug charging at 2.3 kilowatts charging a 78 kilowatt hour battery like ours from empty is going to take at least 34 hours fine if you don't make a lot of long journeys but it's a disaster if you make long journeys one day after another i say at least because there are other factors to consider like the fact that the three pin plug socket in here is linked to our house by 1970s power cable stretching about 30 meters from the house with a cross-section area if i'm being generous i reckon of about 1.5 millimeter square an early version of this mineral insulated copper clad cable and if you try and send a flow of electricity down a cable like that you get what's called voltage drop even slow charging from a three pin plug now voltage drops down the length of a cable because of the resistance in that cable and where you've got an old cable like mine over this long stretch that resistance is going to be considerable and you can see the voltage dropping here where i up the current in the car from 6 amps to 32. although for a 3-pin socket the current's going to be limited to 13 amps and the car has actually shackled it to 10. but that 208 volt reading in the car is wrong and we've been chatting about this on our discord group and we think it's probably because the car calculates voltage from current and power rather than actually measuring it like you would with a multimeter you can see from this table the difference between actual voltage during charge and what the car is reporting it as but the point here is that as you can see the true voltage drop from the old 1970s cable is a worrying eight percent when charging at 10 amps but shackling this down to six amps brings a voltage drop down to a much more acceptable four percent now with any luck most of you won't be needing to charge your car so far away from the house but hopefully this little example illustrates that you can't just plug your car charger into any old three-pin socket around the house without doing at least a bit of detective work just to make sure your wiring is up to it because a large voltage drop can overheat your wires or at the very worst actually melt them to decrease the voltage drop you have to increase the cross-section area of that cable which lowers the overall resistance of the cable length but as cable is expensive as you'll see shortly you need to find a cable that fulfills your requirements without overspeccing it which will waste your money in my case an almond cable with 10 millimeter square cores is adequate even for my seven kilowatt charger over that 65 meter run which is what i've got now that's the consumer unit in the house and thanks go to thomas and dalton on my discord chat forum for helping me calculate that although there are online calculators available which can give you a bit of a heads up on your situation which brings us neatly onto the second point in this video now the majority of ev installers are using this evie ultra cable at the moment with six millimeter square cores which is generally more than adequate for the shorter cable runs that they've got between the charger and the consumer unit ev ultra cable has either four pairs of ethernet cable incorporated into the actual cable itself or as in this case just one pair now the reason for needing the ethernet cable is you need at least one pair of ethernet wires if your charger like mine has active load management or as the indra charger calls it load curtailment and what it's doing is it's monitoring the power being used to make sure your charger doesn't overload your power supply and what's happening here is you've got a communication directly from the charger back to the meter box where a ct clamp attached attaches around one of the tails as you can see here just something to be aware of if you're thinking about installing solar panels you'll also want to utilize another pair of wires in that ethernet cable because the inverter will also want communications back to the meter box again with another ct clamp and finally depending on what charge you decide to put in more on that in a minute you'll want to connect to the charger via the app on your phone and for that the charger typically communicates with your home wi-fi network or via a fixed ethernet connection or in the case of this one via a 4g dongle it can actually do both now in my case i obviously needed 10 millimeter square cores in my cable and ev ultra i don't think generally comes in this thickness a little bit you can probably put in a special order for this so i decided to install two swa armored ethernet cables in the same trench as my electrical cable and here is all 130 meters of it ready for install one going direct to the meter box and a second connecting back to the router in my house which i've used to install wi-fi in the garage useful for security cameras and if we ever decide to convert the garage so let's run through the other issues i encountered on this project next we've got the main cutout fuse upgrade the dno as i often call which stands for distribution network operator had to upgrade the cut out fuse in my meter box from the 60 amp fuse that was there to this 100 amp fuse why is that important well it's all about the additional load your car charger puts on the system if you imagine that your seven kilowatt car charger puts a 30 to 32 amp load on your system and you've only got as i had a 60 amp fuse you can see you've already used up half of your capacity in the system and so you only have to have somebody running a power shower hot tub or an oven and you could potentially blow this main cutout fuse now you'll find that the suitability or otherwise of your fuse all gets flushed out during the onboarding process when you sign up with an ev charger installer like the one i use charge tv during which they'll ask you a series of questions like your mpan number which you can get from your electricity bill they'll want photos of your existing consumer unit and your meter box and what they'll probably do is contact your dno to ask them to upgrade the fuse if that's what needs to be done that cutout fuse upgrade by the dno is by the way done free of charge now if the dno upgrade your main cutout fuse they'll probably also ensure that the tails going from the cutout fuse to the meter are also upgraded to 25 mil i don't think they've actually changed mine so they must have been adequate so the next thing we've got to talk about is upgrading the fused main switch and the tails running into it and out of it firstly the fuse made switch is only 60 amps and needs upgrading to 100 and secondly i've got 16 millimeter tails here that need upgrading to 25 millimeters square both from the meter to the fuse main switch but also from that switch to the consumer unit now i don't have a clue where those have been channeled by my predecessors back in the 1970s but i suspect that channels somewhere through this wall in the downstairs toilet which is no longer allowed so i've got a couple of problems here point one where the tails leave the switch views and head into the consumer unit i've got to somehow find a way of channeling a new set of 25 millimeter tails from an upgraded switch fuse i think we're going to install something like this through trunking which is compliant with electrical rags back to consumer unit in the house but the other problem we've got is this these tails here from the switch fuse into the meter box are strictly speaking the property of the utility company now they'd probably be quite happy for me to supply new tails and after all i have some left over but in an ideal world the utility company need to attend on site to connect these tails into their meter and guess who my utility company is bob who've gone bust and whilst you're utility providers on site you also want your dna there to take out the main cutout fuse to knock off the electrics so that your utility provider can upgrade the tails between the meter box and your new 100 amp fuse main switch and i guess your electrician to upgrade these tails from the fuse main switch back to the consumer unit to 25 millimeters squared luckily though because my charge has got load curtailment on it and therefore shouldn't overload the system i've been able to install that seven kilowatt car charger that will come onto a minute whilst for the time being leaving these 16 millimeter tails and of course the old fused main switch in position until i've had them upgraded which i'm going to do shortly now moving on to number five loop services not something that's relevant for me thankfully everything else seems to be but i thought i'd mention it because loop services happen where you share your supply with a neighbor and the clue again will be in the meter box if you've got more than two supplier cables coming into the service head or main cutout fuse the problem with showing your main supply with the neighbor is it limits the power that you can take and determines whether this main cutout fuse can be upgraded or not whether you've got loops tails is another question that the ev installer will ask as part of the onboarding process because to have a seven kilowatt or higher ev charger you've got to have your own mains grid access and again this is something the dno will sort out and i don't think you get charged for this but your neighbor won't be very happy if you've got to dig up their drive to do it the next point the ev installing company going to want to know about is that all the earth bonding has been correctly done to the gas and water my supply comes via overhead pylon so for earthing i'm reliant on an earth stake down in the basement with all the water pipes earthed when the state was installed but how does the ev installer connect his new seven kilowatt charge point to your home electrics well i decided to take a new feed from the garage directly to my home consumer unit but some charger installers have in the past and maybe still are connecting to your electrics directly in the meter box i'm guessing they do this via an additional consumer unit in the meter box but there's a interesting video by efix which explains why you shouldn't do that i'll link to it in the description below this video the reason for this is that the dno actually owns the space inside your meter box so they might not take kindly if you reduce that space by installing a new mini consumer unit because their point is they might need that additional space in the future as electrical components get upgraded so the following assumes you're going to connect your charger like i have to the main consumer unit in your home so you've got to check if you've got a spare way or space in your consumer unit for a non-rcd way and if you haven't then you need to ask yourself if you've got space for a new consumer unit or indeed you could upgrade your existing one and i had as you can see here two consumer units with two rcds in each now there wasn't much wrong with these two consumer units in store when i bought the house in 2010 except i didn't have many spare ways left on the second board and actually none that weren't on rcd circuits so as i was going to get my electrician in anyway to connect the armored cable to a new consumer unit in the garage and the one in the house i thought i'd upgrade this second consumer unit to a new metal one in line with electrical rags this time with rcbos in place of the rcds that were in the old board why would i do this well rcbos are superior to our cds in the sense that they trip individually whereas in the case of the rcd it takes out all five mcbs miniature circuit breakers that are attached to it and by having that rcd in built into the rcbo you're actually freeing up extra ways on your circuit board because you can see here each art cd actually takes up two ways on the board so what i've ended up with now is a 40 amp rcbo in the house fuse board to feed the garage also with this inbuilt surge protection and then we've got a new consumer unit up in the garage with a main switch and individual rcbos to feed the garage supplies and of course the 40 amp rcbo to feed the new car charger and as my house has nerf stake i decided to save a bit of money and dare i say it the convenience of having a slightly less bulky cable by going for two rather than three-quarket armored cable and instead install a new earth spike up at the garage now choosing the location of my charge point was nice and simple there wasn't really anywhere else i could put it proximity to your car is the obvious thing but you've also got to think carefully about minimizing the cable run from the charge point back to your consumer unit in the house let's have a quick look at charge speed this seven kilowatt charger will now charge my 78 kilowatt battery from pretty much empty to full charge in just under 11 hours which quite honestly has been a game changer we're no longer reliant on fast charges when we're doing a long journey on consecutive days we were having to journey into town where there are still far too few quick charges check what capacity your car's onboard charger has it may be limited to three and a half kilowatts but you might still decide to put one of these seven kilowatt charges in just in case in the future you change your vehicle to one that allows for seven kilowatt charging you've also got to think about what charger to go for charges come in a variety of shapes and sizes both dumb and smart but the key things to consider are do you want it to be tethered like this one which comes with an inbuilt cable or untethered we decided to go tethered to remove that hassle factor of having to reach for your cable either in the car or in the garage every time you charge it up do you want a charger that has solar integration some charges like this indra have solar integration which allows you to charge your car entirely on excess electricity generated by your solar panels now some charges allow scheduling to access cheaper nighttime tariffs i've actually just switched from bulb to octopus which has a tower enabling you to access four hours of cheap charging overnight at 7.5 per kilowatt hour obviously not long enough for a full charge but it helps although i should point out that bulb also have an ev tariff which you can switch to over the phone if you have a compliant smart meter some chargers also monitor electricity usage and cost now a few people have said to me i'm going to wait until i get an ev because the car dealer will probably sort out the car charger be wary of this because a lot of car dealers have entered into preferred partnership with charger installers or charge point operators and these deals may not be the best and the charges themselves might not be the best for your requirements and don't forget if you have a three-phase supply you can of course benefit from a 22 kilowatt charger now the next section was the most arduous part of the project for me and hopefully something that most of you out there won't have to worry about plotting a 65 meter route from the garage back down to the new consumer unit in the house the new cable would have to head diagonally across the garden go under a brick garden wall which i ended up having to demolish because the concrete foundations were too thick to drill through the dear or guy who owned the house before me i think was even more ocd than i am and after all that i had to drill a series of holes in my half meter thick flint and clay cellar walls to get the cables into the house something that even with my beast of a titan sds drill i really struggled to do now the plan was to dig a 450 millimeter deep trench for the 10 millimeter armored cable and after digging about 2 meters i realized i wouldn't be able to dig the whole thing by hand and managed to borrow a three and a half ton digger from a friend up the road here's me on day one learning how to use it fortunate as it turns out because of none of my local heart shops had any available diggers now you'll often want to surround the cable with gravel to protect the cable from stones as the earth settles around it but i didn't bother here because there were very few stones in the trench and actually for about 30 or 40 meters of it as you can see here i had a thick band of almost pristine sand about 400 mil down from the surface and the other measure you need to take is to lay warning tape above the electrical cable the main 50 meter section of the trench was simple enough with the digger but a 15 meter section would have to be dug by hand as i couldn't get a digger into the bottom half of the garden but as the digging progressed and i realized the extent to the carnage i was creating i turned my mind to future proofing we may at some stage try and get planning to turn our garage into living space for our son who has special needs so i decided now is a good time to get water up to the garage from the house this meant increasing the depth of the trench along its entire run to 750 milliliters to lay a 25 millimeter diameter mdpe water pipe at the bottom of the trench i also decided to lay an additional 25 millimeter square armored electrical cable in the trench partly because it occurred to me that with the possible addition of solar panels and if we were to convert the garage to living space the 10 mil swa wouldn't be sufficient clearly if i'd thought about this earlier i wouldn't have had to spend 230 quid on the 65 meters of the 10 mil swa because the 25 millimeter would have been more than adequate for both the ev charger and for any future requirements in the garage and finally we have the steer wire armored cat5e data cables which i positioned at the other side of the trench a bit higher up than the electrical cables to minimize any interference those cables might create with the data i made this measuring stick with the key 450 and 750 positions marked on it but i have to say digging that 15 meter stretch to 750 mil deep was absolutely exhausting and i could only tackle about three meters a day it's also very exhausting and time consuming gradually filling the trench to the various depths for each cable run and positioning the warning tapes and as i edit this video i still haven't filled in the final 15 meter stretch the plan was to get all the cabling in place to minimize for me the cost of electrician attending on site to connect up the two consumer units the 25 mil swa cable has a huge radius on it so drilling the cable through the wall at an angle channeling the radius into the wall helped keep it close to the wall when fixed in place which i tried to do with these linear clips a fabulous product that doesn't require wall plugs but the block work was too soft to hold the 25 mil swa in place so i resorted to more typical cable cleats for this so you can install an ev charge point well you can pick up the chargers themselves electrical retailers like cef and lots of others besides however i'm gonna stick my neck out here and say you've got to get this done by specialist installer when you're dealing with this much power it has to be earthed and bonded correctly to comply with electrical rags and to avoid breaching the product warranty which is why i went for an established installer in charged ev also i was fortunate to get mine installed before the 1st of march which meant i qualified for the 350 pound government grant which again charge dv took care of but which has now sadly ceased electricians who have done the course to become an oz approved installer can obviously also install but my electrician hadn't done the course isn't in any rush to do so which is why i was happy to use him in tandem with the ev installer to get the job done so you're probably wondering what sort of costs i had to incur to get all this installed well the cost for me at least was considerable and i say for me because with any luck if you're installing your charge point on the side of your house you won't have anything like the cabling that i needed to have done and a lot of installers include 15 meters of that ev ultra cable as part of the installation cost running through the figures and i've excluded that 25 mil swa because it wasn't relevant to this install it's for future proofing of this garage the hardware came to 412 pounds 43 my electrician charged 1 375 for supplying and installing the new rcbo consumer units and earth spike up at the garage and the cost of the charger including install was 774 pounds although as i just mentioned it would be likely to be over a grand now that the ozef grant is no longer available so a combined total of 2561 pounds for me a high price when you haven't factored in the cost of the electric car itself which luckily we've leased through our old business which my wife's now running so is it really worth incurring all this cost well arguably not on the face of it but you should see this i think not just in terms of the baseline figures but as an infrastructural asset that you're adding to the house and which will add to the value of your house as consumers we're stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment with with rocketing costs of fuel pumps is now 176 pence per liter down the road but also rocketing electricity prices particularly when the price cap comes off in april the estimated pounds that the indra charger app estimates as the cost of charging the car in february when we did a lot of miles is less than we would have spent refueling our old lease car although with our electricity currently at 19.6 pence and it's going to rise a lot from that in april the saving from charging a car rather than fueling up at the pumps isn't as much as we would have liked so i haven't gone this far the next step i think would be to install solar panels now i've got the infrastructure in place for them with the car and much of our home energy needs supplied by solar and an estimated payback of four to five years rather than the 10 years that it would have been before the energy price spike solar is starting to make serious sense and would also provide further justification for the cost that you've spent in installing that ev charger so that's it for today i really hope you found that useful if you have you might just click on the like button below and don't forget everything i've referred to today any useful references will be in the description below this video which you can access on your smartphone by clicking on the little arrow and on your pc by clicking on the show more button it's been a big old video this which is why i haven't been doing many videos recently i'm going to be returning to a more normal schedule from now on with a video per week so do keep an eye out for those and you can help with that particularly if you're a new subscriber by subscribing to my channel which would really mean a lot to me it helps to support what i'm doing you can do that by clicking on the link here and don't forget to click the bell notification icon so you get notified of all my future uploads see you soon

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 112,814

Keywords: electric vehicle charging point, electric cars, ev charger installation at home, electric vehicle charging explained, ev charging at home requirements, ev charging at home uk, charlie diyte, Indra, ev charging at home cost, ev charging at home installation, chargepoint, charge point, home, ev

Id: M6cgUT88UJg

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022