How to charge your electric car at home if you don’t have a drive
If you’ve got on-street parking, this guide is for you.
You’ve just bought an electric vehicle (EV) or you’re thinking about getting one, but you don’t have a drive.
So how exactly do you go about charging until Kerbo Charge is available?
Here are three options for you.
Trail a cable across the pavement outside your house
It’s not illegal to trail a cable across your pavement, but if anyone got injured from tripping then you could face a claim from a personal injury lawyer.
It’s a good idea to check your car and home insurance policy to check you are covered.
To reduce the risk make sure you use a high quality reflective anti-slip protection ramp (get one for around £25) and remove the cable and ramp as soon as you’ve finished charging.
How do plug it in to the power supply of your home? You’ll see many ingenious solutions, cables running through cracks in the window, under the front door, into the basement…
A better option is to get a wall mounted charging unit professionally installed to the outside of your property. For most UK homes, this will give you 7.2KW power, which means you car will charge twice as fast as a regular three pin plug.
2. Using public chargers
There are now 51,000 public charging points in the UK, and the number is growing daily. 45% of the chargers are in the London and the South East, so take the time to understand the charging infrastructure where you live - Zap Map is a great tool for this.
The cost of public chargers varies from 38p / KWH for slower chargers that will take 4 - 8 hours to charge your car, to 70p kW/H for ultra fast chargers, that can charge in less than 30 minutes.
So how much does it cost? You can work this out easily by first finding out your battery capacity.
If you have a 77 KWH battery (the battery in a VW ID4), then using a 38p/KWH charge point would cost you £29.26 (0.38 x 77) for a completely full charge.
Sounds quite cheap, but when you consider a VW ID4 will only do 250 miles with ‘normal’ driving, which is around half that of a modern petrol car, suddenly you realise the running cost is only around 15% cheaper than petrol!
3. Let the charger come to you
Until Kerbo Charge is available near you, it would be remiss of us to not mention our friends at Charge Fairy.
They’ve developed an ingenious solution - a mobile battery ‘van’ that will automatically top your car up, without you needing to do anything!
They’ve developed integrations into most EV manufacturers which means they can remotely monitor your charge level. When you’re running low they will drive to you (when you’re parked of course..), connect to your car and charge away.
It’s designed to be a 'little and often’ top up service, and if you subscribe you could forgot about needing to plug in for day to day use (except for those big journeys).
The only downside, it’s expensive compared to home charging (59p/KWH for the first 10 miles, and 49p/KWH after that). But if convenience is important to you, it’s a perfect solution.