In this post I will be covering charging your vehicle, going from the basic home charging through to public charging provided by the different companies, of which there are now quite a few in the UK.
Also I will tell you about the different connectors used and the types of charge points, weather it he a home charger, emergency charger, destination charger or a rapid charger.
I have omitted charging etiquette, and as such will submit a separate post to cover "Charging etiquette" as its becoming more relevant as more BEV and PHEV cars hit the roads and start to use the public charging infrastructure.
Home Charging
You will eventually want a charging unit at home (known as an EVSE (Electric Vehicle Service Equipment)), strictly speaking when I am referring to the charger or charging unit I actually mean an EVSE, as the charger will actually be built into the car, the EVSE supplies electric power to the car in a controlled fashion so the cars inbuilt charger can charge the vehicle batteries, its is actually the car that decides at what speed to charge at after talking to the EVSE to agree the charging speed (or power rating).
As a temporary solution you may have been provided a slow charger or portable EVSE also affectionately known as a "Granny Charger" due to its slow speed.
Most people end up using this granny charger at home, until they can get their external EVSE fitted at home, if they have access to off street parking of course.
If you're not fortunate to have your own off street parking don't despair, it is actually possible to have a curb side EVSE fitted on the public highway (usually on the pavement), this involves planning consent as you may expect, you are still liable for the cost of the electricity, ROLEC is one such company at offers equipment suitable for this, you may also have access to a public charging network by Ubitricity or OVO in the UK that offers street light or lamp post charging access, see the public charging section for more.
When talking about DC rapid charging the same charger on board the car is not used.
Right with that out of the way, when buying your
first ev either new or used you currently can get help from the government in the form of a grant that will give you £500.00 towards the EVSE and fitting costs, this grant is called OLEV, you will need to check your vehicle is covered under this scheme, just about all EV and PHEV vehicles are able to benefit from this grant.
There are many companies and products available on the market, obviously you will generally want one that is ratified to take to advantage of the OLEV grant, a second hand EVSE would not qualify for the grant and your chosen installer must also be resisted to provide an OLEV installed EVSE.
If you decide not to take advantage of the OLEV grant you can indeed source your own approved EVSE and get you local qualified electrician to either install or connect the unit for you, this may be the cheaper option even with the grant being taken into account.
You can have installed a 3.6 KW, 7 KW or 22 KW EVSE installed, the only difference between 3.6 and 7 are the fuse rating in your house consumer unit and the thickness of cable used to cable up to the EVSE, I would always recommend getting the 7 KW option installed as it will "future proof" the installation as at the end of the day you will not want to be taking out the cable again if you upgrade to a 7 KW system later down the line.
If you are able to take advantage of 22 KW EVSE ie your car is able to use this level of charge, then you will need to have a "3 phase" electrical connection, this is what some farm, commercial or industrial locations will have as it essentially has 3 main connections to the property, this allows you to combine all 3 mains connections (3 x 7.2 KW = 21.6 KW), some electricity providers will not allow you to have this type of supply to a residential property, so you will need to check with your electricity network provider.
You can charge as said from a "normal" socket with your cars granny charger, this will have (in the case of the UK) a normal 3 pin plug, this will plug into a suitable mains point and the other end obviously plugs into the car, this is usually only 6-10 Amps, about 1.4 KW - 2.3 KW, its a good idea to keep one of these in your vehicle as an emergency charger, as at the end of the day you can usually get access to mains socket if you're stuck, you can always give the person a couple of pounds for the electric you take.
So if you already have an external plug or a garage with a main socket you can use, then use this socket along with your granny cable until you get your EVSE installed, you may need a water tight container to keep the charge unit in, although some are already rated to be used in all weathers.
Some examples of EVSE are as follows.
Public Charging
Before I going into the different type of public chargers I want to point out a couple of online resources that will help you locate and identify the chargers.
Zap Map and
Plugshare
In transit rapid charging
Tesla Supercharger
Tesla Mega Chargers
IONITY (eu)
ChargeMaster/Polar (BP) 150kw
Genie Point (ChargePoint Services)
Shell Recharge (was Newmotion) 150kw* (*currently 50kw 150 kw coming soon)
Ok, so there are a some different descriptions of public chargers, rapid chargers or destination chargers, rapid chargers (you will use en-route to a destination), these will be usually DC chargers and will be either on of these two plugs CHAdeMO or CCS, Tesla SuperCharger only if you have a Tesla car though.
CHAdeMO will be approx 50 KW power delivery although 100 KW standard may be on the way.
CCS will be again approx 50 KW power delivery again higher power versions are starting to come out, 150 KW and the latest to start rolling out 350 KW.
Tesla SuperCharger will be up to 120 KW the V3 Super charger upgrade is targeted for an increase of 200 KW to 350 KW, Teslas cars can also take advantage of CHAdeMO units with a converter, the new Tesla cars in the UK / Europe will be fitted with a CCS socket also, meaning the supercharger network will need to be retrofitted with these CCS plugs as will as the current Type 2 connector currently used in Europe.
Tesla Mega Charges will be designed for their articulated trucks (semi).
There is also an AC "Rapid" option of 43 KW for cars like the Renault Zoe, although some Zoe are only able to charge at 22 KW, Renault will likely move to a combined CCS connector shortly.
Destination charging
You have arrived at your destination weather it be a supermarket or shopping center car park or a hotel restaurant or just a pub for a bite to eat, more and more of these locations are providing charger access for their guests and customers, they are usually lower power output chargers either 3.6 KW or 7.2 KW, some times you will need to get a free token from the place you are visiting or sometimes they are run by one of the national charging infrastructure companies like Polar, the idea being you arrive at your chosen location, plug in and charge or an hour or so and gain some much appreciated range, its not the idea to hog the charger for hours on end to get a full charge.
Supermarkets are a great place for these type of charging posts as you will generally be parked for under 1.5 hours.
The connectors will be either type 1 or type 2 connectors, a good idea if you have a Type 1 socket on your car like a Leaf is to carry a converter cable, this converts the Type 2 connector to the type 1 that the car would use, (see below for connector types).
Ubitricity
This company was one of the first to offer an urban charging solution in the form of a street lamp post conversion, to allow ev's to charge using the street lighting infrastructure that is already in place, the old sodium street lamps (with their signature orange glow) are not as efficient as modern LED lamp technology, this means if the lamp heads are changed to LED then there is still enough capacity to use for ev charging.
The way you use the lamp post is via a special lead that records the amount of electricity you have used and then bills you directly for it, OVO are a supplier that is bundling in the access along with your homes electricity tariffs.
Accessing or using the charge points
There are typically 3 ways to initiate a charge from one of the different infrastructures and most are not interchangeable (unfortunately) between your chosen providers.
- The first is the oldest way to connect and that's via an RFID card, obviously you will need this before you start charging.
- Second and most ubiquitous would be via an app on a smart phone, either Android or Apple.
- Third and arguably the most continent is contact less payment from a contact less credit or debit card also contact-less payments via your mobile phone assuming you have contact-less payment option (akin to the NFC feature).
There were UK guidelines passed down from government saying any ev driver must be able to access the charging unit weather they have a subscription or not, it was decided that this access would be granted via an app, so you really need a smart phone these days to fully utilize the public charging infrastructure.
Connectors
Here are the 4 main connectors as used for electric vehicles across the globe.
If you have any comments, corrections or questions please feel free to tweet me and I will do my best to answer any inquiry.
