We’re thinking of changing my wife’s car for an EV, but just wondering about ball park cost to install the charger. It’s looking like we’ll need 25m of armoured cable from the fuse board to get around the outside of the house to the drive - the cable route also crosses path with the gas and broadband supply to the house.
We had an electrician in for some other work in our house, so he had a quick Look for us (he doesn’t fit EV charging points at the moment, but he does work with three phase supply, so has a good idea with buried cables etc). He recommended getting a local groundworks company in to cut a trench - and we’re thinking it’s all sounding v.costly. (You know, like ‘I could buy a decent bike for that sort of money! 😉
Can anyone in the hive give us a rough idea of cost based on experience? FWIW, we’ve got solar panels on the house and we reckon we could keep an EV battery topped up for our typical usage.
Just paid £1500 including the charger itself (ohme home pro) - a reasonably complicated install, as the electric meter is right in the centre of the house (on an inside wall), and I wanted the charger in the garage. It involved taking up some of the floor boards in the lounge, then drilling through 1 internal wall, and one external wall, plus a run of probably about 20m cable , pinning it to the underside of the joists, running the cable the length of the house etc. it took the best part of a whole day to complete.
I think a more standard install is typically about £1k inc charger
I recently paid £1069 for a reasonably simple Ohme Home Pro install. I think I was quoted £975 by Octopus, but they had a 5-6 week lead time.
The company who did it were absolutely brill and wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. They were available to do it the same week I contacted them, did an ace job and returned again at no extra cost to adjust the load balancing whotsit after my supply fuse was upgraded.
You can take a number of approaches -
Book a package via either the charger manufacturer or your electricity supplier - they'll farm it out to a contractor who'll typically do a 'no frills' install, which might not be exactly what/where you want it.
Ask a local electrician to supply and fit - might be slightly more expensive but you'll get what you want where you want.
I went a third route and bought the charger myself, and after a chat with an electrician (family friend) i did the 'first fix' running the cables and mounting the charger on the wall. He then did a half-day to connect it up and sign it off. Don't think i saved much money (if any) but i also fitted a 13A outside socket which he connected up at the same time.
Before you doing anything - find out what rating is your incoming supply fuse? if its only rated at 60A it'll need changing. UK power networks do this FOC - book it via their website. I originally requested an upgrade to 100A but when they arrived they decided some of my cabling wasn't quite big enough so they fitted an 80A fuse - this is fine for us as we don't have any other heavy electrical uses - in the future when we're all cooking on electric and using heat pumps it'll probably need revisiting.
Further to above Ohme Epod installed might be a bit cheaper, but you then need a charging cable, which might come with the car anyway. Certainly the Ohme epod doesn't need a ground earth so a straightforward install I think, so I'd think a standard sparky would install.
I did same as freeagent above, bought the unit myself (Rolec) and got a qualified mate to install. it's 5 years ago and total cost was £450, I then bought an Ohme smart cable from Octopus Energy (£199) which I don't think are available anymore.
Further to above Ohme Epod installed might be a bit cheaper
Yes, I also should have said that my home pro was the one with the longest cable too, which adds about £100 on to the charger costs
I just had a my ohme home pro.. and <10m of cable...
Paid a local guy about £1160 to install as his lead time was days, not months...
Having signed up to octopus, they offered the same install/charger for £899... But having 'signed up' about a month ago...I've still not heard anything!
DrP
Before you doing anything – find out what rating is your incoming supply fuse? if its only rated at 60A it’ll need changing. UK power networks do this FOC – book it via their website.
It's not a pre-requisite to have it upgraded pre-installation as I understand it. I had my charger fitted and they fitted a load monitor and configured the charger to work with a 60A fuse. Then after the fuse had been upgraded they reconfigured it. This kind of subtlety is why I would agree with the recommendation of a specialist over getting eg. Octopus to do it. The company I went with asked all the right questions pre-installation to sort this out which is what gave me confidence in them over others.
I had my charger installed. by Octopus - cost about a grand for a fairly simple job. Some weeks later I got a call from Northern Powergrid saying they needed to do a survey pre-install. I explained that it was already installed and they said "yes, that often happens" but anyway sent a guy round to check it. While he was there he swapped the 60A fuse for a 80A fuse. He did it FOC but mentioned that it's usually £100. I'm happy to have the bigger fuse, but 60A was not really a problem since the charger had load balancing to avoid blowing the fuse in case of charging the car, cooking a roast and running the heat pump simultaneously.
Our good mate Sparky did ours. We also had an inside fuse board and running in round the house wasn't an option due to the voltage drop / cable length. We ended up spending nearly a day finding a route (thankfully not taking up floorboards etc). Ended up with a double outside socket as well and a really neat install. Was in the ball park of the prices above.
We also have the load monitor on the fuse board. We also have a 80A fuse but run dishwasher at night/heat pump is always on and wanted to be absolutely sure we weren't going over the amperage.
Slightly off topic but because we can't get a smart meter currently, I wanted a charger I could connect to our home automation so I could do my own calcs/manage it without an extra app. It does mean if we ever do get a SM we probably won't be able to do the funky Octopus->charger->car comms, but I'm happy with that tradeoff.
Finally if anybody says 'oh we'll run it over the roof', show them the door!
I presume people above are talking about the cutout, which I also had upgraded to 80a when my smart meter was installed.
It's worth pointing out that the 80a fuse gives you a 100a supply. As IGM stated on page 2 of the Hydrogen bickering thread (it seems he works for a DNO that install these things).
Oh and someone mentioned 80A fuses. Just for clarity, an 80A fuse gives you a 100A supply assuming any reasonable sort of cyclic loading (you don’t run flat out at 100A for 4 hours or you’re at 8-10 times the typical domestic energy use, or 4-5 times the domestic use including car charging).
My own house, including car charging and home battery charging rarely gets to half that load at peak.
About £1100 for an Ohme Pro via Octopus. About 2 months in to the waiting list now so not actually installed as yet.
Had an Ohme Pro fitted by an Octopus subcontractor a couple of months ago now. They were surprisingly inflexible on the quote for install. Was installed on a new build house which was already wired and fused for an EV Charger. Builder had wired a double external 3pin socket to the EV rated cable on the outside of the house. Install involved unwiring the socket and wiring the charger to the same cable, no extra cable used, installation took about 40 minutes. Still got charged £975..!
To give the installer credit he actually left the double 3pin socket in place so we could use it which wasn't part of the quote.
Thanks for the replies. Hmm…perhaps not as bad as I was expecting. Julianp - the location of our meter sounds similar to yours i.e. centre of the downstairs of the house. The PIA with our house is that it has a solid concrete floor, and there’s no easy route through to the front or side wall of the garage (& nowhere to hide the cable). Our electrician friend thought the cable would look a bit cr*p run on the outside of the house, especially as it’d have to run under the front doorstep. I’m ok with wall mounted cables, but in this case, I think he’s right.
Ah, first World problems eh?!
I think you'd be looking at more than £1,000 with 25m of buried armoured cable. But get a quote from a proper installer:
https://www.gov.uk/electric-vehicle-chargepoint-installers
I work for a company manufacturing 7KW chargers. They retail for £478 each (discounted for installers), untethered and delivered to you. They have solar integration and load balancing options.
Check us out here:
https://www.fastamps.com/alpha-7-home-charger.html
Drop me a PM if you/your installer want to discuss it.
Another Octopus Ohme Home Pro with 8m charging cable (so that I can park the car facing in or out in either space in front of the garage).
Fuse box is inside the double garage, cable runs to the back wall, across the back wall, outside then along the outside wall to the front, so a long cable run. Cost was the normal £1079. I called UK Power to get the main fuse upgraded for free, they came out a couple of weeks later. I believe there's now an agreement where Octopus can do this at install time.
I did try to get a local quote but the only people interested were a solar company who were roughly double the cost.
Anyone have one that is 'meterable' - by that I mean you know how many units were used in the charge, or better still, it logs it on an app or something. Maybe they all do this - I'm clueless. I'm thinking for a multi user location - possibly a shared house. In our case it would be having one for our use and being able to offer it to guests at our holiday home next door and knowing how much to charge them.
I had a small meter installed in the cable from the consumer unit to the charger, I think it added about £50 onto the total install and means I can distinguish car electric from house electric. This was back when chargers were dumb, so as above, the newer smart chargers probably give you that info in the app, without having to install a physical meter.
https://www.wickes.co.uk/SPWales-SPWKOM-AEL-MF-11-1-Single-Phase-Meter---100A/p/293934
Mine was just over £1k a year ago for a Hypervolt charger but a very easy install (the charger is mounted pretty much the other side of the wall to the CU).
Thanks for the replies. Hmm…perhaps not as bad as I was expecting. Julianp – the location of our meter sounds similar to yours i.e. centre of the downstairs of the house. The PIA with our house is that it has a solid concrete floor, and there’s no easy route through to the front or side wall of the garage (& nowhere to hide the cable). Our electrician friend thought the cable would look a bit cr*p run on the outside of the house, especially as it’d have to run under the front doorstep. I’m ok with wall mounted cables, but in this case, I think he’s right.
Ah, first World problems eh?!
Take this with a pinch of salt, but could you not the run the cable up the wall and then through the ceiling/1st floor floor go with the joists and then out of the external wall and down to where needed?
