EV Charger Installation

What You Need to Know

It’s an exciting thing for many people to get their first electric car, and then comes the day when your home gets its first EV charger installation. Finally, you’ll be able to charge your car at home and won’t ever have to rely on public charging infrastructure to keep your car ready to go for every day’s school run, commute and more.

EV home charger installation is quite a complex business, which is why under no circumstances does any organisation recommend that you try to do it yourself, regardless of your experience. Home chargers need to be wired into a safe location. Unfortunately, you can’t just put it anywhere you like next to a socket and plug it in. In this post, we’ll discuss the various requirements for installation, what happens when the professionals arrive to install your charger, where they look to install it and so on.

What Are the Requirements?

The basic requirements are quite simple if you want to have your own EV charger installed at home. You need to meet three basic criteria and the work can proceed. These criteria are:

1. You must own the property into which you want to install the EV charger, or have permission from your landlord if you rent the property. The permission needs to be given in writing.

2. Your home must have off-street parking that is not shared with any other car. No electrician or other EV charger installers will ever offer you installation on the street or in a location that infringes even a little on the parking of another vehicle belonging to another property.

3. You must have a Wi-Fi connection at home. Not all home EV chargers use Wi-Fi connections, but having a Wi-Fi connection at home is still a requirement before anyone will come to confirm the installation of your electric vehicle home charger.

There is one more requirement, too, which is that you need to purchase your EV home charger, which you can either buy yourself on Amazon or a similar shopping site, or directly from a provider that will also deal in installation. These comprehensive services typically cost more, but there’s definitely a greater convenience factor.

If you can meet these requirements, then all you need to do is contact either your energy supplier or a company that specialises in EV charger home installation such as Pod Point, ChargedEV, and others. These companies and their EV charger installers bring with them the expertise, equipment and authority to install home chargers safely and in accordance with safety rules and regulations.

Charger Installers - What Do They Do?

The EV charger installation process typically happens in two main stages, and here are certain rules that the EV charger installers have to follow.

For example, they’re not allowed to place an EV charger within 2.5m of what is known as a “sim touch.” These are metal objects that are connected to your home supply of electricity. If any location you have selected features such an object, then your charger has to be at least 2.5m away from it. When you only have a small garage or small driveway, 2.5m can make a lot of difference, but the good news is that in most cases there aren’t any or many sim touches that gravely impact the ability of people to install an EV home charger.

Stage One

In the first stage you contact the provider and they may ask you to show photographs of the places that you are thinking could house your new EV home charger. If photographs won’t do, they may send someone to your home to evaluate the space and determine where the correct place to install the charger would be.

A possible obstacle to outdoor installation is the proximity of street lamps to your proposed installation site. If there’s a street lamp too close, then the location is a no-no, and in some homes in the UK, a street lamp might fall right outside of a person’s gate or wall, thus placing it potentially quite close — and certainly within 2.5m — to the location you’re hoping to install your EV home charger.

Stage Two

When they find a site, they then undertake the following basic procedure:

  • Step 1: Turn of all the power in your home
  • Step 2: The EV charger is mounted in place and connected to your main electricity supply
  • Step 3: The power is turned back on and the unit is tested by the installation engineers
  • Step 4: If you have purchased a smart charger with remote function, the engineer can help you set that up with the Wi-Fi password
  • Step 5: Lastly, the engineers can usually stick around to show you how it works, especially if you bought the box from the supplier that’s dealing with the installation.

Cost Considerations

You might think that shelling out £500-1500 is a huge amount of money to spend on a home EV charger, especially when you’ll also be paying for all the electricity it uses to recharge your vehicle. But it’s demonstrably cheaper to charge an electric vehicle at home than it is to either charge them at public charging stations, or to fuel a petrol or diesel car at a local filling station. Whatever way you look at it, you are going to be saving money overall so the home charger installation is really a kind of investment.

EV Charger Installation UK

And so now you know about how EV chargers get installed in the UK. The hardest part of the process is determining the perfect spot for your charger. It has to be able to reach the car where you usually park it, as well as being weatherproof and safeguarded from thieves should you install it outdoors. That’s where the professional EV charger installers come in.

If you do things right and don’t take any unnecessary risks, then the EV charger installation should go off without a hitch.

Car Manufacturers We Supply and Fit EV Chargers For