DIY EV Charger installation? — EV Pt 3
This blog post and other blog posts that talk about installation of electrics are my personal opinons and logs of the process, they are in no way a recommendation or guide on what to do and will vary depending on the installation place’s current electrical setup and local regulations.
These electrics are high voltage (220V+) at high ampage (32A+)!
As part of getting an EV car it’s pretty common that you’ll want to get a home charger fitted. While there is the 13A to EV adaptors they are rather slow (Around 9.5–10 Hours from empty).
The most common thing you’ll find when searching is that most chargers are available on the OLEV grant and you can get one fitted from £149–350, perfect!
However when you read the smallprint as with most things these prices are for a “standard” installation which assumes that you have a driveway or garage on the side of your house however where I live, we have a private garage and driveway but seperated by a garden increasing the cable length to around 25–30M instead of the standard 10–15M included.
Now so far I’ve had one quote of £515, an rough estimate of £460 and another 2 quotes coming throughout the week. Bearing in mind this is with £500 discounted already due to the OLEV grant making the total cost the company is getting around £1,000.
I then started to look around online and it seems that you can get the base stations themselves for only around £360 in total and around £400 including cable and upon more investigation I think I found out why. They’re surprisngly simple.
From the best I can tell (* I’m not an expert at all) the actual socket is really just a fancy AC connector with 2 small signalling pins for communication, one for earth, one for neutral and three for live (For three phase charging. And by looking at the installation instructions for a couple of chargers the sockets literally pass these connnections through from the cable to the connector via some terminal blocks. As most home chargers are single phase this means that installing a charger is as simple as wiring a cable up at either end and turning it on. The only electronics seems to be a method of the charger being able to switch the connection on and off and to communicate with the car to tell it the charging speed.
So because of this I’m considering installing it myself, it involves routing the cable around the house and along the concrete base of our fence to the charger and wiring both ends in along with fitting an extra fuse breaker. Simples?
Originally published at ryanteck.net on September 30, 2018.
