Came across a car being charged in the street yesterday. H&S well taken care of - large rubber mats covering the cable and small traffic cones either end. Impressed. Until I looked at how it was fed. Long 13 amp extension from the house with a big coil at the end, and a 4 way 13 amp socket strip, with the car lead plugged into it. At least it wasn't raining then.
House had a basement, and a light to the exterior stairs recently added by the shiny conduit. But no dedicated charger point.
I came across a G-whizz? being charged like this on the road next to a mansion block in Hammersmith. A series of extension cords came down from a first floor flat front window, to a pole at the bottom of the steps going up to the ground floor, then across the pavement at about
6 foot high, then duck taped to a lighting pole and down to the car.Wish I had taken a photo.
This is the problem with electric cars when you don't have your own drive but must park at the side of street and then get power from the house. No-one wants to park a long way from their house, wherever there happens to be a free charging point, and then walk home from there and then walk back when their car is fully charged.
Part of the problem is that the dedicated charging cable is usually fairly short, so there will always need to be a trailing 3-pin socket that this lead is plugged into, even if the long extension lead has no further junctions until it is inside the house. I suppose one way is to put the extension socket inside the car, with its lead and the car's charging lead going through a crack in the window, but that's not very rainproof and certainly not secure against theft.
The alternative is to get a very long lead with the car's charging socket (*) on one end and the other end long enough to plug into a wall socket inside the house, then there are no junctions out in the rain. You still need to arrange the lead so it isn't a trip hazard if it crosses a pavement. Even if the lead is on your own drive, you need to make sure the postman etc doesn't trip over it.
I presume the plug on the car has a way of securing the socket on the charging lead so it can't be maliciously unplugged. That will be a significant problem: drunks late at night think it's "funny" to unplug cars so they are not fully charged for their owners to use them in the morning.
(*) I use "plug" and socket" to refer to the male end (with protruding pins) and the female end (with receptacles to accommodate those pins). The end that is connected to the mains always needs to be a socket, to avoid accidental contact with live pins. I once borrowed my grandpa's electric mower which had pair of flat three-in-a-row plug-and-socket, to attach the long cable to the short one on the mower. I unplugged it to untangle the cable and found it was wired the wrong way round, with the live pins exposed, so I rewired it with the socket on the mains end and the plug on the mower end - and kept quiet about it to spare his blushes.
This is all very silly when all they can get out of their string of extension cables is 13A, and possibly only 720W if they were obeying what it says as the capacity of wound extension reels (which they probably aren't).
We already have a solution for this - it's what happens with dropped kerbs. If you want a dropped kerb outside your house you ask the council for permission, pay the fee, their contractor comes and makes it for you.
You could imagine the same principle for charge points - apply to the council, council electrician comes and installs approved charge point in the road, wired in to your electricity supply, council makes good the pavement. You get a proper 32A (or whatever) fast charging point outside your house.
Such charge points could for example be billed separately to your home electricity supply, and maybe you could agree to other people using them for some cut of the proceeds. You could then enrol them in a public charging network. And then maybe it wouldn't matter if your space was full, because you could park a few doors down and use their point on the same network.
This would seem more efficient than trying to run off the 'lamp post' supply that only has a few amps capacity. Maybe they can load balance, so when you run the oven, tumble drier, electric shower and GSHP all together the car scales back its charge rate to avoid overloading the supply incomer.
Theo
Not all chargers require a dedicate charger point.
Ours came with a charger which plugs into a normal 13A socket. In fact, it is the one I nearly always use. We also got a free, dedicated, charger ( including installation) - fund by some Gov scheme.
The included charge takes longer but the car has a timer and I set it to charge in the Economy 7 slot. I use could use a normal socket but I have a radial with just one socket which was installed for something else and use that.
If I need a quicker charge, I?d use the other one.
AFAIK, most cars you can charge come with at least a slow charger.
Of course, plugging them into long extensions etc is more than unwise.
But you don't have a reserved parking space outside your house.
trip hazard - Fire hazard
Good question but I can?t recall the details.
The slow one uses a 13A fuse, so probably under that. I have 10A in mind but I?m not sure.
I?m pretty sure the MCB on the dedicated charger is 16A .
Most of the bundled charge leads deliberately limit the current to around 10A or so. Not sure what they do if they see loads of voltage drop on the supply though.
My old Leaf takes about 10A using the slow charger (on a long extension lead).
I'd have thought apart from anything else charging like that would be slow costly and as you say, dangerous. Brian
But you do get a reserved space outside your house if you get a dropped kerb installed. OK you aren't supposed to park on it, but it is effectively reserved for your use (to come and go to your drive) - people aren't allowed to park in it and so it reserves a little bit of your street.
The issue of 'reserving' a bit of public infrastructure for your sole use would go away if the charging points were on a public charging network as it wouldn't be your reserved space any more.
Theo
not so.
Indeed not. The people who aren't allowed to park on it includes you. As dropped kerbs aren't associated with particular car registrations or keepers only with the addresses where they're located. Which isn't to say this isn't regularly flouted as in streets without other restrictions, parking wardens would probably only show up as the result of a complaint from the person with the dropped kerb
michael adams
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You aren't allowed to park on it, but it is constructed for the sole use to enter your property. It isn't reserved for you, Mr J. Bloggs, but it's reserved to allow entrance of the property 99 Acacia Avenue, whose sole resident happens to be Mr J. Bloggs. The law is different, but the end result is the same.
My point being we've already have precedent for the principle of reserving a piece of public street for a particular property (not an individual), and a similar programme for charging points wouldn't be a major stretch.
Theo
I hadn't realised that the owner of a house isn't allowed to park (or let vistors park) across the end of his drive if it has a dropped kerb. I know that no-one is supposed to park where it causes an obstruction - and parking across a drive definitely obstructs access - but I always thought that the owner of the house that was obstructed was a special case to whom the restriction didn't apply.
I know that no-one has exclusive right to park on the road outside the house (ie either side of the drive access), and that it is a free-for-all: anyone can park there unless parking is prohibited to everyone.
What are the rules about "residents only" parking? Does that include visitors to the house, or are they supposed to park further down the street on in the next street, if there is no space for their car on the owner's drive? I remember going to visit someone in the centre of Oxford and they warned me that I would need to phone to give a precise ETA (eg phone from just round the corner) so the person I was visiting could be standing outside to give me a visitor's permit as soon as I pulled up, because the traffic wardens had been known to ticket people in the few seconds it took to get out of the car, go the house, be given the permit and walk back to display it in the car.
The dropped kerb is. But that part of the road isn't. Allowing people to park anywhere on a public road is a concession. All of that road belongs, and always will belong to the council or whoever. They may if they see fit, restrict parking on their roads for whatever reason they wish - including that of not blocking a dropped kerb as applied and paid for by a householder - but that restriction by the council on their road doesn't confer any additional rights on anyone to make use of that piece of road for any purpose whatsoever..
It isn't reserved for you, Mr J. Bloggs, but it's
It would be for the reason stated above. Preventing people parking outside a property doesn't confer any rights on anyone; it merely removes a concession of allowing people to park their cars on roads, or parts of roads which have never belonged to them.
Doubtless in these straitened times Councils will eventually come up with schemes covering all such eventualities - for an exorbitant annual charge to be decided on at the time.
michael adams
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michael adams
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Correction : contrary to what is stated below the dropped kerb isn't the householders property either, despite the fact he or she paid the Council to make the necessary modifications. It would however enhance the value of the property assuming the Council aren't allowed to dig it up. As they are bodies in (some?) Council owned Cemeteries after a certain number of years, as I learned only the other day. Apparently not all burial plots are bought in perpetuity contrary to what some people might think.
If you have a driveway, why would you park on the street?
At one time, there were parking meters at every bay where anyone could park. Not going to cost that much more to do the same with charging points?
Because there are more vehicles at the property than will fit on the drive?
Chris
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