EV Charging Featured

You can have as long a cable run as you like. The Gov. grant is £500, you pay the excess. You only get the grant if you are buying a new EV (PHEV's do not qualify).

I think for me the question is. If you are charging your car on a streetside charging point, what sort of cable is uses and is there any circumstance where it can become a trip hazard to a blind person. I remember when electric cars first came out the idea was mooted of a kind of swing arm at a high level with the cable on it to drop down past the curb to charge the car. To me that looks like a vandals paradise, and to leave a cable trailing is a h/s nightmare for being sued. Brian

Many are fitted on a 32A circuit. So cable choice will be influenced by the length of the cable run. 6mm^2 T&E is a common choice where the run is internal feeding a charging point fitted on an outside wall.

A very valid concern.

I've not seen any chargers where the cables would/ should lay in the path a pedestrian not associated with the car or charged would normally take. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any nor that someone couldn't set out to place a cable in a way it would cause a problem.

When you get a 'free' charger installed under the gov. scheme (if it is still running), it must be installed on a private drive or in a private garage etc. You can't, for example, park in the street and have it somewhere in your front garden and run the cable across the pavement. You are required to send photos of the planned installation point when you apply. I suppose people could obtain their own chargers and self install- it isn't complex (I watched the chap do ours), just a 16A spur (or 30A in some cases).

While I fully appreciate your concerns, I think the problem of cars parking on pavements etc is probably far more of an issue.

Jim GM4DHJ ... presented the following explanation :

A new local supermarket has four of them fitted, with four parking spots. They seem to require some sort of payment and there are two types, but I didn't explore much beyond that. Two had a trailing lead, rather like a petrol pump, the other two seemed to require you to have your own lead to plug into the post. I have been there several times and have yet to actually spot any of the four charging spaces in use.

Yes indeed, but the council are talking about converting some streetlamps for charging cars, and I was wondering being as these will be in the street if there might be some vandal sitting there relishing the havoc they could cause to such an installation!

Brian

Vandal proof socket which only becomes live after negotiation with the car. The cable and charge security equipment carried by the end user. For example:-

Good. Nothing worse than pulling up in your near empty EV and finding the charging points over subscribed. Or even worse. No charging points.

Indeed!

For at least a year, I've been walking past pavement edge charging points in Berekley Square - they still seem to be working - at leat cars arev plugged into them. But, in general, a lamppost takes 1 or 2 amps at most; a charging point will need a lot more current than that.

Sometimes I think that they encourage it by design. Locally we have had two bays in a car park turned into charging bays. They could have chosen any two bays around two sides of the car park (three if they wanted to run more cable). So which did they convert? The two right by the pedestrian crossing, where everyone has stopped for decades to access the cash-machine on the other side of the road. It should have been obvious that these are the bays most likely to be used for the shortest term stops and by the most people per day, so why turn those into the charging ones?

SteveW

Or indeed an attractive target for copper thievery ????

Has it changed?

When we bought our Outlander the scheme applied to hybrids.

Sorry you are correct, it's just the £5000 (now £3500) grant towards the purchase of an EV now no longer applies to PHEV's.

Up to £500 is still available towards the charger.

Most people at sometime will have seen a metal channel with a 1/2? or so slot laid across a pavement to take rainwater from a downpipe to a roadside gutter.Many date back to Edwardian times but are still in place. It may be that where EV?s have to be charged in residential streets a similar channel could be laid from premises to curb, problem would be that the fast charging cables tend to be a lot thicker than 1/2? so to get a cable small enough would need a rethink on chargers and voltages.

GH

I didn't know they'd stopped that. Oh well, I'm not planning to buy another one just yet ;-)

Heres a side street in Cambridge as can be seen theres hardly any room to put anything anywhere. I reckon this photo was taken on a weekday and during the day sometimes you simply cannot get parked anywhere near your home so how ya gonna charge?..

Small generator?

Cheers

The obvious thing is to suggest the council sets up residents only bays that are short enough they can assign them to one or two houses.

They can make a lot of money out of that, fines, permits, etc. so they would probably consider it.