My “free” charger can be any of the following, does anyone have an opinion on which might be the best to choose?
We currently do not have solar panels but will probably be looking at getting them in 2025 but our road will limit the amount of panels we will get to about 6-7.
Thanks
.sjb
The car should have come with a cable, so the tethered versions aren’t really necessary I guess.
I doubt there’s much difference between the makes and models. All modern chargers seem to use a mobile signal rather than WiFi to connect to their control apps now. Might be worth checking as where ours is installed there is no WiFi coverage from the house. Not an issue as ours is a very simple ‘dumb’ charger and we just control the charge times etc from the cars (from the apps) rather than the charger
Bruce
I’ve had the tethered Zappi for the last 12 months. Never had a problem with it and works with the solar just fine.
I recommend Zappi for build quality, reliability and future-proofed functionality.
I prefer tethered as it’s much more convenient than hauling a cable out of the car boot every day.
Best regards, BF
I agree about choosing a charger with its own cable included. It’s much more convenient and costs nothing extra.
We use a PodPoint home charger, so I can’t comment on the choices offered here.
There is probably not a great deal of technical difference between the various makes, but they do vary somewhat in terms of aesthetics, durability of construction, reliability, functionality and ease of use of the app, warranty duration, reliance on Wi-Fi and/or 4G, and after sale support. Some include a permanently fixed integrated cable, which has merit in terms of convenience and tidiness, while in other cases the cable has to be purchased separately (not cheap, and be sure to get one long enough).
There was a comparative review of 10 brands published in What Car magazine in September this year. Easee and Hypervolt came out top, but only Ohme from your list was actually included in the test. Ohme did pretty well and was rated 5th out of the 10 tested - I think the differences between models was marginal although the lowest rated didn’t do well on reliability. You might find this test on the web, but it won’t help you evaluate the merits of most on your list of possibilities. It might provide you with some useful context on EV chargers in general though.
It is interesting to note how cheap all the listed chargers are in Ireland. As far as I can see few are less than £500 in the U.K. and by the time they are installed the total cost commonly exceeds £1000.
Thanks for that, I have a Which? subscription so I’ll take a look at that.
This is the price for the “free” charger with the Kia EV6. The €300 I have to pay upfront is the government grant which I will get back once the electrician signs off on the installation.
.sjb
We decided against the tethered option and FFWD a few years it’s been the right choice for us - much neater, cars and their charging points and parking position change, we’ve had friends visiting and charging. At times I’ve needed long cables to reach and now have a 5m and a 10m lengths, both being used.
I also subscribe to Which? but, although there is a general article on EV charging at home from July 2024, I have not found any tests on specific brands/models.
Hi SJB,
If you are having solar panels at some point, then I would recommend getting a smart charger rather than a dumb 7.5kW socket type of charger.
We make extensive use of the myenergi control app for our Zappi charger, integrating it with solar PV, our time-based electricity charge rates, our hot water tank immersion heater and even our home’s battery.
Most people won’t go as far as we have but at least you know that the myenergi control app will take you as far as you want to go and it has proven to be 100% reliable over 4 years of full-time use.
Other manufacturers are all playing catch up with myenergi, either in terms of hardware durability, software capability, software reliability or all 3.
Good luck! BF
I’m inclined towards the Zappi I must say and although not always a totally accurate way to asses quality it is the most expensive one (if I wasn’t on the Kia offer) by €200.
gave the car its first charge earlier this evening in a nearby garage with a 50kW charger. It was at 41% and we are going to do about 200km tomorrow going to a funeral. 42 mins to get to 80% and it cost just under €20 - which means I could get a full tank for €50 -which is great value. (Although I think I’ll try the 150kW ones when I need to charge at a public point next as the 50 kW was probably a bit slower that I expected - which may be slightly more expensive).
Interestingly a friend living in Dublin called over for lunch today and he has an MG 4 and I asked him about public charging points and he said he has actually never used one yet as he just charges at home all the time. This is a good sign as his parents live in Tipperary and he often visits them, and as we all know it’s a long way to Tipperary.
.sjb
John,
I don’t see any real relationship between solar panels and electric cars. Where we live, Solar will provide a proportion (in my case 65-70%) of my domestic electricity needs, without considering an electric car. Electric cars are best charged at night, at lower rates, when the sun isn’t shining.
If you are generating more electricity on a sunny day than you are using domestically, then why not divert energy to charging your car at that time rather than adding to the grid? You can think of your car as energy storage in a way. Domestic batteries for this exist already but have much lower capacity (10-15kWh) than an EV.
Not going to work on a wet winter day of course.
Bruce
Ah a lovely excellent joke, not at all rude or offensive unlike many in the Jokes thread, in a most unexpected place! Thank you John!
I don’t yet have an electric car, but I do have battery storage (4.8KW) in my solar setup, which maximises my use of solar to power my home. I also have the luck to have an old mechanical electricity meter which will go backwards if the battery is full, so I’m getting full price for any further small surplus I put back in the grid.
As for charging a car, I think that most people use their cars during the day and would be unlikely to be able to charge in daylight. There is also a considerable saving to be had in using night rate electricity to charge a car, when the sun doesn’t shine.
What I do on some clear sunny days is plug in the car using the 2.3KWh (I think) regular mains cable as it restricts draw. Our panels generate 3-4Kwh so not much but enough to charge the car slowly (but “for free”) during the day as well as cover most or all domestic “idle” or background use (does include hifi on!)
At least on my car’s app, I can also reduce the charging from 2KWh to 1KWh if I want to keep it even lower and not kick in the main supply if using more at home at the same time.
Ah, this was so true in the days before lockdowns and now hybrid working.
These days, many, many more people are able to charge their cars using surplus daytime solar, so we are no longer restricted to nighttime charging.
We see up to 7kW of surplus electricity during summer days, so do harvest as much of it as we can via the car, home battery and hot water tank.
If you are able to rewind your meter during the day by exporting, then it makes perfect sense for you to only charge your car at night.
We each have unique use cases, so have to work out what works best on an individual basis. At least with a Zappi charger, you have the option to do just this.
Best regards, BF
I get 15p/kWh when I export excess solar generation. I buy in at 7p/kWh to charge home batteries and my EV. When i have excess solar it makes no financial sense to charge my EV or even the home batteries.
Indeed, the best use of storage versus export varies for each of us and is critically linked to our tariff structure.
Your tariff looks great. We pay 15p/unit at night and can export for up to 35p/unit in the evening, so the right answer for you looks very different to the right answer for us, especially when I come home in the afternoon and have a long evening drive to do.
This neatly encapsulates why I recommend a smart charger, as the optimum usage profile changes each time the electricity company introduces a new tariff.
Best regards, BF
So battery was down to 30% as we headed for a seaside walk that we often go on and there was a motorway services about 5km from it so I dedicated it would be handiest to “fill up” there.
It took 29 minutes to go from 21%-80% on a 169kW rated charger. We had the picnic that we would have had in the car by the beach in the services and by the time the sandwiches and coffee were consumed we were at 80%. So this was a good trial run for a long journey showing that once there is a free working charger travelling will be as seamless as in an ICE for us.
The rate of charge did vary considerably.
It started off around 78kW, increased to 126kW and then wen’t back to about 76kW. I’m not sure whether this is just the charging curve way of things or whether it was due to other cars being charged at the same time (or a mix of both).
A small ship (Katie) from Colwyn Bay has been washed up on the shore and pulled up out of further harms way by the Irish coastguard. Amazingly intact after an unmanned voyage across the Irish Sea.
.sjb
