I’m not sure we’d have gone for an EV if we couldn’t charge at home. The idea of charging the car from solar panels is hugely appealing to us. We don’t do many really long journeys, only four planned for next year, three to France and one to Northumberland, so the vast majority of charging will be at home.
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This is precisely the reason I’ve never considered it before, but having ‘popped in out of interest’ to the Tesla garage it became apparent that if I wanted to lease one of their vehicles and charge there it might be overall almost cost neutral compared to driving another leased ICE vehicle.
Several other pros and cons, but if nothing else it’s made me consider EVs.
A PHEV user here, when away from home I use IONITY via their ‘passport’ scheme costs me £5.49/mth drops the price to £0.53/kwh, GRIDSERVE offer a 5% discount if you sign up to their app and charge through that.
POD POINT offer a pay up front scheme which is okay, I used it in Bluewater in Kent over the weekend for £0.47/kwh, very useful as we had shopping to do.
InstaVolt I have used on a number of occasions without issue but they are expensive.
The Tesla option for a non Tesla car is one I am considering but by paying a fee - £8.99/mth but this drops the price to £0.39 (off-peak) at our local charging hub which is very competitive.
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In Toronto, between 11pm and 7am every day, the kw/h charge is 2.8 cents. There is a 4 hour daily peak time where it costs 28 cents per kwh, but the rest of the weekdays and weekends charges are between 8 cents and 12 cents per kwh.
So, pretty cheap here. I charge our 20 kwh Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV battery every 2 or 3 days for around 25 cents to 40 cents total, and get about 90 kms in warm weather and about 65 kms in winter.
I buy the high octane petrol, hoping it will last longer as it rarely gets used. We only drive about 1000 kms per month.
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Are you able to explain the appeal of charging your EV from solar panels?
For me, the economics don’t add up. It costs 15p/unit to export and less than 7p/unit to import overnight.
Before these rates, I tried once or twice to use my excess solar and the Zappi charger to charge my car, but the three or four hours of excess solar at 4 kW didn’t really have much impact on my EV battery. It is easier and now cheaper to sell excess PV and charge the EV at night when there is excess electricity on the grid, and hence cheaper.
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Apart from Tesla, most rapid DC chargers are a rip-off. This is a big issue for potential EV users. If you have to charge away from home a lot, then you would do well to get a monthly subscription and pay at a lower rate. Become good at planning your route as part of your journey. My i3s has done numerous 600-mile-plus journeys, and planning ahead is key. But 95% of my trips are within Kent; hence, charging at home is easy and cheap. A trip to Den Haag last year was easy due to cheap Tesla chargers in BE and NL.
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It’s more heart over head here really. We are on Octopus Cosy, which means we can’t get the 7p power that you get on the EV tariffs. So the cheapest is just over 12p for eight hours. Octopus reckon it will be cheaper for us to have Cosy for the heat pump than an EV tariff for the car. It’s a pity we can’t have both! None of the tech has arrived yet but yes, on the face of it it makes sense to fill the battery at 12p and then export at 15p, though the margin is only 3p.
The 12p rate is from 4am to 7am, then 1pm to 4pm and then 10 to 12 at night. I guess we will have to charge the car in those hours wherever possible. But if it needs a full overnight charge it will cost us 25p for some of the time. It’s going to take a bit of puzzling out.
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I thought I read that there was some sort of weird thing in the UK penalising non EV vehicle sales if they didn’t meet some quota that aims to remove all new non EVs being sold in the not too distant future, but the killer being not enough power generation and charging points for the entire vehicle fleet in the UK being electric.
Nah, I must of dreamt that, it wouldn’t make sense.
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The 15p vs 7p is not quite as advantageous as it might appear, but there is still a benefit, albeit a smaller one. It also helps exporting as AC rather than converting to DC for charging the EV battery.
The conversion losses from AC to DC back to AC are approximately 20% (lots of discussion on the exact amount).
I did look at a cosy tariff, but as I do not have a heat pump, there is little advantage. As I have two 9.5 kWh batteries, I charge overnight, then feed the house during the peak rate. I generally force discharge to 10% after 6 p.m. too. This method usually covers the 55p daily standing charge.
The manufacturers have a CO2 task per their overall sales……so the more EV, hybrid and phev they sell, allows them to sell more petrol/diesel cars, without being fined.
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There is plenty of power gen available in the UK for charging cars and the UK is on target to achieve the goverments targets for public charge point infrastructure.
However, whilst we are on target for the quanitity of chargers, the geographical distribution is not great. So if you live in North Yorks there arent many chargers, but in the south east - there are loads.
I understand that Power generation isnt a problem nationally, but locally it can be a pinch point.
We use two cars, one full EV (which we charge at home) and one diesel. The EV charge network is at the point we dont have to spend a lot of time planning when doing long trips. I have collegues at work who dont have home charging and havent done for > a year. They use slow AC chargers at work at a discounted rate, or rely on the public charge network. If I was charging regularly on the public network Id take out a subscription to reduce the cost of the charge. Without being able to charge at home or work, I think I’d probably stick with hybrid or conventional ICE power.
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I think I’ll be looking to you for advice once I get it all in the house! Work starts tomorrow all being well.
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Are Octopus supplying and fitting ev charger, panels etc?
“I’d dismissed EVs being unable currently to charge at home, but if say a Model Y can do a mile for 0.3 kWh it’s 10-11p/mile. Is that reasonable or just pitiful compared to home charging costs?”
Many people are charging at home at nearer 5p/kWh which equates to 1p/mi.
So your 10-11p/mi is still a saving over a petrol/diesel but quite a lot more than EV owners with a home charger.
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No, it’s a local company.
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We have had our EV for over 2 years, for the first year or so we kept a second petrol engined car but found we rarely used it, just used enough to keep it healthy so that was sold.
Also have the Octopus 7p/kw off peak rate…That gives 6 hours each night, at 7kw ish that’s 3quid or enough charge to add about 130-140 miles
Only once in 15k miles has it had a top up charge away from the house, and I also needed a coffee break.
since covid times we rarely go into an office, so our use case for cars has changes and actually we have found so has our attitude to them.
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2p per mile if I charge from home. A bit more in winter.
The car is a BMW i3s that will get 4 miles/kWh, a bit more in summer, less in winter.
I charge at home on Intelligent Octopus for 7p/kWh.
95% plus of mileage is inside Kent, so no need to charge away from home.
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It all depends where you are in the South East, I would say that whilst there are new charging points coming on line reasonably quickly the area is still short of charging points, this Saturday we struggled to find points in and around Maidstone, it was the weekend and with people out and about they are using what points are available whilst they shop.
The charging we did at Bluewater was pure luck with someone pulling of a bay just as we arrived, otherwise all 12 points were full.
If Electric cars are going to make massive inroads on the market it has to be via an under-subscribed charging network, when we arrive at the charging station we need to be able to pull onto a charger and connect, if there are a large number of cars waiting then the drive to make us switch is going to fail.
Exeter Services a few Fridays back, every charger full and the supplier had people on site organising the charging to ensure that people had access to the units in the order they arrived - no queue jumping.
The charging network has to get bigger and cheaper, I’m lucky that our PHEV can use the rapid chargers, I understand that not every PHEV can, so we are able to get an 80% in 30 minutes (ish).
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Ok, fair to say its patchy then.
Glad you had a good experience at Exeter. Ive found it to be carnage everytime Ive stopped there. I think the chargers are in heavy use, and if the gridserve minder is not there its a bit of a free for all. Especially if the chargers have faults.
Are you charging your PHEV at public DC chargers. Full EV drivers tend to get really annoyed when PHEVs use chargers esp when busy as a PHEV can continue without a charge, but an EV can’t.
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I’ll charge absolutely anywhere if the car needs it and it works for me to stop and charge it at that point.
Exeter is very very busy most times when we call in, GRIDSERVE have just opened 12 new charges which will help but it is still not enough at peak times, if we call in away from peak times there is no issue finding a charger (so far anyway).
We will charge via a DC charger, the car will accept the connector but I only charge to 80% to avoid cooking the battery. Not had any issue as yet with a hostile full EV driver complaining that I have stolen a charger for my pseudo EV.
The EV world is a new experience for us and one that we are still getting our head round, we love the fact that we can reach the coast and get back home without burning a drop of fossil fuel, our frustration is that some areas are still devoid of charging points in any number so whilst we can get to the local city on electricity we cannot get home as there is only a handful of chargers available and always occupied.
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