Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

"It costs about £900 in the UK to have an EV charger installed by an electrician"

£900 is $1140. In southern California, it cost me $750 for top notch work and hardware, including: $400 to have an electrician install a 240V 50A outdoor outlet (NEMA 14-50), plus $350 for a good quality level 2 40A EVSE (this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082LMVSLY) that I installed myself as it simply plugs in the outlet and it's just a 5-minute job to secure it to the wall with two screws.

It's possible to bring the cost down to around $600 when picking a cheaper EVSE (like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LMX4TJR?th=1), so about half the UK cost as reported in the blog post. I would love to see a breakdown of that £900... that seems really high.

View on HN

> I would love to see a breakdown of that £900... that seems really high.

The £900 will include: supply of a 7kW EVSE; adding a new circuit to your consumer unit/fuse box; running a few tens of meters of fairly expensive cable (6mm SWA suitable for outdoor and underground use) in a careful, tidy way; adding an extra ground point, if needed; an electrical safety test with a special tester; and issuing a certificate (which is mandatory for this type of installation). It'll take the electrician about a day.

People in the UK pay a fairly hefty premium as we don't have as many qualified installers as we probably ought to.

Of course, standard British sockets already supply 3kW - so the cheaper option is just to get an outdoor socket installed on an existing ring main. This is substantially quicker to install in most cases.

> the cheaper option is just to get an outdoor socket installed on an existing ring main

From my searching, this doesn't meet the current regulations of the socket is intended for EV use. The costs to make it compliant bring it up to the better options anyway.

It goes without saying that you've got to have a 'granny cable' with appropriate protection - but AFAIK every EV comes with one of those.

And of course, you'd fit a socket like [1] which is waterproof even when in use, and has a built-in RCD if your consumer unit doesn't have one. It's common sense when using electricity outside. And your installer will want to make sure the circuit has enough capacity to avoid nuisance trips - put your EV on the same circuit as your kettle, washing machine, dish washer and tumble dryer and you'll have a frustrating time :)

But my point is, not every Brit with an EV spends £900 on EVSE - especially if they're only commuting two days a week, or they've got a plug-in hybrid.

[1] https://www.screwfix.com/p/masterplug-ip66-13a-1-gang-weathe...

> but AFAIK every EV comes with one of those.

No, not any more.

Sample of 1 but yeah we have a plug in hybrid and and waterproof socket in the storm porch, the car charges in a few hours. No desire to spend nearly 1k to charge a bit quicker

£900 seems cheap to me. I'm in Belgium and I installed a charging point at my house earlier this year. The cheapest quote I got was 1300 euros.

I ended up installing one myself, but spent almost as much anyway. 800 euro for an Alfen Eve charging point with support for OCCP protocol (for reimbursement of electricity cost by employer), about 200 euros in other materials (admittedly with some scope creep), 150 euros for the mandatory technical inspection...

Another recent example: I'm in Switzerland. I paid 550 CHF (630$) this summer for a "go-e Gemini" charger. I screwed it to the wall and ran a roughly 15m 3-phase 16A cable to the main fuse box (maybe around 50 CHF for cable and installation tubes), where an electrician connected it properly for 108 CHF (124$) and added an appropriate RCD for 116 CHF (133$). All in all, it cost me around 800-900 CHF (900-1000$).

Without doing some of the installation work myself, the electrician would have cost me several hundred CHF more.

From some searching, I think paying an electrician to install a 32A CEE socket (often called "Commando" in Britain after a particular manufacturer) and then installing the EVSE yourself would be similar. Although there do seem to be some safety requirements for the socket if it's to be used for charging EVs, which increase the cost.

Also, the £900 includes 20% tax.

I talked to the electrician about using a CEE16 connector to charge the car. He said that this should only be done if you don't load it near its max (16A) for long periods of time. He's seen multiple CEE16 connectors that deformed condsiderably after a year of use with regular charging sessions at 16A. If you load it to 10-12A, it should be fine.

I have servers and UPSs and so on connected with these sockets, drawing a high current 24/7. Just like every datacentre in Europe, UK included. They are only very rarely unplugged though.

Is it a case of using a high quality socket which costs 2-3 times as much?

Not the person you're asking, but it might also be where it is installed. The connector I looked up online is rated to +40C, and being located in direct sunlight on a hot day could derate the connector compared to a temperature controlled environment. Add in some dirt or corrosion in the connector and it will generate more heat. Like you said about buying a high quality connector, something with more margin in terms of current will help prevent problems from developing.

The electrician may have been referring to the 16 amp connector specifically being too close to the charging current.

Thank you for the dozen of you who responded. It's fascinating for me to see the large range of price points due to different regulations in different countries and also affected by different needs (eg. need to track kWh for subsdies).

I'm in the UK and I've got a charger being installed next week. The basic Ohme model is costing me £900 installed. Prices were the same pretty much everywhere I looked.

Also. £900 is negligible and pocket change compared to the price of an EV, even in the second hand market.

No one looks at it this way, because extremely few people buy cars with cash. Majority of buyers buy a car on finance - and compared to the monthly £500 a car might cost you, £900 is not insignificant, that's nearly two car payments, and also I have no idea how wealthy you'd have to be to call £900 "pocket change".

We have an EV and a PHEV, I had a charger installed back when government grants were much more generous, we paid £250 to have one installed, but nowadays I think I'd just make do with a 3 pin charger, or get a commando socket installed + OHME 32amp commando socket charger, much cheaper than this.

I used a granny charger for the first 3 weeks after getting my EV. I don't use the car that much but even so, the painfully slow charging made it a hassle. And also remember, if you want access to cheap electricity, you need to use a "real" EVSE. This DIY one can't provide access to that either.

>>And also remember, if you want access to cheap electricity, you need to use a "real" EVSE.

Why? I was on Octopus Go for a long time, I'd just set the in-car timer to charge between 00:30 and 04:30, worked fine even with a 3-pin charger. It won't work with Intelligent Octopus, but it's by no means the only way to get cheap electricity.

Not that it matters anyway, I kept a detailed log of our usage for months and concluded that GO wasn't actually saving us any money, the cheaper electricity at night didn't offset the energy used during the day, not at the idiotic prices they charged for peak usage anyway. We just switched to Octopus Tracker, I can charge my car at any point during the day and it's actually cheaper than being on GO.

Presumably if someone drives enough that they need more than four (or whatever) hours of charging overnight, they will need a higher power charger to take advantage of the cheapest hours.

Of course. I'm just saying that if our charger broke tomorrow I don't think I'd pay £900 for a new one, it's just too much money imho, but our personal situation works even with the slow 3 pin charging.

You are right, sorry. I forgot there's the non-intelligent version. Although you can't put in much in just 4 (I think?) hours with a granny on Go.

Intelligent Go is saving me a lot. But the peak rate where I am (I believe it varies by region) is only a few pence more than the cap. And I'm trying to use washing machine etc only off-peak where possible. My bill is now less compared to before I had the EV.

Yeah but the cap is stupid - on tracker I've been consistently paying 20p/kWh or less.

And yes I was always scheduling the washing machine and dishwasher for the cheap hours at night, but we both work from home, both run a lot of equipment, the daytime cost just was destroying any savings made during the night. But again, that's just us and our situation.

The UK VAT is 20%. California's sale tax is only 7.25%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com