Which home charging point?

[Buzz84]

blank said:

I really like the idea of a 7kW dual charger that can balance 7kW between 2 vehicles.

Unfortunately I would not buy anything ProjectEV as they're very much a case of "buy cheap buy twice". They're rebranded ATESS units from China and the UK team know virtually nothing about how anything works.

If I was getting a charger now it would probably be an Ohme as they're most widely supported on smart tariffs.

I mentioned above we had a dual 22kw ProjectEV charger installed at work, they were quick and helpful to answer a couple of queries we had prior to buying it.
Once installed we had reason to get assistance from them and they were again very quick to sort out what we needed. (Our electrical supply wasn't good enough to supply full load initially, so they carried an over the air update to flash a special firmware that limits the unut to half power till we got the cables upgraded later). While it doesn't account for everyone's experience, I can't fault them.

Ohmes are just rebranded units from china too,

[CivicDuties]

Evanivitch said:

CivicDuties said:

Genuinely, hardly anybody needs fast charging at home.

7kW is fast charging.

You mean Rapid.

No, I meant what I said. I've got 3kw charging, had it for 7 years, even that is faster than I need really. When the average user is only doing 20 or so miles a day, even granny charging is plenty overnight in the vast majority of cases - most cars will be parked at home for 12 hours or more at a time.

But sure, 110+ mile a day users would want fast at home, but for most of us fast is a nice to have on the rare occasion you might need it, and even then there's the back up of going to a local rapid in those odd circumstances.

[Evanivitch]

CivicDuties said:

Evanivitch said:

CivicDuties said:

Genuinely, hardly anybody needs fast charging at home.

7kW is fast charging.

You mean Rapid.

No, I meant what I said. I've got 3kw charging, had it for 7 years, even that is faster than I need really. When the average user is only doing 20 or so miles a day, even granny charging is plenty overnight in the vast majority of cases - most cars will be parked at home for 12 hours or more at a time.

But sure, 110+ mile a day users would want fast at home, but for most of us fast is a nice to have on the rare occasion you might need it, and even then there's the back up of going to a local rapid in those odd circumstances.

You're applying your own experience, and ignoring the wider constraints.

People aren't charging for 12 hours. Ideally, the majority of charging will be between 10pm and 5am because that's when grid demand is lowest. Anyone charging at 6-7pm is often using highest cost (and carbon) energy from gas STOR plants. It's entirely possible that different houses on the same street will have different low-rate charging windows to balance the load on the local infrastructure. So again, having that 7kW charging gets the energy in.

And this conversation is about dual-head chargers, which are most unnecessary for majority of households because, as you said, most people aren't doing 100+ mile days in both household cars. So having one car charged each night is fine, and that might be only in a 4hr cheap charging window (about 25kWh delivered at 7kW).

Then there's the other scenarios where perhaps you've forgotten to plug in or had a failed scheduled charge, and need as much at 7kW as possible in that hour between waking up and leaving!

7kW/32A isn't a big deal at the moment, but I'm sure in future as we move to more electrical heating (and hot water) we'll see more and more load management in the household. Which is also where a 3-5kW home battery can help balance things, but personally I'd rather see better V2G implementation (and another reason why I'm in no rush to update my home charger).

[blank]

Buzz84 said:

blank said:

I really like the idea of a 7kW dual charger that can balance 7kW between 2 vehicles.

Unfortunately I would not buy anything ProjectEV as they're very much a case of "buy cheap buy twice". They're rebranded ATESS units from China and the UK team know virtually nothing about how anything works.

If I was getting a charger now it would probably be an Ohme as they're most widely supported on smart tariffs.

I mentioned above we had a dual 22kw ProjectEV charger installed at work, they were quick and helpful to answer a couple of queries we had prior to buying it.
Once installed we had reason to get assistance from them and they were again very quick to sort out what we needed. (Our electrical supply wasn't good enough to supply full load initially, so they carried an over the air update to flash a special firmware that limits the unut to half power till we got the cables upgraded later). While it doesn't account for everyone's experience, I can't fault them.

Ohmes are just rebranded units from china too,

Just adding some more opinions. I'm sure there are people that use them in "plug and charge" mode and have no issues.

"I" have spent over £300k on EV charging in the past couple of years, including ~£40k with ProjectEV. I could rant for ages on all the issues they have with OCPP compliance, chargers not meeting published specs, clueless tech support and various other things.

[CivicDuties]

Evanivitch said:

CivicDuties said:

Evanivitch said:

CivicDuties said:

Genuinely, hardly anybody needs fast charging at home.

7kW is fast charging.

You mean Rapid.

No, I meant what I said. I've got 3kw charging, had it for 7 years, even that is faster than I need really. When the average user is only doing 20 or so miles a day, even granny charging is plenty overnight in the vast majority of cases - most cars will be parked at home for 12 hours or more at a time.

But sure, 110+ mile a day users would want fast at home, but for most of us fast is a nice to have on the rare occasion you might need it, and even then there's the back up of going to a local rapid in those odd circumstances.

You're applying your own experience, and ignoring the wider constraints.

People aren't charging for 12 hours. Ideally, the majority of charging will be between 10pm and 5am because that's when grid demand is lowest. Anyone charging at 6-7pm is often using highest cost (and carbon) energy from gas STOR plants. It's entirely possible that different houses on the same street will have different low-rate charging windows to balance the load on the local infrastructure. So again, having that 7kW charging gets the energy in.

And this conversation is about dual-head chargers, which are most unnecessary for majority of households because, as you said, most people aren't doing 100+ mile days in both household cars. So having one car charged each night is fine, and that might be only in a 4hr cheap charging window (about 25kWh delivered at 7kW).

Then there's the other scenarios where perhaps you've forgotten to plug in or had a failed scheduled charge, and need as much at 7kW as possible in that hour between waking up and leaving!

7kW/32A isn't a big deal at the moment, but I'm sure in future as we move to more electrical heating (and hot water) we'll see more and more load management in the household. Which is also where a 3-5kW home battery can help balance things, but personally I'd rather see better V2G implementation (and another reason why I'm in no rush to update my home charger).

Yeah all good points, but I'm not ignoring anything - I'm fully aware of what you're saying. I just like to try to open people's minds to the possibility that they may not necessarily need the fastest charge rate possible, thereby maybe saving people some money by not over-speccing their installation. There's still a general received wisdom out there that EVs have worryingly short range and worryingly long charge times, and I'm just trying to add to the sum of knowledge and hopefully help open people's minds a bit and overcome some of the scare-mongering that exists around EVs.