ELECTRIC CAR CHARGING INSTALLATION

First start by finding out kWh your car battery is.

A kilowatt (or kW) is 1,000 watts. It’s basically a measure of power. So a 7kW charger has 7 kilowatts of charging power.

We measure the energy of electric car batteries in kilowatt hours (or kWh). One kWh is the same as the amount of energy used if you kept a 1,000 watt appliance running for an hour.

To roughly work out how many hours a charger would take to fully top up your car, just divide the energy of the battery in kWh by the speed of the charger in kW.

So, a 60kWh car battery needs 60 kilowatts (or 60,000 watts) of power to fully charge. Which means a 7kW charger could do the job in a little over 8 hours.

In the context of home charging, the “OLEV Grant” refers to a government grant for electric car home chargers, provided by the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV).

• The OLEV Grant, specifically named the Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme (EVHS), provides up to £350 off the cost of purchasing & installing a home charging point.
• It’s available for most electric cars and plug-in hybrid cars, old or new.
• You can claim one chargepoint per eligible vehicle and up to two eligible vehicles per household.
• An additional grant of up to £250 is available to Scottish EV drivers via the Energy Savings Trust Scotland.
• OLEV also offer the separate Workplace Charging Scheme (WCS) grant which can be claimed by any business, charity or public authority and provides up to £350 off the cost of purchasing & installing workplace charging points, up to 40 sockets.

To ensure this information is update to date please look at the above website links as it can change regularly.

Engineers have to follow a few electric car charging point installation regulations. This might affect where you can put the charger in your house.

Before installing your charger, the engineers will look at some photos of where you want to put it. They might ask you to send the photos, or they may come and take some themselves as part of a site survey.

They’ll mostly be looking for ‘sim touches’ – metal objects that are connected to your electricity supply. Any potential sim touch has to be at least 2.5 metres away from the charger.

For example, if you have lights in a metal case, they’ll ask you to replace the case with a plastic one. And in some rare cases – like if there’s a street lamp by your driveway – it won’t be possible to install the charger in that site, so you’ll have to pick a new location.

Small Jobs i.e one or two new light installations or replacements

Normally through description over the phone or email and or some images if needed we can give you our hourly rate with estimated time frames which you can find here on our prices page

Small - Medium Projects i.e new installations with cable routes and design requests

We may recommend a video estimate to start with to assess your requirements and potentially provide you a ballpark figure to provide you quicker turnaround time and save you the hassle of appointment slots.

The Electrician will ask if your supplying materials and or any specification requests - and from asking to see fuse board locations and installation locations - plus the ceiling and flooring type for route estimate how much time they think it will take. On longer duration jobs we do not price per hour of course - and based on the estimated time work out days and man power + materials to provide competitive rates.

Medium - Large Projects i.e new installations with cable routes and design requests on a larger scale or more in depth designs

We would attend for a free site visit to go through this in depth and look round the site/drawings or designs if you have them. As well as any products you are looking at.

On longer duration jobs we do not price per hour of course - and based on the estimated time work out days and man power + materials to provide competitive rates.