251 - The No Home Charging Solution Episode 1

Gary :

Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today we'll be looking again at living without a home charger.

Gary :

Our main topic of discussion today is living without a home charger. Now this is going to be a two-part episode and in this first episode, we'll go through all the options available. We'll talk about the pros and the cons and I'll provide some useful links. And then in the next episode, next week, we're going to chat with someone who actually lives with this on a day-to-day basis. We'll go through a typical couple of weeks with them, what they do, where they charge, how they handle it. And more importantly, we'll also look at how much it costs.

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So stay tuned for that. Now let me start by framing up the issue. I spend a lot of time talking with people who own and live with electric cars. The vast majority of these conversations are with people who have somewhere to park their car off road where they can charge using their own home charging at off-peak rates. Almost without exception, these people are happy with their EV, happy with the charging situation and happy with their decision to go electric. But there are people out there driving EVs that not in that position.

They don't have anywhere to park their car off-road and as a result they're dependent on other methods of charging. Generally these people are less happy about their decision to go electric but not always. Those that are happy have moulded their driving habits around the need to find charging solutions on a regular basis. We did a whole episode back in season 11 called the No Home Charging episode, episode 209, where a lot of these people came on and told us about their charging habits.

But there's an even bigger group of people out there who probably want to go electric, but are hesitant because they can't charge at home. In fact, if you cash your mind back to the ZAPMAP episode, episode 233, Charlie Gilbert from Field Dynamics came on and told us that about 33 % of the dwellings in the UK are unable to park a car off-road. As always, I advise caution with this figure as it doesn't indicate what percentage of those dwellings actually have a car.

Gary :

But if we assume that 33 % is a reasonable figure for the moment, we can start to see the problem. Of course, the irony is that 100 % of drivers worldwide have no ability to refuel their fossil fuel cars at home, and every one of them pays the rates mandated by the oil companies, rather than discounted rates from third parties, for example. But the perception seems to be that without home charging, it's difficult to live with an electric vehicle. We've already had people on the show

who can prove that this isn't the case. But as I mentioned earlier, they're of the mindset that they want this to work and are happy to do whatever needs to be done. As we approach the steeper part of the early mass adoption segment of the adoption curve, we're not going to find people who have that sort of mentality. What they want is something that replicates their existing paradigm of run for a long, time and pop into somewhere that can top them up in minutes. Now I'm convinced that this will come in time.

A battery and charger technology is improving at a tremendous rate. I wouldn't be surprised to see new battery chemistries that can support ultra, ultra rapid charging where they have a huge range and can literally refill in five to 10 minutes. In fact, if you look at the likes of Chinese EV manufacturer Zika who have a commercialized battery that can do exactly that. Charges 74 kilowatt hour battery from naught to 80 % in 10 minutes. And you'll see we're not that far away. BYD has recently announced a more powerful charger

that can charge a battery in about four minutes. But that's not going to solve the immediate problem. People not moving to EV because they can't charge at home. In fact, even if we had vehicles that could replicate the wet fuel scenario for speed and convenience, we still have one big elephant in the room and that's cost. We've spoken on the show many times before about the fact that public chargers, especially public rapid charging, is more expensive than home charging.

Now, nobody believes that there should be parity between the two. You're comparing apples and oranges and it's not a fair comparison. But everyone believes the price should be lower. How much lower? Well, that's an interesting question. Now I'm on record as saying that we should be looking to get the price of public rapid charging down to below the price of wet fuels. At the time of writing this episode, that's approximately 14 pence a mile for diesel and 15 pence a mile for petrol. And that's somewhere in the region of

Gary :

46 or 47p per kWh for charging. Remember, six years ago when I first started driving electric, the price of rapid public charging was around 9 or 10p per kWh with a small monthly subscription. We've also talked extensively on the show about the reason the price is as high as it is, mainly high VAT rates, as well as much higher grid-imposed charges for things like standing charges and capacity charges.

alongside a generally higher wholesale price for electricity. Which brings me on quite nicely onto today's main topic. What's actually out there for people in this situation? Now we've done episodes in the past that cover all the things I'm going to discuss today, but we've never put them all together in a single episode that covers all the solutions. In the show today, you'll learn about solutions for those who can park their car at their house, but not on their drive. For people who can use neighbors' charges.

for people who can't park anywhere near their home and for people who have nearby charges with options to charge but at public charging rates. So here we go. Now let's start with the least best option which is 100 % public charging. Now I call this the least best option for two reasons. One, it will be more expensive than any of the other options here and two, it will probably be more inconvenient or possibly less convenient.

subtle difference between the two. Now don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible. Podcast supporter and Patreon contributor, Ron Godfrey does all his charging on the public network. He covers thousands of miles in a week and he's worked out that he's paying around 10 pence a mile due to time of day discounts or subscriptions and his quite extensive use of the Tesla supercharging network. But within this option, we're basically looking at two different methods of charging.

using public, rapid and ultra-rapid charges while doing something else, or using overnight, slower charges while sleeping. Option one is the easiest, I suppose. While you're driving, navigate to a charger, plug in and either eat or do your email, social media, wordle, etc. until it's done. And depending on the size of your battery and your state of charge, it could be 20 minutes or it could be an hour. Anecdotally, Tesla owners never seem to have enough time to eat their food before their charge is complete.

Gary :

If you use an app like Zapmap and their price filter, you can easily locate those units that are near you with lower charging tariffs than the average. At the time of writing, the average price per kilowatt hour for rapid, ultra rapid charging, 50 kilowatts or higher, was 80 pence a kilowatt hour. This is the price EV drivers can pay at a ChargePoint network without a membership or a special deal. Just ad hoc, turn up and pay. But by looking around a little,

you can get discounts, time of day tariffs and subscriptions. We talked about subscriptions in episode 255, but basically there are several ChargePoint operators out there that will discount your price per kilowatt hour, sometimes quite steeply if you take out a monthly subscription. Check that episode out for more on which CPOs do that and what the offerings are and how to calculate whether a subscription will work out for you. Discounts are offered regularly by different ChargePoint operators.

Sometimes these are linked to using their app. Sometimes they're just discounted by the charge point operator for no reason. At the time of writing the PP pulse units at Reading Motorway service areas are 49 pence a kilowatt hour. AW renewables, electric rapid charging at Checkley Wood near Lake Buzzard is 39 pence a kilowatt hour. Obviously, if you don't live near these places, they're not going to be much use. But if you do, then it's always an option. GridServs launched their in-house app last year. And as part of the promotion for that,

They offered a substantial discount for any charge started via the app. Guests of the podcast last season, BEV, also offer discounts if you use their app to start and stop the charge. InstaVault have off-peak rates at the time of writing, 54p per kWh between the hours of 8pm and 7am everywhere on their network when using their app. And if you're at their new Super Hub that opened in Winchester recently, that site is offering 50p per kWh charging between 7pm

and 7am, again, starting and stopping your charges in their app. So there are options out there, but moving on, let's look at slower charging. The Zapmap average price index for fast charging, i.e. below 50 kilowatts, shows a rate of 56 pence a kilowatt hour at this level. This basically covers things such as 7 kilowatt, 11 kilowatt and 22 kilowatt charging, but it can cover some of the slower rapid charges such as those installed for

Gary :

Chademo drivers at the grid serve electric forecourt in Stevenage. 49 pence a kilowatt hour for 24 kilowatt charging. The whole idea of this type of charging is that you can use it when your car is stationary. Now I know that sounds stupid, I mean stationary as in parked up for a period of time, as indeed it is for 90 % of the vehicle's life. And ideally this can be used when you're at work or shopping or watching a live event or staying overnight at a hotel.

There are some great slower charges at places like Chester Zoo, Centre Park, Chester World of Adventure. They're there for when you park your car for the day to do something else and you can charge it up at a relatively slow rate, thereby preserving the battery health. Anyone who's ever been to the Harry Potter Wizarding World that leaves the studios outside Watford will see that near the entrance there, there are several rows of seven kilowatt charges to use while you're discovering the wonders of Hogwarts. At the next door film studios and

also at Pinewood and Shepperton, there are similar charges for use when you're actually working there. The advantage of this, as I found to my great delight, is that I can arrive with a low state of charge, plug in, ignore the car for the rest of the day, and when I return to the car in the evening, it will be fully charged. The cost is often relatively low. The last time I knew it was actually free if you're working at Pinewood Studios. I'm not sure what it is just now. It's been a while since I've been there. Now I was recently at a local government event in Harrogate where I had to park up

in a public car park for the day. I discovered that there were row of connected curb chargers there. I plugged in when I arrived, stayed for seven and a half hours. And when I left, the charger had added almost 48 kilowatt hours of energy to my car. Not bad for a car that has a 58 kilowatt hour usable battery. Total cost around 23 pounds. And that got me all the way home for the night with absolutely no problem. So if we are looking at using 100 % public charging, there are definitely options there if you can charge while doing something else.

But often that's not possible. So people need overnight charging where they live. And that's where street charging comes into its own. Street charging is where companies install either lamp post chargers or standalone AC charging units on a given street that are intended to be used overnight. Ubitricity is one of the major players in the lamp post charging market. They've literally added AC connectors to existing street lamps in dozens, probably even hundreds of streets around the country.

Gary :

And again, at the time of writing, they currently charge 49 pence a kilowatt hour for charging, which gives a rate of a little under 14 pence a mile. Connected curb are similar. They run AC charges in places such as Coventry, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Milton Keynes, and they charge 50 pence a kilowatt hour at any time. Again, the high end of 14 pence a mile. Chargy, C-H-A-R dot G-Y, have a pay as you go overnight rate valid between midnight and 7 a.m., which costs 39 pence a kilowatt hour.

. This was announced in July,: 2023

The reasons behind this are little opaque, but the official announcement seems to indicate issues with comms connections between the cabinets and the apps used to manage the charging. BT having comms issues as an irony. Anyway, back to prices. If you want a great site to compare these prices, I recommend lecky.net, Lincoln's show notes. It lists all ChargePoint operators in ascending order of price per kilowatt hour or price per mile.

And it's great for finding little gems like little AC plus charging tariffs at 40 pence a kilowatt hour or 11 and a half pence a mile. For comparison, as mentioned earlier, these figures are averaged against a fossil fuel rate of 14 pence a mile for diesel and 15 pence a mile for petrol. But of course, the issue with all of these solutions, or at least the perceived issue, is that they're not outside your house. You might have to walk to get there or they might not be available when you need them. That's right. But in many places where people park on the street,

They also don't park outside their house all the time. It's often somewhere further down the road. Former EVA England, chief executive officer and podcast guest, James Court is in this situation. He lives in South London and he parks in various different places near his home when he charges. Even when he's not charging, he can't always park right next to his house. Furthermore, if you're in this situation, you don't always need to charge every night.

Gary :

Remember with average distances traveled on the UK roads and EV with a range of 200 miles will need to charge approximately every seven to nine days. Now next week I'll be talking with Bob Murphy. He's a Kia Soul 63 kilowatt hour driver who has no home charging and does a reasonable number of miles per week. He'll be given his chapter and verse on what he pays to use a hundred percent public charging of the sort we've discussed here. So we've covered public rapid charging and how you can cut costs with that through subscriptions.

We've covered public fast and street charging and how you can cut costs with that through overnight tariffs. Let's move on from public charging and go to home charging for those without off street parking. Again, everything I'm talking about today has been covered in various episodes on the show before, and I'll include links in the show notes wherever possible to previous episodes. The Holy grail for people without off street parking is to find a solution that allows them to use their own home electricity tariff, including off peak charging rates.

to charge their own car as it sits outside their own house. Well, there are a number of options that allow you to do that. Let's look at apartment blocks. On episode 226, we spoke with a company called Charge Guru. They have a solution for people who live in an apartment block and can't charge. It's simple and quite ingenious as a solution as these things often are. Rather than each person having to contact the landlord and get permission and sort out charge installation and work out how to calculate charge for it.

Charge Guru sort all this out. They approach a landlord, they install the cabling and the charges and they manage the billing. You can opt into their offering, in which case you get a charger installed and it will charge you a subscription per month for dealing with the billing, etc. But what it does mean is you can use domestic electricity rates, which are cheaper than public. Now, yes, there is a subscription payment on top, but it still works out cheaper than paying for public rates. There are a couple of small gotchas with this solution, however.

You have to have an underground car park and there have to be more than 30 parking spots available. So what if you're not in an apartment? Well, in some places, if you can guarantee to park in a similar or the same place overnight, you can literally run a cable out of your door, across the pavement and into your car. Obviously this has to be done safely and with appropriate cable covers, et cetera. Some councils allow this, some won't. I've talked before about friend of the podcast, Gary Wales.

Gary :

who parks his Tesla Model 3 in a communal parking area outside the back of his house. He runs power from his shed, under his fence, along the side of the footpath, through a cable cover and into a secure box. In the box is his Tesla charger, which feeds the cable out to his charge port. He's only pulling three kilowatts overnight, but he's getting that at seven pence a kilowatt hour and his return journey to work is 26 miles per day, which at three and a half miles per kilowatt hour means he'll need about nine kilowatt hours of energy to cover that distance.

something that is three and a half kilowatt charger will provide in a little over three hours. With Octopus Go, it gets four hours. So it's sorted. Easy peasy. Other places are not quite as convenient. And that's where products such as Kerbo Charge, Gully and Charge Bridge come in. We've talked about all of these before on the show. They are products that allow charge cables to be passed across public footpaths without causing an inconvenience to passersby. Plus,

They allow the user to provide the energy via their own home charger, thus avoiding high public charging fees. Chargebridge is a device fitted to the side of a house, which provides an above the head solution to pass the cable across the pavement. The latest versions have retractable leads that avoid the need to have cables running on the ground when charging. They've been developed by a company called Nodem. And we spoke with Ben McDonald from that company in episode 214. Kerbo Charge and Gully.

are similar products that do something quite ingenious. They create a channel in the footpath that allows the cable to be buried in there, passing from the private residence to the street side of the curb. At that point, it can be plugged into the car and charged as usual. The USP of both of these products is that they completely remove the trip hazard related to running cables across pavements. Devices such as these are currently being rolled out on a council by council level. So your area might not be able to get one at the moment, but

Hopefully it will ultimately. Now where someone like Kerbocharge shines is in the communal aspect to this. We mentioned earlier that not being able to park your car outside your house is a potential problem in situations such as this. But the business model for Kerbocharge is a little bit different. Kerbocharge only expects to put their product in at about every third house. This means that the cable you use will be long enough to attach to a car part in one of three locations.

Gary :

the spot directly outside the house to which it's connected, the spot immediately to the left and the spot immediately to the right. The basic process is that if you can't park outside your house, you can park one spot either side and still get a charge. But there's also an additional aspect to this, which is that if you and your two neighbors all drive electric, you can use one connection and share the costs. And this is done via a charger sharing app, which brings us onto the final method of charging for those who don't have their own charger.

which is charger sharing. Now again, the concept is simple. If you have a charger and off-street charging, you can rent out your charger and the electricity to someone who doesn't have that. There are several apps that allow this to happen. One of them is CoCharger, and we spoke to Joel T from CoCharger way back in episode 139. Zapmap have a home charger option where you can register your charger for use by others. Juice Help are another company that offers a very similar solution. In each of the cases, you use the app to locate the charger,

connect to the owner, usually via the app and book in time to charge. Costs are managed by the owner, but are generally lower than public charging costs. And if you charge overnight, you usually only slightly higher than standard off-peak charging tariffs. If you combine the co-charger slash juice juice up slash zap home offering with Kerbo charge or gully offerings that link three parking slots to one charger. This can provide a simple mechanism to share the charger and make sure everyone benefits from the solution. So there you have it.

Living without a home charger. What are the barriers? What are the options? And how does that work in real life? Did I miss anything? It's time for Coolie the Orange U-Booth and Sherry the Listeners. Gravity Water, with support from companies like Apple, is installed in rainwater harvesting tech at hundreds of locations around the world. At a remote elementary school in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam until recently, access to safe drinking water was a daily challenge.

The school tried to use groundwater, but there wasn't enough supply. The water was also contaminated with salt and metal. And in the dry season from December to April, droughts made the challenge worse. But last month, the school installed a new system that harvests rainwater, filters it, and then automatically supplies it to the drinking fountains, the kitchens and bathrooms. Later this year, the organization plans to also begin adding the technology to buildings in a city in Massachusetts.

Gary :

Fantastic, I love to see things like that.

Gary :

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at evinfo at evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on bluesky at evmusings.beesky.social. I'm also on Instagram at evmusings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there? Thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon on a monthly basis and through ko-fi.com on an ad hoc one. If you enjoyed this episode, why not buy me a coffee?

Go to ko-fi.com slash EV Musings and you can do just that. ko-fi.com slash EV Musings takes Apple Pay too. Regular listeners will know about my two e-books. So you've gone electric and so you've gone renewable. The 99 pH are equivalent and you can get them on Amazon. Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles. Now know you're probably driving or walking or jogging, but if you can remember and you enjoyed this episode,

Drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at musingsv.p.sky.social with the words, charging home. Hashtag if you know, know, nothing else. Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. You know, here's another week where he's been remarkably quiet. Strange that, hey. Thanks for listening. Bye.