If a car on a Heatherside drive holds 60 kWh, should the battery in the garage be big enough to fill it? It is a fair question, and the answer is no. A home battery is sized to the house, and the gap between the two is large enough to change how you plan both.
For the charger itself, the fuse and SSEN’s paperwork, see our page on EV charger installation in Camberley. This guide looks at the two batteries a Camberley EV household ends up with, one in the car and one perhaps on the garage wall, and why they do different jobs.
Two batteries, two jobs
The car’s battery stores energy for driving. The home battery stores energy for the house: from the roof in the day, or from the grid in a cheaper window, released in the evening when prices and demand are higher. The Energy Saving Trust says a typical home system might be 10 kWh and that there is no exact formula for sizing one. A 60 kWh charge, the example we use for a car, is about six times that (our arithmetic).
For a Watchetts or Old Dean household, the useful way to see it is the house’s scale. Ofgem’s typical domestic consumption value from 1 July 2026 is 2,500 kWh a year, about 6.8 kWh a day (our arithmetic). A 10 kWh battery is sized around that kind of figure, a day or so of a typical household’s average use, not around a car.
Why emptying the battery into the car rarely pays
Suppose a Camberley household drains a full 10 kWh battery into the car at seven in the evening. The car gains about a sixth of a 60 kWh charge, and the house then meets its own evening demand from the grid at the peak price the battery was bought to avoid. The car would have taken the same energy more cheaply overnight on a smart schedule. Every new home chargepoint sold in Great Britain has had to be smart since 30 June 2022, so that overnight schedule is built in.
The usual pattern is therefore simple: the car charges direct from the grid in the off-peak window, and the battery covers the house between the end of the solar day and bedtime. On a sunny June weekend in Camberley, with the car parked at home, surplus solar can go to either, and how it is shared depends on how the system is set up.
What the roof adds in Camberley
PVGIS puts a 4 kWp south-facing array in Camberley at about 479 kWh in June, roughly 16.0 kWh a day, and about 137 kWh in December, roughly 4.4 kWh a day (our arithmetic). In summer that is enough to fill a 10 kWh battery and still have some left for a car parked at home in daylight. In December it is less than a typical day’s household use, so the battery is more often filled from a cheap overnight rate than from the roof.
More than 500 solar panel and battery installations have gone onto Surrey Heath homes through Solar Together Surrey since 2021, so many Camberley households asking this question already have panels. If yours do, our earlier post on adding a battery to existing solar panels in Camberley covers how a battery joins an array; our page on battery storage in Camberley covers siting and sizing.
How the two share a Camberley supply
A 7 kW charger draws 32 A continuously, and most homes have a 60 A, 80 A or 100 A main fuse. A battery charging from the grid at the same moment adds to that load. In a large Heatherside house with an electric shower and a busy kitchen, the sums need doing once for everything on the supply, not separately for each product. Load management, a sensor on the incoming supply that turns the charger down while the house is busy, usually keeps the total within the fuse.
SSEN’s rule for Camberley matters here. Where the property’s total demand is 60 A or less with no safety concerns, the installer connects and notifies SSEN within 28 days; above that, or on a supply looped with a neighbour’s, the installer applies first and waits for approval. Planning the battery and the charger together means the supply in a Camberley house is assessed once against that 60 A line, rather than twice.
What Surrey Heath’s car numbers say, and do not
Privately kept plug-in vehicles across Surrey Heath rose from 2,720 to 3,671 in the year to June 2026, about 35% (our arithmetic). The figure covers battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and range-extended vehicles registered to private keepers across the whole borough, from Camberley to Bagshot and Lightwater, and leaves out company registrations. It is not a count of chargers or of households with a car, and it says nothing about whether any of those households should buy a battery.
The money in a Camberley EV-and-battery plan
The VAT differs between the two. Under HMRC’s VAT Notice 708/6, a residential battery installation is zero-rated until 31 March 2027 and 5% from 1 April 2027; a home EV charger is not on the energy-saving list and is standard-rated at 20%. A combined quote should show them on separate lines. The Energy Saving Trust puts home batteries anywhere from £1,500 to £10,000, and says fitting storage at the same time as panels costs less than a separate visit later.
On grants, owner-occupiers of Camberley houses have had none for a charger since April 2022. Flat owner-occupiers and renters with private off-street or allocated parking can claim 75% of the cost, up to £500 per socket, until 31 March 2027, through an OZEV-authorised installer; tell us your situation at the quote stage. Who qualifies for the EV chargepoint grant sets out the conditions, and our home EV charger installation page covers the charger we fit.
Sources: Energy Saving Trust, Battery storage (updated 19 August 2026); Ofgem, typical domestic consumption values from 1 July 2026; DfT and DVLA, VEH0142 licensed plug-in vehicles by local authority, private keepers, 2026 Q2 and 2025 Q2 (published 23 September 2026); Surrey Heath Borough Council news, Solar Together Surrey; PVGIS 5.3, European Commission Joint Research Centre (PVGIS-SARAH3, run 15 October 2026); SSEN Distribution, EV Connections (read 19 October 2026); NESO GB DNO licence areas (May 2024); Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021; HMRC, VAT Notice 708/6; GOV.UK, Changes to electric vehicle chargepoint grant schemes from 1 April 2026 (updated 7 July 2026). Ratios, daily figures and the change in vehicles are our arithmetic.