The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 came into force on 30 June 2022, so any home chargepoint sold in Great Britain since then has been smart by law. Across Broxbourne, DVLA records about 2,631 privately kept plug-in vehicles at the end of June 2026, up from 1,856 a year earlier. This guide is about what those rules make a charger do once it is on the wall, which settings belong to you, and how to line the schedule up with a tariff. For where a unit goes on an EN7, EN8 or EN10 house, and what the survey checks first, start with our Cheshunt EV charger page.
How a charger, panels and a battery share one house is covered in EV, battery and solar in Cheshunt. Here the subject is the charger’s own software, which works the same on a Goffs Oak drive or in a Turnford garage.
What “smart” means in law
Regulation 5 says a relevant charge point must have smart functionality. In plain terms it has to be able to send and receive information over a communications network, and to respond to signals by changing how fast, or when, it charges. The EnSmart SmartBee-M we fit connects by WiFi or Ethernet and supports OCPP 1.6. Whether it goes on a semi in Rosedale or a detached house in Bury Green, that is the legal baseline, not an extra, so a Cheshunt quote should not charge more for the word “smart”.
The default hours, and who sets them
Regulation 10 requires a charger to come with default charging hours outside peak hours, and it defines peak hours as 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm on weekdays. At first use you can accept the defaults, remove them or set different hours, and you can change or remove them at any time afterwards. The rule does not apply where a charger is sold with a qualifying demand side response agreement.
The 4pm to 10pm block is the one that matters most in a Cheshunt house. It is when many people get home and plug in, while the oven and shower run on the same main fuse. On a 60 A fuse, a charger drawing 32 A takes more than half the supply on its own (our arithmetic).
A random start
Regulation 11 makes a random delay of up to 600 seconds the default at the start of each charge, and the owner can cancel it each time. The charger must also be able to accept a delay of up to 1,800 seconds set remotely. The effect is that chargers on one street set to the same start time do not all switch on in the same second. Broxbourne added 775 privately kept plug-in vehicles in a single year (our arithmetic on DVLA’s figures), many of them on the same Eastern Power Networks cables, and the delay costs you at most ten minutes of a night’s charging.
When the connection drops
Regulation 7 requires a charger to remain capable of charging the car when it is no longer connected to a communications network. That matters in a garage at the back of a Flamstead End semi, where the house’s WiFi may not reach: a lost signal should not leave the car flat in the morning, although changes made in an app will not reach the charger until it reconnects. Where the signal is unreliable, the SmartBee-M’s Ethernet connection is the steadier choice, planned at the survey.
Your own charging record
Regulation 9 requires the charger to record the energy delivered and the duration of each charging session, and to let you view that information for each session, each month and the preceding 12 months. It is the simplest check on a tariff: compare it with the off-peak units on your bill.
If you divert solar to the car with a compatible setup, the daytime sessions in that log show it, and they will thin out sharply over the year. On PVGIS figures a south-facing 4 kWp roof in Cheshunt makes about 479 kWh in June and about 136 kWh in December, roughly 16.0 and 4.4 kWh a day (our arithmetic). What panels would make on your own roof is covered on solar panels in Cheshunt.
Security on the wall
Schedule 1 of the regulations sets the security rules. A charger needs a password unique to it and not derived from publicly available information; software that can be updated securely and that verifies each update is genuine; encrypted communications; a tamper-protection boundary that notifies the owner of any attempt to breach it; a security log; and personal data the owner can delete without undue difficulty. That matters when a house is sold, and in Broxbourne, where 16.0% of households rented privately at the 2021 Census, it matters at the end of a tenancy too: the outgoing tenant’s account and charging history should be cleared before the next tenant arrives.
Lining the schedule up with a tariff
The regulations’ default hours keep the car out of the peaks; they know nothing about your tariff. Off-peak EV tariffs set their own cheap window, and the charger’s schedule should sit inside that window, not merely outside 4pm to 10pm. As a yardstick, Ofgem’s price-cap unit rate for October to December 2026 is 26.32p per kWh by Direct Debit, and off-peak EV tariffs price overnight units well below that. We do not quote supplier rates; compare them yourself and set the charger to match. In a Cheshunt December, with an unshaded roof averaging about 4.4 kWh a day, that overnight window is where almost all of the car’s energy will come from.
Smart is not the same as load management
One thing smart charging does not do by itself is protect your main fuse. Scheduling decides when the car charges; load management, a current sensor on the incoming supply, decides how hard. A 7.4 kW charger draws 32 A continuously, and domestic main fuses are commonly 60 A, 80 A or 100 A. Central Cheshunt sits in UK Power Networks’ Eastern Power Networks licence area, about 7.7 km from the London network boundary. The installer notifies UKPN of the chargepoint, and where a supply is genuinely too small, UK Power Networks says it can raise a 30 A or 60 A main fuse to 80 A or 100 A. Our home EV charger installation guide sets out the SmartBee-M’s published specification and what the survey checks.
Grants and VAT
A charger on a Cheshunt house you own and live in carries no grant: the scheme for owner-occupiers closed in April 2022. Renters, and people who own and live in a flat, with private off-street or allocated parking can get 75% of the cost up to £500 per socket. The claim must be made through an OZEV-authorised installer; tell us your situation at the quote stage. The on-street grant needs an approved cross-pavement solution, and Hertfordshire County Council’s channel trial covers St Albans postcodes AL1 to AL5 only, so it has no route in Broxbourne at present. Our guide to who qualifies for the EV chargepoint grant sets out each case. A home chargepoint installation is standard-rated for VAT at 20%.
Sources: legislation.gov.uk, The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021/1467), regulations 1, 5, 7, 9, 10 and 11 and Schedule 1, read 19 October 2026; Department for Transport and DVLA, VEH0142 licensed plug-in vehicles by keepership and local authority, Broxbourne, private keepers, end of June 2025 and end of June 2026 (published 23 September 2026); ONS Census 2021, TS054 Tenure (Nomis), Broxbourne; PVGIS 5.3 (European Commission JRC), PVGIS-SARAH3 2005–2023, 4 kWp, 35° tilt, due south, 14% system losses, run 15 October 2026; Ofgem, energy price cap October to December 2026; OZEV, Changes to electric vehicle chargepoint grant schemes from 1 April 2026 (updated 7 July 2026); HMRC, VAT Notice 708/6; UK Power Networks, fuse upgrade guidance and Licence Boundaries open dataset (17 December 2024); NESO, GIS boundaries for GB DNO licence areas (3 May 2024); Hertfordshire County Council, Electric vehicles and Cross-pavement channel pages (read 19 October 2026); EnSmart SmartBee-M specification as listed by its UK distributor.