If you fit a home charger on a Kingston drive today, the law decides some of how it behaves before you touch a setting. The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 have applied to every home chargepoint sold in Great Britain since 30 June 2022, and they set default charging hours, a short random delay and your right to override both. This guide explains what those rules mean for a car parked overnight in Norbiton, Kingston Hill or Coombe, and where they stop applying.
For the installation itself, the cable route, the fuse and the borough’s flats, see our Kingston upon Thames EV charger page. Here the subject is what the charger does once it is on the wall.
What the Regulations require
For a charger on a Kingston drive, smart, in the Regulations’ sense, means the charger can communicate over a network and adjust its charging in response. Four requirements matter most to a household. The charger must keep its smart functions if you switch electricity supplier (regulation 6). If it loses its network connection, it must still be able to charge the car (regulation 7). It must come with default charging hours outside peak hours (regulation 10). And it must apply a randomised delay at the start of a charge (regulation 11).
None of this makes the charger harder to use. In Kingston upon Thames, where DVLA counts 5,029 privately kept plug-in vehicles at the end of June 2026 against 4,125 a year earlier, the rules exist so that a growing number of cars on the same streets do not all draw power at the busiest times by default.
Peak hours and a Kingston evening
The Regulations define peak hours as 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm on weekdays. A charger’s default charging hours have to sit outside those windows. In practice, for a commuter who parks on a Kingston Hill drive at half past six, a car plugged in and left alone will wait until after 10pm to start.
That suits most Kingston households with a drive, because a car parked overnight in Coombe or Norbiton has hours to spare. At 7 kW a charger delivers roughly 7 kWh an hour, so even a 60 kWh charge from nearly empty takes around eight to nine hours, which fits between late evening and morning. The weekday definition also means the peak windows do not apply at weekends.
You are not locked in. The owner can change or remove the default hours and override the default mode at any time after first use. If you need the car full for an early run down the A3 from Kingston, start it.
The randomised delay
Each time a scheduled charge is due to begin, the charger waits a random period of up to 600 seconds, ten minutes, before starting. The owner can cancel the delay. The point is to stop every charger set to the same time from switching on in the same second. On a borough network that UK Power Networks is reinforcing, with 13 km of new high-voltage cable being laid from Sury Basin in Kingston to Fairoaks Lane in Chessington according to the council, spreading the start of thousands of charges by a few minutes is a sensible piece of housekeeping.
What off-peak is worth, in round numbers
On a Kingston drive the charger can schedule itself, but the saving comes from your tariff. As a reference point, Ofgem’s price-cap unit rate for October to December 2026 is 26.32p per kWh for Direct Debit customers, so a 60 kWh charge at that rate would cost about £15.79 (our arithmetic on the average capped rate, not a quote). Off-peak EV tariffs price overnight units well below that. Compare tariffs with your supplier; we do not recommend one.
A roof changes the daytime side. PVGIS gives a 4 kWp south-facing array in Kingston about 481 kWh in June, roughly 16.0 kWh a day (our arithmetic). For what panels on a Kingston house involve, see our page on solar panels in Kingston upon Thames.
Lamp columns and flats: where the rules stop
The Regulations exclude public chargepoints and rapid chargepoints of 50 kW and above. That matters in a borough where 36.3% of households live in flats and the council tells residents without off-street parking not to trail a cable over the pavement. For many of those households the route is the council’s lamp-column chargers, run by ubitricity Shell Recharge from February 2026. Those are public chargepoints, so the default-hours rule does not govern them; the operator sets the terms.
If you live in a Kingston flat with an allocated bay, a home charger there is covered by the Regulations like any other, once the freeholder or management company has given written consent. Renters and people who own and live in a flat can claim 75% of the cost up to £500 per socket from OZEV with private off-street or allocated parking; the claim must be made through an OZEV-authorised installer, so tell us your situation at the quote stage. Our guide to the EV chargepoint grant and who qualifies has the detail.
The charger we fit and its settings
For Kingston homes we fit the EnSmart SmartBee-M, a 7 kW unit in tethered or socketed form. Its published specification lists WiFi and Ethernet connectivity, OCPP 1.6 support and RFID cards for access control. At handover you get a demonstration of the app and the scheduling, including how to override a schedule when you need the car sooner. More on the kit is in our home EV charger installation guide.
The installer, not you, notifies UK Power Networks of the new chargepoint. Kingston’s town centre is in its South Eastern Power Networks area, only about 0.7 km from London Power Networks, so check your network with UKPN’s postcode checker.
Sources: The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, S.I. 2021/1467, regulations 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 (legislation.gov.uk, read 19 October 2026): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1467/made; Ofgem, energy price cap unit rate October to December 2026 (Direct Debit); DfT and DVLA, VEH0142, privately kept, end of June 2026 and 2025 (published 23 September 2026); ONS Census 2021, TS044 (Kingston upon Thames); Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, Greener driving (read 19 October 2026): https://www.kingston.gov.uk/roads-and-travel/sustainable-travel/greener-driving; Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, UK Power Networks infrastructure upgrade page; European Commission JRC, PVGIS 5.3, 4 kWp, 35°, due south, 14% losses (run 15 October 2026); GOV.UK, Changes to electric vehicle chargepoint grant schemes from 1 April 2026 (updated 7 July 2026); EnSmart SmartBee-M specification as listed by its UK distributor; UK Power Networks, licence boundaries (December 2024).