A home charger bought for a house in Farnborough today is a small computer as well as a socket. Since 30 June 2022, every new home chargepoint sold in Great Britain has had to be smart under the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, and the rules say quite precisely what that means: when it charges by default, how you change it, and what it must still do if the WiFi drops.
Rushmoor has more cars that this applies to every year. DVLA records 2,201 privately kept plug-in vehicles across the borough at the end of June 2026, up from 1,491 a year earlier, about 48% more (our arithmetic); we leave out the much larger all-keeper figure because it mostly counts company registrations. Fitting, fuses and SSEN’s paperwork are on our page about EV charger installation in Farnborough. This guide is about the smart part.
What “smart” has meant since 30 June 2022
GOV.UK’s guidance, updated 23 April 2024, says the regulations apply to private chargepoints sold for use in a domestic or workplace environment in Great Britain. They require smart functionality, including the ability to send and receive information; pre-set, off-peak default charging hours that the owner can accept, remove or change; a randomised delay function; and, from 30 December 2022, security requirements consistent with the cyber security standard ETSI EN 303 645. Public chargepoints are outside the scope, so the rules here are about the unit on your own wall in Farnborough, not the public chargers you might use elsewhere.
The purpose, in the government’s framing, is to let cars charge when there is less demand on the grid or more renewable electricity available. For a Farnborough household, the practical effect is that the charger arrives able to follow a schedule, and you choose the schedule.
The default hours, and changing them
Regulation 10 sets the default. A home charger must come with pre-set default charging hours that sit outside peak hours, and the regulation defines peak hours as 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm on weekdays. When you first use it, the charger has to give you the choice to accept those hours, remove them or set your own, and you can change or remove them at any time afterwards.
You can also override the default to charge now. The regulations put one limit on overriding: under regulation 8, the charger must not let anyone override the default hours, the random delay or a demand-response instruction where doing so would or may create a risk to health or safety. For a driver plugging in on a drive in Southwood after a late shift, the schedule is a starting point, not a lock.
The random delay
Regulation 11 adds a delay that surprises some new owners. By default, each time a charger would start charging or change its charging rate, it waits a random period of up to 600 seconds, and it must be capable of a delay of up to 1,800 seconds if that maximum is changed remotely. The owner can cancel the default delay, and it does not operate while the charger is providing demand-response services or where an equivalent delay has already been applied.
The reason is arithmetic at network scale. If every car on Farnborough’s streets that shares a cheap window started at exactly the same moment, the step change in demand would land on the local network all at once. A few minutes’ scatter spreads it out, and for a car parked overnight the delay makes no practical difference to the morning’s charge.
Matching the schedule to a tariff
The default hours the law sets are a floor, not a tariff. Your electricity supplier sets its own off-peak window, and the useful step after installation is to set the charger’s hours to match it. For scale, a 60 kWh charge at Ofgem’s October to December 2026 price-cap unit rate of 26.32p per kWh (Direct Debit) costs about £15.79 (our arithmetic on the average capped rate); off-peak EV tariffs price overnight units well below that. We do not quote supplier rates, which change, so compare the current offers yourself before you set the schedule.
Smart features also matter if you have panels. PVGIS puts a 4 kWp south-facing array in Farnborough at about 483 kWh in June and about 138 kWh in December, roughly 16.1 kWh against 4.5 kWh a day (our arithmetic), so a summer schedule that leaves the car to take surplus solar at a weekend can be paired with a winter schedule that relies on the overnight window. Our page on solar panels in Farnborough covers the roof side.
The other things the rules guarantee
Several quieter parts of the regulations protect you as an owner in Cove or North Camp. Under regulation 6, a charger must not be configured to lose its smart functionality if you switch electricity supplier, so you are not tied to the supplier that sold the tariff. Under regulation 7, it must still be able to charge the car if it loses its connection to the communications network. And under regulation 9, it has to measure the electricity used each time it charges and let the owner see that by session, by month and for the past 12 months.
The EnSmart SmartBee-M we fit has WiFi and Ethernet connectivity, RFID cards for access control, an LCD status screen and OCPP 1.6 support on its published specification. Our home EV charger installation page sets out the rest of it.
How smart charging fits a Farnborough supply
Farnborough is on SSEN Distribution’s Southern Electric Power Distribution network. A 7 kW charger draws 32 A continuously against a typical 60 A, 80 A or 100 A main fuse. SSEN’s rule is that where the property’s total demand is 60 A or less with no safety concerns, the installer connects and notifies within 28 days; otherwise the installer applies and waits for approval, and a looped supply is checked first. Scheduling and load management work together here: a charger set for the small hours seldom overlaps the evening cooking in a Cove semi, and load management turns it down on the nights it does.
Sources: GOV.UK, Regulations: electric vehicle smart charge points (updated 23 April 2024), read 19 October 2026; The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021/1467), regulations 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, legislation.gov.uk, read 19 October 2026; DfT and DVLA, VEH0142 licensed plug-in vehicles by local authority, private keepers, 2026 Q2 and 2025 Q2 (published 23 September 2026); Ofgem, energy price cap October to December 2026; 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); EnSmart Power, SmartBee-M specification as listed by its UK distributor. Percentages, costs and daily figures are our arithmetic.