When people in Walthamstow ask what makes a home charger “smart”, they usually mean an app. The law means something more specific. Since 30 June 2022, every new home charger sold in Great Britain has had to meet the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, and those rules shape how and when your car charges before you change a single setting.
This guide reads the regulations on legislation.gov.uk, as made, and turns them into plain answers for an E17 home: what the charger does by default, what you can change, and how it fits with a tariff. Whether your home can have a charger at all is a separate question, answered on our page about home EV charging in Walthamstow.
What the law makes every charger do
GOV.UK’s guidance on the regulations, last updated 23 April 2024, summarises the core: smart functionality, including the ability to send and receive information; pre-set default charging hours; a randomised delay; the ability to take part in demand-side response services; a measuring system; and security in line with the cyber security standard ETSI EN 303 645. The main rules came into force on 30 June 2022 and the security requirements on 30 December 2022. DVLA counts 4,312 privately kept plug-in vehicles across Waltham Forest at the end of June 2026, up from 3,352 a year earlier, and every home charger bought for one of them since mid-2022 has had to work this way.
None of that is optional. A charger that cannot do it cannot lawfully be sold for home use, which is why any charger quoted for a Walthamstow home today, including the EnSmart SmartBee-M we fit, is a smart charger.
Default hours, and why they avoid the evening
Regulation 10 defines peak hours as 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm on weekdays. A new charger must come with pre-set default charging hours outside those peaks. When it is first used, the owner must be offered the choice to accept those hours, remove them or set different ones, and can change them again at any time afterwards. The evening peak is longer than the one Waltham Forest’s lamp columns use: the council says their smart option pauses from 4pm to 8pm, while the regulations’ peak runs until 10pm. So, out of the box, a car plugged in on an E17 drive at 6pm on a Tuesday is not meant to start pulling 32 A straight away. It waits for the default window. You can override that whenever you like; the regulations require the override to be available, except where using it would or may create a risk to health or safety.
The random delay
Regulation 11 adds a less obvious feature. Each time charging is due to start, or the charging rate is due to rise or fall, the charger applies a delay of up to 600 seconds, of random length. It must also be capable of a delay of up to 1,800 seconds if the maximum is changed remotely. As we read it, the point is the network rather than your car. If the home chargers behind Waltham Forest’s 4,312 privately kept plug-ins all started at exactly 00:00 when a cheap window opened, the load on the local network would jump at once; a random spread of up to ten minutes smooths it. The owner can cancel the delay on any occasion, and it does not apply while the charger is providing certain demand-side response services.
Records you can read
Regulation 9 requires the charger to measure, on every session, the electricity it has imported and how long it took, in watt-hours or kilowatt-hours. You must be able to view those figures for any session, any month and the whole of the past 12 months, and the figures must be accurate to within 10%. That gives you your own record of what the car has used, separate from the household bill, which is useful in a converted E17 house, 12.1% of households across the nine wards, where the charger shares a flat’s own meter. Regulation 7 covers the other worry people raise: if the charger loses its internet connection, it must still be able to charge the car.
Matching the hours to a tariff
The charger’s schedule and your tariff are separate things. The regulations set when a new charger charges by default; your supplier sets what each hour costs. To compare, the Ofgem price-cap unit rate for October to December 2026 is 26.32p per kWh on Direct Debit, and off-peak EV tariffs price their overnight hours below that. We do not print supplier tariff rates, because they change and differ by supplier; what matters at the survey is that you can set the charger’s window to match whichever tariff you choose. In Walthamstow that often means a flat’s own meter. Across the nine wards, 34.9% of households live in purpose-built flats and 12.1% in converted or shared houses (Census 2021, our sums). In a converted house, a charger can only be wired to the supply of the flat it serves, so the tariff and the off-peak window that count are on that meter. Central Walthamstow is on UK Power Networks’ London Power Networks area, about 2.2 km from its Eastern area, so towards the north of E17 UKPN’s area checker confirms your network.
If you charge on the street
Waltham Forest Council’s own page, last updated 16 April 2026 and read on 19 October 2026, says it does not permit charging from a private supply with cables across, above or under the highway. Its on-street answer is lamp columns: it lists 1,010 of them, rated at about 5.5 kW, typically used overnight with a charge time of seven to eight hours. The council says off-peak lamp-column charging runs from midnight to 7am, and that choosing smart charging at the column pauses charging from 4pm to 8pm and resumes it afterwards. The pricing is the operator’s, shown at the column and on the council’s page.
Pulling it together
A smart charger at an E17 home does three useful things without being asked: it waits for off-peak hours, it staggers its start, and it keeps a record. Your job is to choose a tariff and set the window to match. If you are also weighing up panels or a battery, our post on how an EV, solar and a battery fit together in Walthamstow covers that side, and our page on solar panels in Walthamstow covers the roof. For the charger itself, see our home EV charger installation page.
Sources: The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 (S.I. 2021/1467), regulations 7 to 11 as made, legislation.gov.uk, read 19 October 2026; GOV.UK, Regulations: electric vehicle smart charge points (last updated 23 April 2024, read 19 October 2026); Ofgem, energy price cap October to December 2026; ONS Census 2021 via Nomis, TS044 by 2022 ward for Walthamstow’s nine wards (our sums); UK Power Networks Open Data and NESO licence boundaries, town-centre point check; London Borough of Waltham Forest, Electric vehicle charging points (https://walthamforest.gov.uk/node/5585, last updated 16 April 2026, read 19 October 2026).