Almost every home EV charger enquiry arrives with the same hidden question underneath it: can my house actually take one? It is the right question, and the answer is usually yes — but not for the reason people expect, and not without a survey that looks at four specific things.
What a 7 kW charger actually asks of your house
A standard single-phase home charger is rated 7.4 kW, which at 230 V is 32 A drawn continuously for hours at a time. That last word is what makes it different from everything else on your consumer unit. A kettle pulls 13 A for three minutes. An electric shower pulls more than a charger does, but for ten minutes. A car charger sits at 32 A all evening.
Set that against what comes into the house. Domestic main fuses — the cut-out fuse in the supply head, before your meter — are commonly 60 A, 80 A or 100 A. On a 100 A supply, 32 A of charging leaves plenty of room. On a 60 A supply, a charger plus an electric shower is already over the limit, and the thing that fails is the main fuse, which you cannot replace yourself and which leaves the whole house dark until the network operator attends.
So the first number in any honest EV charger survey is the rating stamped on that fuse.
Why the answer is almost never “upgrade your supply”
Here is the part that saves people the most money. If the arithmetic is tight, the instinctive fix is to ask the distribution network operator for a bigger supply — a job that means excavation, a visit, a wait and a bill.
The standard solution instead is load management. A current sensor is clamped around your incoming supply cable and reports continuously to the charger. The charger then takes only the headroom that is actually spare: when the oven, the shower and the immersion are all running, it quietly drops its own current, and when the house goes quiet it ramps back up to the full 32 A. Your car charges slightly more slowly for the hour someone is cooking, and the main fuse never comes close to its limit.
This is why the great majority of homes with a 60 A or 80 A supply can have a 7.4 kW charger without touching the supply at all. It is also why “will my fuse take it” is the wrong question in isolation — the right one is “will it take it with load management”, and the answer is usually yes.
The other three things the survey looks at
The main fuse is the headline, but it is not the only limiting factor, and the other three are cheaper to find now than later.
The earthing arrangement. How your property is earthed determines what protective equipment the charger needs. Outdoor EV charging equipment has to be protected against the specific fault where the supply’s combined neutral and earth conductor breaks — a condition that can put a dangerous voltage on anything metal and earthed, including a car on a driveway. Modern chargepoints handle this with built-in protection, but which arrangement you have changes what is required and occasionally what it costs.
The consumer unit. A charger needs its own dedicated circuit with its own protective devices. A board that is already full, or an older board that cannot accommodate the required protection, means either a spare-way solution or a board change — a real cost, and one that belongs on the quote rather than in a conversation on installation day.
Where the charger goes relative to where you park. Cable routes are priced by the metre and by the obstacle. A garage wall next to the consumer unit is one price; the far side of the house with a driveway crossing in between is another. And if you have no off-street parking at all, a conventional installation is not the answer — the cross-pavement route is a different conversation entirely.
The network operator notification, which is not your job
Every new chargepoint is notified to your local distribution network operator. High-demand devices matter to them because they plan the local network around aggregate demand, and a street filling up with chargers changes those numbers.
This is worth saying plainly because it is a common worry: the notification is part of the installation, handled by the installer. You do not apply for anything, you do not wait for permission before the work can be booked in the ordinary case, and a quote that treats it as an extra or omits it altogether is a quote worth questioning.
What this means for your quote
Four items, all of which should be visible before you agree a price: the main fuse rating and whether load management is being specified; the earthing arrangement and the protection it requires; the condition and capacity of the consumer unit; and the cable route with its length. A quote carrying all four has been to your house. A single figure for “7 kW charger installed” has not.
If you want the full picture of charger speeds, the smart-charging rules that now apply to every new unit sold in Great Britain, and the current grant position, it is all on our home EV charger installation page — and the cost side, including what each of those four items does to the number, is in our EV charger installation cost guide. If you are weighing charger speeds specifically, the 7 kW versus 22 kW comparison is the shorter read.
One last thing worth knowing: because a charger is a continuous load that runs when the house is asleep, it pairs unusually well with battery storage and an EV tariff — the cheap overnight window can fill both the car and the battery, and the battery then runs the house through the following evening’s expensive hours.
Sources: charger ratings and current draw are arithmetic at 230 V nominal; domestic main fuse ratings and load-management practice are standard UK installation practice. The smart-charging requirement for new chargepoints sold in Great Britain and the current chargepoint grant rates are GOV.UK-published and cited on our EV charger page. Nothing on this page is a substitute for a survey of your own property.