Home EV Charger Installation

Roughly 7 kWh of energy per hour — so divide your battery size by seven for a full-charge estimate. A 60 kWh battery takes around 8–9 hours from near-empty, comfortably inside an overnight window, and a typical day’s driving tops back up in an hour or two. Your car’s on-board charger sets the true ceiling, which we check before quoting.

Tethered (cable permanently attached) wins on day-to-day convenience: park, grab the cable, plug in. Socketed (bring your own cable) is tidier on the wall and more future-proof if you change cars. There’s no wrong answer — the EnSmart SmartBee-M comes in both forms, and we’ll talk it through at the survey based on how you park and who drives.

Yes, with a compatible setup — surplus solar that would otherwise be exported can be diverted into the car, and scheduling can prioritise sunny hours. If you already have panels, bring your system details to the survey; if you’re planning them, see our solar panels page and we’ll design the two installations to work together.

Sometimes. A 7 kW charger adds a significant continuous load, so the survey checks your main fuse, supply capacity and consumer unit before anything is promised. If an upgrade or a load-management device is needed, it appears as a line on your written quote — not as a surprise on installation day.

The SmartBee-M uses a Type 2 connection, the standard fitting on new EVs sold in the UK and Europe for years. Owners of older cars with different connectors use an adapter cable on a socketed unit. Plug-in hybrids charge the same way — their batteries are smaller, so they fill quickly even at modest speeds.

For a conventional installation, yes — a driveway, garage or allocated space where the cable never crosses public ground. If you only have on-street parking, the cross-pavement gully route (with its £500 grant, above) now makes home charging possible for some properties, subject to your council’s rules on the pavement works. It’s honestly not viable for every street, so ask us and we’ll tell you straight.

There is no single number, and anyone publishing one has not seen your house. The price is built from five items: the chargepoint itself, a dedicated circuit with its protective devices, the cable route between the consumer unit and where you park, a load-management device where the supply needs one, and the network operator notification with commissioning and handover. The cable route is the item that most often separates two quotes for the same charger. Our cost guide sets out the national picture item by item; our quote sets out yours, itemised, after a survey.

Usually not. A 7.4 kW charger draws 32 A continuously and domestic main fuses are commonly 60 A, 80 A or 100 A, so on a smaller supply the arithmetic can be tight - but the standard solution is load management rather than a supply upgrade. A current sensor on the incoming supply tells the charger how much headroom is spare, and the charger reduces its own current while the oven and shower are running, then ramps back up. Your car charges slightly more slowly for an hour and the main fuse never approaches its limit. Supply upgrades are reserved for the minority of cases where load management genuinely cannot fit the demand.

Almost never, because 22 kW requires a three-phase supply and the overwhelming majority of UK homes are single-phase. On single-phase the practical ceiling is 7.4 kW, and a 22 kW unit will simply run at 7.4 kW. Where a property genuinely has three phases the next question is the car, because many electric vehicles accept only 7 kW or 11 kW on AC regardless of what the charger can deliver. For overnight charging at home, 7.4 kW fills a typical day of driving in two to three hours inside the cheap window of an EV tariff.