Recommendations for EV home chargers

[Stuartrav]

Hi everyone,

I'm taking delivery on 25th May of a XC90 T8 R design and haven't as yet sorted out getting a home charger. What do you all recommend? How many people have gone for a 7kw option which I gather for the XC90 has no advantage over the 3kw option.

Also do any of you charge whilst out and about such as at motorway service stations and shopping centres? What plans for these locations should I sign up for? I gather the charging stations at motorway service stations are fitted with the cable but I believe at shopping centres etc you need to bring your own cable but before I splash out on circa £100 for a cable I thought I should find out how useful they are and if it is really worth it.

Any other comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[Deman77]

I don't have a t8 but I have a pure EV as a second car. It has larger battery but the same approach applies.
The upshot is I am using the mains charger the car came with.
The reasoning - it charges from near flat to full overnight; with dedicated charger - it would be 6 hours, with faster 3 hours. Importantly all these cases mean overnight. So there is no real life speed of charge advantage getting a dedicated charger unless you do lots of hopping back and forth from you home during the day.
As for convenience I just fitted a bracket to hold the charger head on the wall and made room for the cable from the garage. Keep the charger installation money and the hassle.

Regarding charging away from home. The key here is not to make your life a misery by looking for a place to charge and waiting for the car to charge and dealing with compatibility and subscriptions. If you have a dedicated charging spot in your parking slot at work - fine. Other than that just leave it and get on with your life. It's a lovely car that is very efficient for short hopping and can really blast in the straight line if you want it to. It is not efficient for long distances - just accept it and pay the extra cost. We pay a lot more for other things to make our lives comfortable. Don't ruin your enjoyment by trying to save a tenner or two on long trips.

[Philip Fisher]

+1 to the above.

I charge at work only. I have a dedicated POD point but only because I didnt understand the ins and outs before I got the car.

The car comes with a waterproof (I am sure it is IP67) charger which will charge from a 3 pin plug. This will charge to full in about 3.5 hours. POD point does so in about 2.5 hours so marginal gains.

I would just use the supplied charger and come up with a method of storing it and connecting to make life easy. MK do some good external 3 pin sockets which can clip shut with the plug fitted to make a nice water resistant connection. This is far cheaper than a POD point.

As for out and about, as soon as Ecotricity started charging more for the charge than the equivalent cost of unleaded I just stopped using when out and about.

Oh and finally when I ordered my car, ticking the option for the type 2 lead at 50 quid deleted the normal 3 pin charger from the car. Beware of this trap if you want the 3 pin standard charger...

[Fortune7]

Originally Posted by Philip Fisher

Oh and finally when I ordered my car, ticking the option for the type 2 lead at 50 quid deleted the normal 3 pin charger from the car. Beware of this trap if you want the 3 pin standard charger...

Yep, I fell in the trap too! I have a charging point at home as I bought a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV in 2014 and (then) the charge point was fitted free (govt. subsidy). So I use a dedicated cable for charging and keep the mains-plug version on-board for away charging. The Mitsu. cable has a 'type 1' plug at the car end so I ticked the box for a 'type 2' cable for the Volvo, for what I thought was a bargain at £50. I'm sure there was somewhere in the marketing blurb online which DIDN'T mention the replacement for the standard cable, so I thought I'd get both for the extra £50. I discovered a couple of days too late to alter the build sheet so now am paying around £300 for the original cable!

TBH it's the only 'bad' experience I've had since ordering so just have to put it down to experience....

If I didn't have the PHEV and charge point already, I'd probably not bother with a dedicated point now as it doesn't charge that much quicker than the mains job.

Cheers, Andy

[V8EBR]

I agree that there is only a marginal gain in speed using a dedicated charger, however for me the convenience of it made it a worthwhile option. I do personally find the quicker charging time quite useful on occasion, as I can often get in from work and plugin to then have enough charge in the car to go out for the evening.

I ended up getting a 32A Rolec tethered charger fitted on a post next to my drive, which means that I just turn up and plugin in seconds, and then just remove and holster in the charger when I am ready to go. There has been quite a lot of bad press about Rolec chargers, however the dodgy part has been replaced by 2 newer generations, so hopefully will prove to be ok. I appreciate that there is no benefit having the 32A version with a T8, however it was the same price, and provides me with a more capable option should I end up with a Tesla or similar in the future (having driven the T8 for a couple of months, I'm expecting my next car to be a full EV).

Living in Milton Keynes, we are a bit spoilt with public chargers, so I tend to use them quite often when I am at the shopping centre - have to pay 9p / KWh, however get free parking whilst doing so, therefore works out cheaper than the parking charges!

Disclaimer: My obsession with charging up is only partly because I am very tight and don't like paying for petrol - generally I am really enjoying the EV driving experience, and using a internal combustion engine feels like a step back (although the T8 does shift a bit in Power mode with the help of some petrol!).

[Stuartrav]

Many thanks for the replies.