EV charging
Charging an electric car at home
There are three ways to charge a car at home and they differ by a factor of six in speed. The right one depends less on the car than on the wiring already in the wall.
By Jean-Benoit Buisson
Three routes, one bottleneck
The car has an onboard charger with a ceiling. The wall has a circuit with a ceiling. Whichever is lower is what you get, and for almost every home the wall is lower.
1. A fixed wallbox
Eleven kilowatts on three phases, typically. That needs a dedicated circuit, usually an electrician, and often a notification to the network operator.
What it buys is time: a full charge overnight without thinking about it, on a cable that lives on the wall rather than in the boot.
What to check: whether it needs a separate residual current device or carries its own, and whether access control matters — RFID, if more than one person charges there.
2. A portable charger with a household plug
Three point seven kilowatts, single phase, no installation at all.
The safety questions are sharper here, because the socket was never designed for eight hours at its rating. Two things are worth insisting on: adjustable current, so the draw can be turned down on old wiring, and a temperature sensor in the plug.
Charging from a household socket for a whole night is the commonest way a home setup fails — old wiring, a worn contact, nobody watching.
3. A Type 2 cable for public posts
The one most people need first, and the one most people buy last.
Length is the decision: five metres covers a drive, ten covers most public bays, fifteen covers the ones laid out badly. Amperage decides the ceiling — 16 A is 11 kW three-phase, 32 A is 22 kW, and both are useless if the post or the car is lower.
Every Type 2 cable in this catalogue cites IEC 62196-2, which is the connector standard. Not one publishes a conductor cross-section or a weight, and a ten-metre 32 A cable is a heavy object carried daily.
4. The meter, if someone else pays
MID certification is the whole question. It is what allows the reading to support a bill rather than merely being accurate.
What none of these pages will tell you
What your wiring can take. That comes from an electrician looking at the consumer unit, and it is the figure everything above is sized against.
