Is it possible to charge an EV with no garage and no drive?
I’ve seen a few folks with charge points installed on their property near the road side.
Is there anything to stop someone pitching up and grabbing some free charge? Do these things have a lock or PIN number?
Presumably 13A charging is a no-no?
Do they install the cabling from the house underground or can it run from the house to the street in some kind of shielded ducting?

Generally you would need allocated parking for this to work and they would need to be able to run the cable from your system to the charge point. If you don’t have allocated parking how do you know you will be able to park close enough to actually reach it?
It’s not really a great option to be trailing cables across a footpath, but could be done short-term I suppose.
13A charging does work, it’s just blooming slow and you generally would prefer to have the car parked on a drive or in the garage for the 6-8 hours+ it might take to charge.
Usually someone “stealing” the charge won’t be an issue as it is just not a quick thing to do, not many people would want to park up and leave their car somewhere for 1 or 2 hours for a charge on the sly. Chances are quite high for getting caught and going to a commercial rapid-charger will just be so much quicker.

I think most chargers have some sort of software lock , but I imagine you will run into issues with trailing cable across footpaths or areas that have public access. Mostly because someone will think it’s unsafe or unsightly (not me btw, just the usual nimby stuff I hear about EV charging).
Check out people like co-charger or plugshare for using someone else’s off street charging. Basically you agree (via an app) that you can regularly use someone else’s off street charger.
13A charging can be unsafe for long term EV charging. The sockets can get pretty hot and aren’t necessarily up to long term high current draw.

My charger can be controlled by an app to switch it off/timed for off peak etc.

I think that will be the least of your worries though, I’m not sure how the logistics of it not being on your own property would work.

Thanks all
The charger would be on my property but at the side of a public road, which is where I would need to park to use it
There is no footpath
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times someone has parked on the road outside my house (excluding delivery drivers for a few minutes)

That sounds workable then, assuming there’s no legal issue.

Have a look at the EO Mini if you want something discreet that won’t draw attention to itself. Make sure you get the smart one.

Octopus were doing an offer on them if you’re prepared to change supplier (they also have a good off peak tariff).

IIRC in order to get the grant to help pay for installation of a charger you need to have a garage, driveway or allocated space in which to park the car.
If you’re not worried about that then I’d say you need to talk to an installer about your particular setup to see if it’s practical. More complicated = More expensive.

Sounds fine you just won’t be able to get the grant and have to pay in full for the charger.

We own one and don’t have any home charging, but we are 100 metres away from a 7kw public charger and a few miles from some 50kw that are in really nice places for trail running, so just stick it on charge and go for a run.

Three’s someone near me who has a little cable cover/ ramp that they use. Their drive is too steep for a car so the run the cable across the pavement. It seems to work, but I suppose it depends on how grumpy/stealy the locals are!

Ah, missed a few posts, in particular yours about no footpath!

FWIW I charge mine on 13A plug overnight. The Leaf has a timer so it only tries to charge between specific times so I use cheap rate electricity from Octopus overnight. No idea how long it takes to charge but it is less that 11pm – 5am on a Mk1 Leaf with 13A connection. Off road and next to a garage so can’t help with the other stuff.

Not sure I’d want to install a charger that requires the cable to run across public property for it to be used.

I can see if cables running across pavements gets too popular the government might introduce a law or something to stop it.

You will end up in the local news looking grumpy at the press photographer
https://www.ardrossanherald.com/news/17428841.beith-driver-told-council-safety-cover-cable-hazard/

Well in my case we’re talking a distance of around a metre for the cable to run from the wall to the car – as I said there is no footpath
Presumably the govt has thought this through as I guess it will affect a lot of people once petrol/diesel cars are phased out?

Same situation here (almost). No drive, one wall of the house is on the roadway but decided against it as it’s a solid white line. We would have gone EV recently otherwise. Hoping the council/govt will start thinking about public charging in rural areas.

Presumably the govt has thought this through as I guess it will affect a lot of people once petrol/diesel cars are phased out?

Nope. They have thought about private driveways and public rapid charging. No one has thought long and hard about how to serve urban streets short of giving councils grants, that relies on the LA having the skills and resources to implement, which many, if not most do not have.

No white line here so maybe a “Please do not park here – EV charging” sign would discourage anyone – not that parking has ever been a problem for the last 9 years we’ve lived here

Worth engaging with your local council, many are running trials of different solutions including sunken cable channels from house to car. Trawl some council meeting minutes and see who’s involved then get in touch to see what they’re up to.

I think it’s reasonable to run a cable a short way to your car though if you’re taking the sort of precautions (cable cover, etc) as someone carrying out works would do.

Most can have some way of locking them, either mechanical lock, some like Zappi do PIN, or some support RFID cards that you beep to activate.

The installer has to carry out and EV risk assessment in accordance with the regs before installing an EV charge point, part of that is risk of trip hazard. Also as mentioned above if you want the grant you need the off street parking. But the risk you have is one of someone tripping over your lead. An installer shouldn’t be installing one either like that but many won’t care as they won’t realise there’s an EVRA to be completed. I install over 400 commercial units a year and we always get some where walkways have to be blocked off for this reason.

You want get a grant if it’s roadside, you can use the below to tidy the cable up.

Oh and look it would seem they can install chargers on for those with no off street parking.

We’ve installed plenty roadside it’s not an issue, the install costs would probably fuel a diesel car for 10 years what with it being streetworks and groundworks 🤣 You may also struggle to get permission for it and you’ll also need some sort of liability insurance for it.

I’d not expect that one to be a personal charger.

Don’t get a charger installed, get a IP44 (or better) 32A “outside socket” installed. Much cheaper, and no requirement for the stupid additional earth rod etc.

Then just buy a cheap EVSE, i use the OPENevse, which is open source, so if you really want to you can modify the firmware yoursel!

(The charging cable is locked to the car when charging, so someone can’t easily steal your charger)

Presumably the govt has thought this through

Lol!

Then just buy a cheap EVSE, i use the OPENevse, which is open source, so if you really want to you can modify the firmware yoursel!

This sounds interesting – how does it work? Have you got it plugged into the 32A outside socket permanently?

I’ve got one installed outside my roadside house. It’s sited just inside an alley behind a gate, but crosses a 1m public pavement directly outside. Luckily the pavement is just 3 terraced houses with me in the middle and doesn’t go anywhere. I had to DIY it all, as already said, I didn’t qualify for a grant and the 2 EV installers I spoke to didn’t seem to want to know. So I bought a new 2nd hand untethered charger (someone who got a charger free with their PHEV but didn’t intend ever charging) and paid a local electrician to install it. This was over 2 years ago and it sat unused for about a year as I didn’t have an EV. I’ve had an EV now for 14 months, but have been using free local public chargers. When that ends (October) my intention is to have a covered 1m channel put into the pavement from my alley into the street so I can feed the cable thru (currently I’ve got one of those^ yellow and black cable cover channels for the odd times I’ve charged at home. The downside is obviously that I can’t guarantee I’ll always get to park directly outside but a) I don’t need to charge every day b) I can always use one of many local public chargers if desperate, altho I could also just buy a longer cable.
This is the channel I intend to install

Doesn’t running a charging cable across a footpath (one that has people using it frequently) contravene Rule One?

Shame no one makes a removable battery that you bring in with you, charge it in your shed and then slot it back in when you want to drive it

Shame no one makes a removable battery that you bring in with you, charge it in your shed and then slot it back in when you want to drive it

Renault Zoe battery weighs over 300kgs.

BTW, it’s worth clarifying on why the earth rod requirement for car charging is so stupid/unnecessary:

1) the earth rod is nothing to do with the cars own HV battery, because that battery is NOT earth referenced in any way. You can touch earth and grab either Battery+ or Battery- and not get any shock what-so-ever because the battery is just that, a battery, consisting of galvanically isolated chemical cells where the only potential generated is between the +ve and -ve of that battery. To get a shock you’d have to grab battery+ and battery- at the SAME TIME.

2) the eath rod is there to protect the car user from getting a shock off their metal car when there has been a house supply wiring fault of a specific nature. This fault, a simultaneous loss of protective earth AND the neutral conduction results in everything becoming live when any switch is turned on, and voltage can pass from the live wire, through a load, and into the Neutral, but not “escape” back down either that Neutral or the protective Earth. This fault is as you might expect, not that common (although it is more common on certain supply layouts that share Earth and Neutral) The idea therefore which sounds initally sensible, is to add an extra earth rod for your car charger, so that should this fault occur the metal chassis of your car does not become live when it is plugged into your EVSE.

3) The problem is however that there are currently lots of other metal things in your home that will become live, irrespective of if your car is being charged or not, and they include:

any metal bodied electrical item (toaster, oven, microwave,kettle,)
any metal plumbing (taps, sink, washing machine, dishwasher (not the wife!), shower head, radiators, towel rails etc etc

So, why if the danger is considered so great to us from a car becoming live, do we not insist on having that independant earth rod fittd ANYWAY, ie for all houses! And of course, modern cars are increasinly not made of metal, are pretty much 100% painted, anodised, undersealed, or trimmed.

Try it, try to find some bare metal on a modern car! Ok if you drive an old Defender you’ll probably manage, but on any modern EV, it’s really really difficult to actually find any “bare metal” certainly far far harder than to find say a tap to touch, of which there are many in your house!!

And it gets worse. I can guarantee that pretty much everyone will regularily touch a metal tap in their house when either not wearing any shoes (the rubber soles of which offer a very real reduction in shocking current) or worse, when actually sat in a nice bath full of water. How often do you go out to your car in your bare feet?

So why do we need an earth rod (or alternative protection device) for our car and not for our house? Simples, money! With the charger installation Grant, electricians can get a nice chunk of cash and few people will argue because “safety init mate”

My Pod Point charger doesn’t need an earth rod.

https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/earth-rod-details

I agree with maxtorque’s analysis (above), however the pod-point blurb that tenfoot’s linked to made me blink a bit! Under the heading ‘Risk in case of Neutral Failure”, they describe the fault mechanism, then go on to say blithely “Inside the home this is not as dangerous as it might seem, because if all conductors are at the same potential there is no potential difference between them to do harm.” WOT??? All the conductors may be at the same potential, but so is your steel sink, and having that at 240V is most certainly a problem…

I had to have my gas earthed and water mains earthed, they’ve never been earthed for some reason. That’s all that was needed for mine, the water has been earthed with a rod as it enters the house under concrete.

Equipotential bonding, as is the name for making sure all metal objects in your house, from the toaster to the radiators are tied to earth is very sensible. This is because a fault where the casing of a device becomes live, or a wiring fault that shorts inside your boiler to the metal pipework is significantly likely (statistically speaking) to occur. So, nailing everything to earth in general is a good thing!

When it isn’t a good thing, is when the main incomming supply looses its earth and neutral connection simultaneously, because then your “nailing everything to earth” has just become “nailing everything to live”……

(statstically that failure however is much less likely to occur, and so in general, it’s better to equi-potential bond everything, and that’s what we do.)

Wow so people installing their own DIY charge points and dismissing the lost neutral as something that may never happen.
The loss of neutral is not a house fault but a network fault and it is not a simultaneous loss of earth and neutral as they are one and the same thing until they enter the property. The fault is a loss of neutral on the network side. The return path is then through any metal object connected to the earth terminal on a PME system, basically 90% of UK supplies.
The metalwork in a house will be bonded which is a form of protection, the metal car stood on rubber tyres is an unbonded potential and much more of a risk however small that risk is. To dismiss all this and install your own DIY non protected charge point is crazy.
Lost neutral in a PME or TNCS system is a reality and that is why car charge points have needed either an earth rod or a device to isolate the supply and earth in case of fault. There is also the requirement to have the correct RCD as the majority of RCD units in domestic premises can be blinded by the electronics and DC leakage in an electric car. This is why a car charge point can’t be connected through a normal RCD protected DB in a domestic property.

However I do agree that a lost neutral will have many other aspects and faults that should show up. I wouldn’t however be installing a charge point without allowing for it. I assume those that install a socket DIY still inform the DNO that they have done so which is another requirement of BS7671, also having any cables running across a path isn’t allowed as per the amendment to BS7671 within the EV risk assessment.

I just put petrol in my car and it seems to turn on, I didnt even have to install anything at home.

I just put petrol in my car and it seems to turn on, I didnt even have to install anything at home.

No but when you drive it loads of pollution will spew out of the exhaust.

Plus, having driven a few EVs, petrol and diesel cars are crap. Sounds like you haven’t realised this yet 🙂

the metal car stood on rubber tyres is an unbonded potential

Car tyres are conductive. Surely this keeps the car at earth potential?

Our last house was earthed to I think the gas and water mains (Edwardian, metal pipes). The gas main was replaced with plastic so that oath disappeared. The other earth was faulty. The shocks in the shower and bath as a result were not pleasant! I’d no **** around with earthing. Our ev charger has its own dedicated ground spike and is separate from the main house circuit (splits off after the meter).

And now I’ve read maxtourque’s post and feel schooled….