Content by TimothyN in September, 2025

To be fair, on your advice I dismantled the 13A to 13A cord and said I would desist from putting the boiler on it, even though it has a 13A plug. So you are a very valuable person.

I have now charged maybe 50 times, sometimes from 20% to 80% and it doesn't even get warm.

I think the thing that most people get most confused about, and is worth looking at closely, is MGPilot and how it allows you to switch off the most annoying features, which will drive you mad, and store the settings.

Salty, what was the logic of going for one limited to 10A when 13A is available? I have charged many nights at 13A/2.7kW and had no problems whatsoever, no heating of components, no cut-outs, and going 30% slower would be a pain.

My DAB is pretty much unusable, even on the M25. I just use IP and BT to get stations which are not on FM. Actually, I think I'll give up on the radio altogether, both its performance and its UI are dreadful.

I'm very happy with https://amzn.eu/d/6pEE6fa It goes to a true 2.7kW consistently, so may be a few percentage points better than the one Salty suggests, at the same price.

I sometimes get a bit of a whining sound from the back seat area, but then I can take them home to their parents.

"This can be everything from your electric scooters to your television or kettle, just as long as it can be connected to your electric car battery." (My bold.)

I owe you an apology. I was sitting in stationary traffic today and removed my seatbelt to get something from the passenger door pocket. The traffic started to move and I tried to start without putting my seatbelt on, but it wouldn't. To get it to drive I had to put on the seatbelt, put it in...

Seems fine to me. I have run a variety of high consumption white goods (oven, tumble drier, washing machine) from it and they have all worked flawlessly.

What is the best iOS App? All the ones NEXAS describes are very ICE or Hybrid specific, except the one specially for the Leaf.

I locked and unlocked the car and it's steady at 2.7kW now.

I am sitting in the car during granny charging for the first time and witnessing that the charge rate varies between 2.7kW and zero (though more typically 0.3kW) on about a 30 second cycle. I have a video if anyone would like to see it. Is that normal?

...and, is it obvious that it's the duty of the car manufacturer or the V2L device manufacturer? (I bought mine from MGTitan, from memory).

I also have random behaviour on radio station selection, though my symptoms are different. There's clearly a bug.

It's pretty random. It usually plays nothing, sometimes plays what I can only assume is the lowest most station on FM, a ghastly rock station, and sometimes the DAB station I left it on. I can find no pattern. It's certainly not dependent on how I left it when I switched off.

Is this service chargeable?

Loads of useful information, suggestions and opinions, but, unless I am being blind, no-one has actually answered the original question, which was "are there any winter tyres specifically designed for EVs?"

My biggest beef is radio management. How the radio behaves at startup is apparently random, at its worst giving me very loud rock music from somewhere near the bottom of the FM spectrum. Also, the whole radio UI is pants. A tiny thing I'd like changed would be to put the ApplePlay icon on the...

I have no idea, all I can add is that I had one night when it was plugged in and didn't charge. At the time, I put it down to not having quite pushed the plug in, or not having configured the charging properly (I schedule midnight to 7am on a granny charger), but neither explanation really...

…but we all live in different environments. I was talking today to my colleagues, many of whom live and work, as I do, in hilly, rural settings, and they simply wouldn't be able to get through the winter without appropriate tyres. I acknowledge that it's different for people living and...

I think I’ll wait for one of the tame gurus before doing that!

As I understand things, EVs use different tyres, for a number of reasons including weight, torque delivery, rolling resistance, noise and so on. So are there 4 Season or Winter tyres designed for EVs?

The Freedom of the City of London to drive your sheep applies to London Bridge, neither to Rotherhithe Tunnel nor Albert Bridge.

I don't want to be "that person" but the restrictions on Albert Bridge are 6'6"

I bought the S5 sight unseen, because I called the dealer wanting an MG4 and the deal on the S5 was so good that I just took it. In that scenario, there is, of course, plenty of scope for buyer's remorse, but I feel almost none. I have been stupid enough to buy a car about which I know nothing...

Does the panel have a view on appropriate winter tyres for the S5? I know that EVs have different standard tyres to ICE cars, but are they available as winters? A second question relates to wheels. Historically, I have paid £60 twice a year to have the tyres swapped. Maybe it makes more...

Of course; I was just wondering what was the rationale for questioning the extension lead and thinking that it might have been related to perceived current draw...

When you talk about running a boiler off an extension lead, bear in mind that this is a gas boiler, so its only use of electricity will be for things like timers, control circuits, igniters, possibly pumps, we are not talking about a high power consumption unit.

Hunting around the Internet, it would seem that 6'0" restrictions are extremely rare. One in Winchester which isn't physically enforced, and somewhere called Oakhill Bridge near Bath, though I can't find it on the map. Most restrictions are 6'6" and a few 7'0". I think that if @Terry2 is...

Ah. Mine is plugged into a 13A socket. Does that mean it's OK for V2L, or do all the same caveats apply?

Rory Sutherland is my idol. He lives in the next village to me and I went to hear him talk in the village hall. He is brilliant. He is also a massive advocate of EVs.

No rattles for me. Very quiet ride.

I am mildly irritated by Google Maps, which has it's own Light and Dark mode and a setting for Automatic, which also doesn't seem to work.

Oh deary, deary me, how great would it be if people read before going off on one. This conversation is rather like talking to ChatGPT. You say "Give me an image of an aeroplane without a tiger under its wing" and all it can produce is pictures of aeroplanes with tigers under their wings. And...

I get the engineering, but that is not my question. As an educated and not stupid owner of a V2L device, it would not have been obvious to me if it hadn't been mentioned here. Given that V2L is consumer electronics and that this is a potentially lethal use case that could easily be done in...

I have 360° view on a steering wheel button for exactly this purpose.

So, two questions of the expert panel: How would I know the earthing scheme used on my rental property. Will it be on the EICR? That has been done, but I can't see it today on the agent's portal. No doubt I can ask for it if the information is there, but I'll only do that if there's a point...

...but the little white cubes may be...

Just a tiny wrinkle. If you don't put your seatbelt on, it doesn't enable OPD. Seems perfectly sensible and reasonable to me!

Is that why DAB reception is such pants?

So there is hope for the ZS?

I think that OPD is the same as 3 but brings you to a stop. The dashboard symbol is, indeed, S.

I’m 1957. The first computer I actually saw was a CP/M desktop at school in about 1973, but the first time I really engaged was FORTRAN on punched cards on a teletype at Uni in the late 70s, and yet mice and GUIs (GEM, then Apple Mac) in employment in BT by the early 80s.

Indeed you can. There is a left/right swipe on the charging screen.

That’s why I put it here.

My experience has been 12 days from order.

I'm sorry, I was wrong before. I used a lot of V2L yesterday and it has made a significant impact on my consumption, from 5.3 to 3.2, so it would seem that you can't do both.

I get that, and thank you for drawing it to my attention. I have dismantled the 13A to 13A cable and will have to live without hot water in the event of the next (sadly inevitable) power cut. But I still hold that you responded to my question about the boiler with comments about the advice I...

I'd like to apologise to www.TheWheelShop.co.uk . I was just doing a tidy up and I found that they did indeed supply a telescopic brace, making the whole package even better value. Highly recommended.

Wait a minute. The UK Power guy was talking about a 13A male to 13A male. He expressed no opinion about plugging the combi boiler in to V2L, so we seem to be conflating two (potentially both dangerous, but entirely different) things. It will be much easier to understand if we kept them separate.

But I'm not talking about what you call suicide cords (but whose use is recommended by the UK Power guy yesterday), I am talking about plugging the 13A plug of my combi boiler into the car. Now, that may not be safe, for other reasons (delighted to be educated), but let's not confound things!

So we agree! That's good, isn't it?

I have absolutely no idea. I think it was built in the 80s, if that helps? In other news, I have just baked these two delicious seeded loaves using about 5% of my battery. Ignoring losses, 5% of 62kWh is 3kWh (rounding because the percentage is very granular, it could be anything from 4.1%...

So the risk is to whom and under what circumstances?

It is plugged into the wall in the garage, so the sequence would be: Plug the V2L adapter into the car Set the car to deliver V2L Attach an extension cord to the car V2L adapter and run it towards the boiler Unplug the combi boiler from the wall socket Plug it into the extension cord I believe...

It seemed to fit perfectly. 🤷‍♂️

Yeah. I leave the ignition keys in both aeroplanes in a last ditch hope...

Today's experiment is to run the dehumidifier, the proving oven and then the oven to make bread, while starting at 54% and not going below 20%. All in the name of science ;)

Yes. I stupidly failed to realise yesterday that I could have plugged the gas combi boiler in and had hot water.

The most important thing (though obviously very low impact) was the router and charging devices, but I went on to stuff as I needed it - coffee machine, microwave, lights. At the moment I am running a dehumidifier in the car (I stupidly left the door open in the heavy rain.) I am going to...

Well, I can report that I pumped about 8% of my battery into the house yesterday and it doesn't seem to have affected my mls/kWh figures at all. Apparently a bit cleverer than we feared.

In conversation with the guys from UK Power, apparently the trick is to switch off the main circuit breaker in the consumer unit and then plug the feed from the car in and it all should just work. They only told me this after they had restored power, so I haven't tested it, though I do now have...

May I check what "it" is? Just a pair of 13A plugs back to back, brown to brown, blue to blue, plugged into the car and any socket? Because that doesn't work for me.

Have you tried Ancaster in Bromley?

I have a power cut which means that UK power networks have to dig up the road in front of my house, it might take a day or two. Given that I can isolate the national grid using the circuit breakers in the meter cabinet (it's actually self isolating at the moment, anyway!), is there any way of...

I can isolate using circuit breakers in the meter cabinet, and thank you!

I mentioned in another thread, I have a power outage, and it would now seem that UK Power Networks have to dig up the road to fix it. In the meantime, I am using V2L to run a cable into the house, which is fine to power a few essentials (router being top of the list) but I’d really like to...

I love OPD, never use anything else, except ACC. It really doesn’t take long to get used to.

In Custom Drive Mode, I am not able to set OPD, which is a pain.

A cube of white foam with a cutout inside, Under the carpet, no purpose implied. Is it a throne for a hamster to reign? Or a boat for a pea when it’s caught in the rain? Could it be glasses for giants at play, Or a portal to somewhere two inches away? A pillow for pixies, a cheese with no...

I live in Biggin Hill village and dream of fibre!

Kent is awful for mobile signal. Actually, Kent is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful parts of the country, especially Leeds Castle, but the infrastructure is generally awful. The mobile signals are worse than the Highlands of Scotland, the road system is as bad as Cornwall. I once had...

Funnily enough I just had a power cut myself but it only lasted 10 seconds! Not enough time to even get the lead out :ROFLMAO: Thank you for that contribution, Jack😂

Well, top of the list, sadly, is the router. I get virtually no telephone signal on either Vodafone or O2 (yes, I have both) so I rely on Broadband. I live on the top of a hill in a London Borough, not far from the M25. In what world would I expect a telephone signal? But yes, the coffee...

I have a power cut, and I am powering the house from the car. Has that screwed over my consumption figures for the month?

So, if you went to sleep with the car plugged in, and you heard thunder, would you pull on your slippers and go out in the hail and wind to disconnect it?

I just can't believe that EVs can have been around this long and they haven't worked out that we are going to charge in the rain, in thunderstorms, in the snow and so on.

Yeah, ChatGPT told me about that, but, as I say, IRL I'll never need to put the heavy one back on. That can be done by some horny handed son of toil who does it 50 times a day and has the tools and infrastructure.

Also available on MGClubs.com

There was no problem at all getting the wheel on the front. I didn't drive with it, but it span freely and was nowhere near the brake. The only difficulty, and it was a big difficulty, was getting the original wheel back on, which is not only a lot heavier, but you can't see the central hub...

Well, we are having pretty much continuous rain, and, although I will suffer for my art, I won't get wet for it. However, I am glad that various members have bullied me into doing this, because I have already encountered and fixed three issues which would have ruined the B269 experience...

I am going to fantasise that some Chinese minimum wage employee has dropped something metallic (somewhere between a spanner and a shard) during the manufacture of that battery and short circuiting has caused it to blow almost immediately. If there were a systematic problem, we would know by now.

I can't let that go. I am a couple of years short of 70 and, ***, we were the generation that actually understood tech. We understood how computers worked and we built them from parts. When I first programmed it was FORTRAN, and Assembly for the bits FORTRAN couldn't do. If our software...

I had absolutely promised myself that I was going to put mine on today. But it's pouring with rain this morning. I really will try this afternoon!