Nice and Tidy?

ukslim said:
I was in a similar situation, but I've decided to get a wallbox for a few reasons:
  • We've learned that we can get on perfectly well with a combination of work and public chargers. But it causes some very slight hassle and anxiety; I'm paying to get rid of that hassle and anxiety.
  • Peace of mind with regard to safety at home
  • Making best use of off-peak tariffs. It's no good having Octopus Go's 4 hours of 10p/unit electricity, if I can only get 8 units in that time. With a wallbox I can get 28 units every night.
  • Now I'm leasing, and I had some capital from selling my old car
  • A friend pointed out that I should treat it as a luxury spend. Some people spend their money on leather seats. Some spend it on a charger.
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That's more or less how my thinking is going, although the sums come out differently for me.
  • I'm not having any hassle or anxiety. I don't need the public charger pretty much at all, and I don't use it very often - generally only if I come home with less than about 25% or thereabouts, and even then, frankly, I could simply take the car home and hook it up to granny as I'm unlikely to want it for a long trip again the following day. But in fact the charger is not heavily used and I have no anxiety about getting on it if I need it. It's only 400 yards from my house.
  • I'm not really worried about safety at home, having a good electrical supply in the garage and a granny charger whose plug isn't even faintly warm after 15 hours of charging.
  • Off-peak tariffs is the reason I might eventually get a wall box, but I'm also thinking about the increase in price for all the rest of the electricity I use, and the hassle of having to run washing machine and dishwasher overnight (although I'd probably adapt to that).
  • I'm still trying to crawl out from under the rather unexpected purchase price of the car without raiding too much from my savings, complicated by having just been told that the travel agent organising our autumn holiday wants over £1,600 by 12th June. I'll get there, but I'm not thinking about a wall box until the current account looks healthier.
  • I have lots of other luxury spends I want to splash out on that rank well above a wall box! That 2½ weeks in the Greek Islands for a start.
 
Rolfe said:
I have to say I'm very grateful to everyone on this forum for educating me about electrical safety using these things. I am actually doing exactly what I intended to do when I first got the car, but I know what not to do and what to look out for to detect any problems before they've become critical. I realise how fortunate I am to have a robust metal-jacketed power point in my garage only 1.5 metres from the charging port in the car's normal garaged position, and that the house circuitry is very well designed with the garage lights and power points on a separate fused circuit. (The house fuses trip if a light bulb pops or you plug in a faulty appliance, which has always annoyed me, but maybe it's for the best.)

I had thought that I'd start looking at wall boxes, but right now I can't really afford that outlay, and the longer this goes on the less I want one. At least that's a solution if I do run into problems with the granny lead.

I haven't had to use an extension cable, but some people who have acquired suitably robust cables seem to be managing OK. I'm now seriously wondering what the guy up the street was doing when he had a (legally sanctioned) cable trailing across the pavement to his EV parked outside his mid-terrace house. (He's not doing it now, I suspect permission was revoked when they installed the village charge-point.) I had assumed he'd had a wall box fitted but for all I know he was using a granny cable and extension lead all the time.

I have a friend who has had a Leaf for two or three years. He told me he used the granny cable for a year when he first got it because of some delay with his wall box installation. I assumed that he'd also been using the village 50Kw charger to save leaving the car on the granny charger for a very long time. But no. The other day he started asking me about using public chargers as he's intending to drive up to Inverness and has never used one! He doesn't even have a garage and the Leaf sits in his driveway all the time. I don't know what power point he was using or if he was using an extension lead, but he didn't have any problems - he only got the wall box to speed things up.

So far I have only gone on one visit where I might have had to use the granny charger away from home. I could have got the car into my friend's garage all right, with a power point just there, but it was a plastic one and I was a little bit doubtful. However, the public type 2 chargers only 50 yards from her house worked fine, so I never needed to try it.

Anyway, as far as I can see, reports of serious consequences arising from using granny leads seem to be pretty rare, and I think their use is more widespread than people often realise. I don't accept that the majority of the public will ignore firm safety instructions if these are communicated to them clearly. The issue, as with the coiled lead in the OP photograph, is that these instructions are not communicated clearly. I have a number of appliances around the house and garage that came with pretty prominent safety instructions, including a 12v lead-acid battery jump-starting kit and a snow clearing machine with a small petrol engine. I read them, and I'd have been a raving idiot not to. But there wasn't a thing inside the case of my granny charger or the bag of my type 2 lead to alert me about any issues. Just some text buried deep in the MG4 manual, about the granny charger.

In l'esprit d'escalier, I think if I'd had the opportunity to talk to the owner of the coiled-and-taped lead, I'd have spoken to him in a friendly manner, pointed out the risk of over-heating, and suggested that he untaped the lead and made a habit of laying it out loose when in operation. We need more education, not banning things.
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I bought an old, well, 2014 kangoo ze. 2 years ago, it came with its original granny charger and I must Say, it looked well used. I was told that it has always been charged with the granny charger (25k miles) and I still use it to this day!
I don't do many miles though.... maybe 50 to 100 a month.
 
I'm now seriously wondering what the guy up the street was doing when he had a (legally sanctioned) cable trailing across the pavement to his EV parked outside his mid-terrace house. (He's not doing it now, I suspect permission was revoked when they installed the village charge-point.) I had assumed he'd had a wall box fitted but for all I know he was using a granny cable and extension lead all the time.
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I had to go up the street to the Co-op and had a good gawp at the house in question on the way. EV (Ioniq?) still parked outside but no trip-hazard cable. No sign at all of a wall box, but there is what looks like a new-ish, robust, boxed in 13A power point on the front of the house. I reckon he was using a granny lead the whole time.

Pianoman said:
I bought an old, well, 2014 kangoo ze. 2 years ago, it came with its original granny charger and I must Say, it looked well used. I was told that it has always been charged with the granny charger (25k miles) and I still use it to this day!
I don't do many miles though.... maybe 50 to 100 a month.
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There's a certain mileage below which I don't think a wall box is going to be economically sensible. Also, if you're only charging for a few hours at a time the hazard must be reduced.
 
Rolfe said:
There's a certain mileage below which I don't think a wall box is going to be economically sensible. Also, if you're only charging for a few hours at a time the hazard must be reduced.
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Agree, however I think it only charges at around 3kw? And I've wired it to an outside metal waterproof socket from the garage and also checked that doesn't get warm at all.
P.s. we've owned an ev since 2017 so have a pod point (dumb wall charger) but have added a zappi to our collection. The zappi is brilliant I have to say. The last 500 miles has been totally free! with the weather we've been having lately.
 
Pianoman said:
Agree, however I think it only charges at around 3kw? And I've wired it to an outside metal waterproof socket from the garage and also checked that doesn't get warm at all.
P.s. we've owned an ev since 2017 so have a pod point (dumb wall charger) but have added a zappi to our collection. The zappi is brilliant I have to say. The last 500 miles has been totally free! with the weather we've been having lately.
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My granny charger only charges at about 1.8 Kw, according to the app. It doesn't bother me.

I charged last Wednesday night in preparation for a long weekend away. Not much motoring, maybe 115 miles, and I returned late yesterday evening on about 42%. I eyed up the village charge-point as I passed it, but it was late, it was getting dark, and I just wanted home. I knew I wasn't going anywhere today anyway. Hooked up the granny charger at 10 pm which took about a minute, app estimated some time after 1 pm today. In fact it turned out to be more like 2 pm, then I left it a bit longer to let it balance-charge before unplugging.

The thing is, by the time I got up, the car was already quite well charged. If I'd wanted it this morning I could have taken it out with a pretty fair range on it, then just plugged it in again when I got back. Averaging out over a week or so, the car can pick up enough charge while I'm asleep to more than cover my usual mileage. And if I do get back low then there's always the 50Kw charger at the end of the road which will give me about 65% of battery fill in the maximum time allowed on the thing (54½ minutes, don't ask). I've done that twice, but not because I had to, just because I felt like it (it's only 30p a unit which is about the same price as my home electricity, so why not?)

Now bear in mind that my nearest petrol station is nine miles away and you'll see why I like this.
 
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Alb said:
Not really, the context of the Acronym was Back EMF. Even your Wiki will tell you that's a counter electro motive force. Something I was taught 49 years ago in the first year of my training as an electrical engineer!
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Yorkshire Hillbilly said:
Been using mine like this for months now.

View attachment 17954
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Do you have permission to do that? I know that when someone in the village here wanted to do that he had to badger the council quite a lot before they relented and gave him permission. However, he's not doing it now and I suspect that permission was revoked when they installed the public charger within walking distance of his house.

In another thread, someone who was planning to do that discovered in the course of the conversation (thanks to the google-fu of other members) that his council didn't allow it, and he had to make other arrangements.

Pianoman said:
How long does it take?
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I'm doing the same, except that the car is in the garage right beside the power point, so no leads trailing over the pavement (and no possibility of anything getting wet).

How long depends on how low the battery is when you start. My most recent charge started at 42%, at 10 pm on Monday evening. It got to 100% at about 2 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, then balanced for half an hour.

If I'd wanted the car on Tuesday morning I'd simply have stopped the charge and driven off with about 80% in there - plenty. It's the last 20% that takes the time anyway. It's not really an issue of how long it takes, but whether on average you can charge enough to meet your weekly requirements while you sleep. I suspect most people can, actually. After all, if I'd started the charge when I originally got home at five o'clock on Monday, it would have been at 100% by 9 am. I just didn't bother because I needed the car again for a short journey in the evening, and I knew I didn't need it on Tuesday morning.

I'm retired now, so not driving regular distances, and some days not driving at all. But I could have lived happily with the granny charger when I was working - I did a round trip of 24 miles to work and back, and that's easily recoverable overnight. I did (and still do) 80 and 100 mile round trips to the cinema and the theatre, but even these can be caught up with when you're not out every night, and on the nights you're not out you have over 12 hours to charge.

My back-stop is the 50 Kw CCS charger at the end of my road, which can bring the car up from 20% to 85% in less than an hour. If I'm down as low as 25% then a session on that gets the whole thing back in the game.
 
Rolfe said:
Do you have permission to do that? I know that when someone in the village here wanted to do that he had to badger the council quite a lot before they relented and gave him permission. However, he's not doing it now and I suspect that permission was revoked when they installed the public charger within walking distance of his house.

In another thread, someone who was planning to do that discovered in the course of the conversation (thanks to the google-fu of other members) that his council didn't allow it, and he had to make other arrangements.
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Nope... No one's likely to complain where I live and the path that goes past the house is set back away from the road and normal pavement. Also, I pay £12 a month to rent the parking space from the council.
 
I wish you continuing lack of harassment! I can see it's not dangerous, and it's exactly what my neighbour was indeed given permission to do on a well-trodden section of pavement in the middle of the village near the shops.
 
Rolfe said:
I'm doing the same, except that the car is in the garage right beside the power point, so no leads trailing over the pavement.

How long depends on how low the battery is when you start. My most recent charge started at 42%, at 10 pm on Monday evening. It got to 100% at about 2 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, then balanced for half an hour.

If I'd wanted the car on Tuesday morning I'd simply have stopped the charge and driven off with about 80% in there - plenty. It's the last 20% that takes the time anyway. It's not really an issue of how long it takes, but whether on average you can charge enough to meet your weekly requirements while you sleep. I suspect most people can, actually. After all, if I'd started the charge when I originally got home at five o'clock on Monday, it would have been at 100% by 9 am. I just didn't bother because I needed the car again for a short journey in the evening, and I knew I didn't need it on Tuesday morning.

I'm retired now, so not driving regular distances, and some days not driving at all. But I could have lived happily with the granny charger when I was working - I did a round trip of 24 miles to work and back, and that's easily recoverable overnight. I did (and still do) 80 and 100 mile round trips to the cinema and the theatre, but even these can be caught up with when you're not out every night, and on the nights you're not out you have over 12 hours to charge.

My back-stop is the 50 Kw CCS charger at the end of my road, which can bring the car up from 20% to 85% in less than an hour. If I'm down as low as 25% then a session on that gets the whole thing back in the game.
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I was simply curious as to how long it would take to granny charge. You have satisfied that curiosity perfectly. Thankyou. 🙂

Yorkshire Hillbilly said:
Nope... No one's likely to complain where I live and the path that goes past the house is set back away from the road and normal pavement. Also, I pay £12 a month to rent the parking space from the council.
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So regardless of renting from the council or not, you will definitely need to be insured against liability. I know this as I had a house where people (to 2 other properties) needed to walk across a 1 Square metre corner at the end of my garden path and was advised strongly to insure against liability. It was perfectly level! In this day and age someone may see an opportunity. Not harassing you by the way, just being helpful. Forewarned is forearmed. 🙂
 
Pianoman said:
I was simply curious as to how long it would take to granny charge. You have satisfied that curiosity perfectly. Thankyou. 🙂
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I have a friend who has had a Leaf for two or three years. He tells me that he ran it entirely on the granny charger for a year, because of snafus getting his wall box installed. He obviously didn't use a public charger in that time, as he told me just last week that he had never used a public charger at all! He couldn't even find his never-used ChargePlace Scotland card in the muddle of his desk. (Keep it in the car, Murray, srsly.) He also has an ICE car (I think the Leaf might technically be his wife's), but he said he used that so little that the battery was always going flat.

He was sighing and saying (of the granny charger), "but it takes so long!" But it all boils down to whether your car is at home long enough for you to be able to keep up with your regular driving needs. If you can leave it charging all night most nights, indeed all evening and night a lot of the time, I think you'd have to be doing a lot of mileage to run into trouble.

Murray then perked up and said "but then you live right beside the West Linton charge-point, don't you?" That's the secret weapon. If you have a rapid charger that's convenient to use (I can walk home from that charger in five minutes) then any time you find that your SoC is low and you want to get back on track, a short visit to the rapid charger will do it.

Obviously a wall box becomes attractive if you're doing a lot of mileage for the ability to use variable-tariff electricity and make it all cheaper, not to mention the convenience of faster charging. Also if you don't have an electrical supply that's safe for a granny charger. But for the relatively low-mileage user who has a safe electricity supply to where the car is parked, my feeling is that the granny charger is absolutely adequate.
 
Has anyone ever seen advice from 7kw home charger manufacturers not to use coiled up?
I’ve never seen this and I know of a few who never fully uncoil before charging. I didn’t think it made any difference on a type 2 cable connected to a 7kw charger. It would be interesting if anyone has a user manual that advises to unwind…
 

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