If you don’t have a home charge point you’re sort of limited to charging your electric vehicle at home. I found out when our point was briefly out of commission, the charge cable wouldn’t go through the letterbox on our uPVC front door. So if you don’t have a home charge point, you would basically end up putting the cable through an open ground floor window. This would mean that you also wouldn’t be able to leave the room whilst charging your car in case some scallywag decided to nick in through the window and make away with your stuff.
That’s 8 hours sitting in a room while your car charges. And the heat leeches slowly out of the room. Not exactly ideal is it?
If you decide to charge your car when you’re out and about it’s just as much of a bind at times too. Personally, I tend to steer clear of the fast charge points that are springing up around the place. The nearest one to me in St Albans is in Enfield anyway; so by the time I’ve driven 35 miles there and back to spend 20 minutes charging up, I’d need to charge it up again pretty soon anyway.
So basically that leaves you with two or three options. You might be lucky to have some on-street charge points like we do (IF you can find one that someone in a petrol car hasn’t parked at) or be even luckier and i) have parking at your office & ii) convince your boss to install a charge point just for you. If you are that person that has the parking space at work and have convinced your boss to install a charge point, could you leave a comment below picking me 6 numbers between 1 and 49, because nobody is that lucky!
Alternatively you could park in one of those special parking bays and a shopping centre. Providing you’ve already signed up to the bespoke scheme they run of course. Then what do you do? Your shopping. Wait a bit. Some more shopping. More waiting. Maybe then a cup of coffee in one of the 37 coffee shops the shopping centre has. Some more waiting. Change your mind over some of your shopping purchases and take them back. Buy some more stuff. That’s probably got you two thirds of a charge and if you’re still talking to your better half you can head off home.
Of course if you’ve got any common sense, like me, you can simply do your own thing, plug your EV into your British Gas Domestic EV Charge Point when you get home and forget about it until you need it again. The vast majority of journeys that people make are under 25 miles and in the 6 months I’ve had my Nissan LEAF, I’ve never come unstuck needing charging while I’m out and about. Modern batteries like those in the LEAF don’t suffer from being left plugged in or “topped up” regularly, so it’s easy to make sure I always leave the house with a full charge and maximum range available.
I love my British Gas Domestic EV Charge Point and I really can’t imagine owning an EV without having one, it just makes it so much easier and practical to own an electric car.