EV vehicle

[ineedacoffee222]

Looking at opting into company car scheme and wondering if tethered or untethered home charging point would be best.

Would untethered be open to theft, if left charging overnight on the driveway?

Any advice or tips regarding this? Thanks 🙏

We've unthreaded, looks better - when its charging its locked at both ends so not sure what the theft risk is

Thanks for this - does it unlock as soon as it’s finished charging or stay locked until you unlock it?

I can’t remember which is which. I suppose in theory someone could use our charger without us knowing straight away as we haven’t enabled a lock yet - I think Ohme chargers can have an electronic lock on them , and I know dp would spot quickly if someone was charging as he is all over the app.

I’ve gone ohme home pro with a tethered connection. Having to get the cable out all the time would drive me mad. And it’s going inside my garage so different to most I’d imagine. First EV arrives in October and electrician fitting the charger next week.

We went for an untethered charger mainly because it looks much neater and is quite small, which we preferred as ours is right at the front of the house. We only charge about once a week anyway, so getting the cable out and putting it away really isn’t a big deal.
There are also quite a few ways to control access and prevent someone else using your charger. I think some chargers can be locked or restricted through the app, so that’s worth checking depending on which one you get.
We’ve also enabled Peak Save, so charging doesn’t automatically start as soon as we plug the car in — it chooses the best time to charge overnight. With ours, once the car is connected I also need to stop/unlock the charging session properly before unplugging it, otherwise it throws an error. So it’s not really a case of someone simply taking the cable out of our car and plugging it into theirs.
For us, the cleaner look at the front of the house was definitely worth the very small inconvenience of getting the cable out once a week.

I guess with an untethered charger someone could theoretically drive up with their own cable and plug in, but equally with a tethered one they could potentially use the attached cable if the charger wasn’t restricted. So I think the app/access controls are probably more important than whether it’s tethered or untethered. Ours also notifies us on the app when charging starts, so we’d know if someone tried to use it anyway.

This is all really helpful, thanks everyone

We had to go with untethered for our charger because of the slightly odd shape of the driveway, where the charger needed to be located on the house and the location of the charge port on the car. A tethered charger had a length of 7m or 8m which just wasn't long enough, I needed at least 10m. As it worked out, now that DH has changed to electric and DS has passed his driving test, we now have three electric cars and an 18m cable in order to not have to shuffle cars around to be charged, so the 10m cable is spare in case of emergency.

We have had both tethered and untethered, and find the tethered charger far easier. It is a pain to have to keep getting the cable out and putting it away again. Yes, you can often lock your charger, or have an isolator switch inside the house or garage, but over our years of having EV's and home chargers and reading many of the EV owners forums I have never heard of anyone having someone rock up and charge without asking!

We have tethered. The cable wraps around neatly and doesn’t really change the look of it at all as it sits partly behind the charger.

Getting the cable out and storing it would drive me mad and we are on an electric tariff where we plug in when we are home and let the energy supplier decide when to charge based on grid conditions so we plug in often.

We leave our cable connected to the charger because an 18m cable weighs a flipping ton. I was concerned about it being stolen but it can't be seen from the road and also the road is gated so it's been safe for five years now. And also, as mentioned, it weighs a flipping ton and is very unwieldy, it's not a grab-and-run item like a phone.

It never even occurred to me that someone might rock up and charge. I don't think that's an actual thing that really happens, I've only ever heard of it on the internet and tbh I'm beginning to suspect that not everything on the internet is completely true. Even if it did happen it's not a massive cost, unless a neighbour was deliberately sneaking over every day at peak time. Our charger (and probably all or most chargers) has its own breaker switch on the fuse board so I guess you could just turn it off there if you were away for a few weeks or something.

Same as this.

Ours is a Hypervolt 3. Cable wraps around it and is mostly out of sight as the front of the charger sits further out than the back part.

Same but an older hypervolt.

I did once come home from dropping off at school to find someone had plugged into the charger. I turned it off and locked it in the app, and went back out. They must have only been plugged in ten minutes, I hope they left it hours and came back to discover it hadn’t charged at all.

So bloody cheeky!

I am currently on an Octopus fixed tariff and thinking of opting for their Inteligent Octopus Go which is great overnight but it’s way higher than my current rate during the day. For those of you that have switched tariff since going for an EV did you find it balanced itself out & your energy bills haven’t changed that much (taking out the issue of energy bills increasing overall).

I think it would be worthwhile costing out how much you use and when at the moment. We changed to an ev tariff once we had three electric cars, but it's very expensive between 5pm and 7pm so we have to make sure that nothing is running then. I don't like running appliances overnight (dishwasher/washing maching/tumble dryer) so it wasn't a good tariff with just one electric car.

at the cf plugging in on your drive.

We’re on intelligent go. We use the washing machine during the night now. I wouldn’t bother but OH is a bit mental like that 😆

If you plug the car in during the day Octopus will charge it during non peak hours at the lower rate and your house uses the lower rate at these times as well. It sets up a charging schedule so you know when the lower rates will be.

It costs about £8 to charge my car 50% on the normal rate. About £1.80 on intelligent go.

We have untethered ohme for the neat look but if I had my time again I’d deffo have tethered for convenience and swallow the ‘look’ element. Everyone who has an EV on our road (which is prob every other house on a road of over 120 houses) has tethered except us. It can look messy but agree with PP we have the hassle of plugging ours in and the wire is heavy! I do a lot of mileage about 18000 miles a year! So need to charge a lot,

People cut the whole cables off for the copper.

I’ve got a tethered Ohme Home Pro, as it means I don’t have to bother getting the cable out the car. With the Ohme, teathered or untethered, nobody else can use it if you’ve set the charger to approve plugins and disable the buttons on the charger, you can then only kick the charging off through the app. I would have thought most, if not all others are the same.

Tethered is very neat, as the cable coils up nicely and plugs into a bracket that comes with the charger.

We have a tethered Ohme. You can set it so you have to authorise every charge from the app on your phone, so no one can use it without your ok. It would be a faff digging out your cable every time you charged. We are on Octopus Intelligent Go. 6 hours cheap rate at night, but Octopus ask for the car to be plugged in daily, if there us a surplus in the day, it will give you a bit of charge, and the house gets the cheap rate too. So weekends, and sunny or windy days you often get an hour or so cheap power. If you live in a fairly safe area, I wouldn't worry about someone cutting your cable off. The cable remains locked in the charging socket, and the car won't go when its plugged in. All the little worries we had before buying have all been thought of before and solved.