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Scheduling against a tariff, load management, and what the application can and cannot see.
A charger is the largest single load most houses will ever add. What that means for the tariff, and for everything else on the circuit, is the real question.
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Most households leave a car plugged in for twelve hours and need perhaps four of charging. Which four is entirely a matter of price, and on a time-of-use tariff the difference across a year is considerable.
A connected charger takes the tariff, the departure time and the state of charge, and works out when to draw. The car may be able to do the same thing, which raises a question about whether both should be trying.
Load management is the part nobody thinks about. A charger drawing full current while an oven and a shower are running can exceed what the house supply is rated for.
Where the intelligence sits
In detail
This is the decision that determines how well the whole thing behaves. Tap an arrangement.
What is doing the scheduling?
What that means appears underneath
A description of how these arrangements differ. We cannot see your particular equipment.
Worth knowing
Less visible than tariff scheduling, and more important.
A domestic electricity supply has a rated capacity. A charger drawing at full rate is a significant fraction of it, and adding an oven, a shower and a kettle to that can exceed what the supply is rated to deliver.
A load-managed charger measures the whole house at the incoming supply and reduces the car's draw when everything else is busy, restoring it when the demand drops. The car takes slightly longer and nothing trips.
This requires a sensor at the consumer unit, fitted at installation. It is not something added later without going back to the wiring, which is why it is worth deciding on before installation rather than after.
All of this is installation work. An EV charger is a permanent high-current connection to a domestic supply, and in most countries it must be installed by a qualified and registered person, notified to the relevant body, and in some cases approved by the network operator beforehand. This page explains what these devices do. It is not a fitting guide, and nothing here should be read as one.
Practical
The details that decide whether it is pleasant to live with.
A tethered charger has the cable permanently attached: convenient, always there, and it decides your connector type for the life of the unit. A socketed one takes whatever cable you plug in, which suits households with more than one car or an eye on changing.
Tethered cables also live outside in the weather and get run over. Worth thinking about where it will hang.
A charger on an exterior wall, often round the side of a house, is at the edge of the Wi-Fi. Some carry a mobile connection instead for exactly this reason.
The important question is what it does when the connection drops. A good charger falls back to charging on a stored schedule. A poor one stops scheduling entirely and either charges immediately or not at all — and finding out which at seven in the morning is unpleasant.
Chargers that divert surplus generation into the car are a genuinely good pairing, since the alternative is exporting it for very little. It requires a compatible charger, a sensor at the meter, and enough surplus to be worth capturing — which in a northern winter is not much.
Before you buy
Tap a question to read the answer.
A three-pin socket will charge a car, very slowly — commonly around ten miles of range an hour, meaning a substantial battery takes days rather than hours.
It is also a sustained high draw on a circuit not designed for it, and manufacturers describe it as an occasional measure rather than a daily arrangement. For regular charging a dedicated unit is the right answer.
Pick one. Two schedules on the same car is the commonest complaint in this category, and the outcome is a battery that did not charge with each side assuming the other was handling it.
The charger is generally the better choice, because it knows the household tariff and can see the rest of the house. Set the car to charge whenever it is plugged in and let the charger decide when.
Charging stops and resumes when supply returns. Most chargers pick the schedule back up automatically; some want a moment to reconnect first.
Worth knowing that a charger cannot supply the house from the car unless it is specifically built to, which most are not.
Load management and tariff scheduling are the two features that matter, and both are well established. Neither is a reason to wait.
The one thing worth confirming at purchase is that the unit meets the requirements applying where you live, since several countries now mandate specific scheduling and security features on new installations.
Keep reading
A charger is the largest load in most homes. The lighting guide covers measuring the rest.
Read the lighting guideHow we checked this
Nothing stated here rests on a forum thread or an article with no name attached to it. Where a point simply cannot be pinned down, the page admits as much instead of papering over it.
Written reference material about connected household equipment, published independently by DIGITALDOTS TECHNOLOGIES of Ontario, Canada.
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