For safety, efficiency, and cost reasons, owners of an electric vehicle need the right hardware when it comes to charging, says an EV expert. Photo / 123RF
As electric vehicle sales continue to charge ahead, an expert has warned of the potential issues of not having an adequate home charging setup.
“For safety, efficiency, and cost reasons, EV owners need the right hardware, so they are not trying to charge their car the same way they boil the jug or run a hairdryer,” says Schneider Electric’s national mobility manager Liam Vink.
“Boiling a jug for an hour would give you about 13km worth of range on your EV.
“It’s a lot of power to be consuming. Additionally, if you’re charging at that rate you’re actually going to be charging for three times longer than you would with a wallbox or with an EV charger built for purpose,” he said.
“We’re talking 24 hours perhaps for a mid-range electric vehicle if you were charging it to say 10 amps, which is electric jug level.
“A proper wallbox, 32 amps, you’re charging three times as fast.
“It’s one of the worst loads you can put on a house … an EV is drawing full power for the entire time it’s plugged in,” Vink said.
He said on average, it can cost about $2500-$3500 for a wallbox and installation.
“If you spend up to $100,000 on a vehicle, I can’t imagine a situation where you’d want to forgo a safe and effective way of charging that vehicle.”
Vink points to an October 2021 survey by the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) of 932 EV owners in New Zealand, which found that although 82 per cent of people commonly charge at home, most lack the right hardware for optimal safety and performance.
More than three-quarters (77 per cent) said they used a standard three-pin domestic power socket and charging cable (known as Mode 2) to charge at home, while only 30 per cent had dedicated wall-mounted EV home chargers (or Mode 3).
But those numbers can be partly explained by a couple of factors, Vink said.
“It’s driven mainly by the number of Nissan Leafs in the market. Nissan Leaf came to market in 2010 and at that time electric vehicle chargers just didn’t exist so the only way was to use a 3-pin plug.
“I think it’s something like 10,000-15,000 Nissan Leafs in the market.
“Hybrid vehicles charge at a lot lower rate than purely electric vehicles, so the use case there for a wallbox is not as high,” he said.
A dedicated EV charger also comes with cost savings too, Vink added.
“By minimising peak power impacts and avoiding power overruns and effects on power availability, there are associated electricity bill savings.”
And then there’s the safety question.
“Are you covered from a safety perspective?” Vink asks.
“If an electrician’s looked at that kind of installation from the WorkSafe guidelines, he should be putting in a type B residual-current device (or RCD) to protect the socket.
“That’s actually mentioned in the WorkSafe guidelines that if a socket is regularly used to charge a vehicle, it must be RCD protected.”
WorkSafe’s website offers this advice:
“There are two kinds of three-pin charging ... one with just a caravan-style plug and the other with an ICCPD in-cord cable protection device ... the first kind is forbidden in many countries including New Zealand by the WorkSafe guidelines, but there’s every chance it’s still being used,” Vink said.
He said such a plug was forbidden because of issues such as: the cord being live at all times; the fact that it still delivers power even if the battery is full; no safety checks are performed (e.g. is the cable actually plugged into a car) before power is delivered; no RCD protection is incorporated; and no temperatures of components are checked. Those issues can result in a fire risk.
“And you wonder how EV terms and conditions and warranties play into that [being covered] if you haven’t chosen to charge [your EV] in a safe and effective way,” Vink said.
“Most vehicles come with a three-pin plug and it’s normally labelled for emergency use only.
“I’d highly recommend that any EV owner looking to install an EV charger chooses one that has a home energy management system as well.
“If you’ve got a home energy management system installed, you’ve got no concerns around the tripping of your own switchboard and also being able to charge that vehicle in a fast manner.”
Vink said there was huge demand for EVs, with 30 per cent of passenger vehicles globally expected to be fully electric by 2030.
And here in New Zealand EV sales have surged, thanks in part to the clean car rebate, which takes as much as $8625 off the price of a new clean vehicle.
There were 2656 pure EVs (or battery electric vehicles - BEVs), 2503 hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and 515 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) registered in March 2023, according to the Motor Industry Association.
Pure EVs represented 16 per cent of total new vehicle registrations of 15,997 for the month of March.
For the year to date, pure EV sales now stand at 4590 - 61 per cent ahead of this time last year when the figure was 2828.
And figures from the Ministry of Transport put the number of light EVs with an active registration at 69,111 as of February this year.
Jayme Fuller, Trade Me’s motors sales director, said it was seeing changing attitudes towards EVs on the auction site.
“Every month, we see a growing number of Kiwis consider an EV on Trade Me.
“The good news for those considering making the switch is that there are more EVs on the market, with new makes and models being released each month,” she said.
Fuller said Trade Me saw a 48 per cent jump in the number of EV listings year-on-year when compared with February 2022.
Views for EVs also rose 4 per cent in that time, she said.
“Currently on Trade Me you can pick up a second-hand EV for around $10,000. While that may not fit into everyone’s budget, over time we have seen this figure decrease as more second-hand EVs enter the market.”
The Future of Motoring consumer survey, conducted by Driven, last year surveyed 2500 New Zealanders and found 60 per cent would consider buying an EV as their next car.
But it also highlighted a number of concerns, and even misconceptions, around EVs, including cost, driving range, battery life and replacement, and the accessibility of recharging stations.
“The EV market has been maturing for around 8-10 years now and a lot of people would have absorbed a lot of information during the early days when that was the case,” Vink said.
“And there were only a few manufacturers and the ranges were quite small and that infrastructure just didn’t exist.
“These days I believe there’s been serious improvement in the availability of chargers both at the workplace and for customers to install in their own homes. And the technology behind managing those loads has improved as well.”
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