Reply With QuoteIIRC they're just rebranded Charge Master points anyway but yes, would agree.
What a con, priced to soak up every penny of the government grant, it took the installer 40 minutes, I had a good look inside and would estimate the box cost about £50, it is just a socket with some conms in it, it isn’t a charger, these companies are getting £500 a pop from the government for these things, it’s our money they are wasting, I reckon that when the grant stops the price if these things will drop to about £100-150 fitted.
It’s the next home insulation scam
IIRC they're just rebranded Charge Master points anyway but yes, would agree.
I can’t see any good reason why you can’t just use a 32amp switch and wire the lead straight into it, maybe with a contractor as a safety interlock.
If they are rebranded cm units then I can assure you they are not just a psu and comms.
There is a lot of safety and car to charger communications that had to be developed then firmware updates and back end services that all need paying for without a subscription. Competent, ticketed sparkies also do not come cheap.
Two relays to turn it on once it senses the car for safety , it’s a rip off priced to soak up the grant/subsidy, the comms or back end! are not for the benefit of the user. The pcba is populated mainly with discrete’s a cheap processor and a cellular data modem that isn’t being used. mould tools would have been fairly costly but they probably capitalised the development and offset sunk costs against the government tax scheme.Originally Posted by julian2002
at £319 to the user and a £500 bung from the taxpayers it is a rip off.
As I said once the grant stops the price of these things is going through the floor,
It also doesn’t need to be much bigger than the socket, the great big round plastic box is branding, or maybe the American model of if it’s big an heavy it’s value!
Last edited by adrianw; 29th October 2019 at 09:10.
I tend to agree with you with regard to the price of these things, and I also agree the price will drop when the grant goes.
Unfortunately, you can’t just wire a 32A charger cable to a switch, there’s a bit of negotiation between your cars onboard charger and the supply to establish max charge rates and the safety handshakes.
I moved house a couple of years ago and left the grant funded charge point behind, but at my current property I paid an electrician to run some 32A armoured cable to my parking space and install a 32A CEEFORM socket, in compliance with current regs. That also meant an earth rod at the socket.
Into that I plug an OHME smart EVSE, which has the Type 2 car charging lead tethered to it.
Price for that setup was £700 installed, but it is a 25M cable run.
When I enquired with the branded wall box manufacturers, it was classed as a non standard installation so they wanted another £250 on top of the £810 for the wall box with £500 grant.
Ok, I paid £700 for my install versus £560 for the grant funded one, but I can take my £400 OHME unit with me if I move house, and just pay for another CEEFORM socket install that will be much cheaper with a lesser cable run. The OHME unit is also a smart charger, you input electricity tariff information and when you want your car to be ready, and it chooses the cheapest times to charge it and/or charges at a time when the grid is less loaded.
Last edited by Tooks; 29th October 2019 at 13:43.
The more I read about (current) EV’s the more cynical I become. All this associated cost and faff around chargers and charging, range, access to charging points. Think I’ll stick to filling up with diesel and getting 650 miles, no worries or nonsense until I have to switch. Looks like you’re swapping one set of costs for another at the moment (unless you make a high number of short journeys)? - and I refuse to feel guilty about my carbon footprint (whatever that means) when I haven’t been on board a plane in 15 years and live in a country that at least makes more than a token effort to limit emissions. Are they expecting us to swap cars every 18 months like an iPhone as the tech makes its inevitable advances? And how environmentally friendly is that? - don’t wish to come across as a curmudgeon but it all looks a bit dodgy to me!
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Cynical is ok, but it’s really not bad, it’s just different.
For me, I arrive home to my car parking space, get out of the car, open a flap, grab the charge plug from the wall and insert it into the charge point. That’s it.
4 hours, and £3.50 worth of electricity later (if I arrived home low on battery), and the car is fully charged and ready for another 150 miles.
I drive about 80 miles a day, so I rarely arrive home with less than 45% battery, it really just becomes the normal.
I haven’t visited a petrol station in months, my electricity bill has gone up by £65 a month, my petrol bill has gone down to zero from £240.
I paid no more for my electric car than I did my last hybrid one, and I changed it because my old one was at 100k miles and needed a couple of thousand spending on it.
I agree that changing for the sake of it isn’t sensible if your old car is still going strong, but next time why not?
But I agree with adrianw that the price of a box on the wall with limited electronics inside it is a bit steep, inflated by the installer grant I expect. I didn’t really need one, I could have carried on using the 3 pin domestic socket charger/EVSE it came with, but it used to take 12-15 hours to recharge with that.
Still cheaper than a petrol pump at home I suppose!
Having had a look on the internet I'm pretty sure that podpoint and chargemaster have no hardware in common so I no longer have skin in this game. All I can say is that chargemaster chargers required a fair bit more than a couple of relays and a non functioning modem - or did have when I was working on them which was a few years ago now so things might have changed.
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