How long does it take to charge an electric car?
This all depends on the size of the battery and the speed of the charging point. Charging can take anywhere between 30-minutes and 12-hours. A typical electric car with a 60kWh battery would take 8-hours to fully charge the car’s battery from empty to full when using a 7kWh charging point.
The majority of electric car drivers never charge their battery from empty. They normally top up the batteries' power regularly which would speed up the charging process. This would mean hooking up the battery through the day when parked at work or a shopping centre or charging your car overnight. The majority of electric cars can be charged within 35-minutes with a 50kWh charging point to provide a range of up to 100-miles.
As you can see, the bigger the battery and the slower the charging point is that you are using. The longer it will take to charge your car’s battery.
Electric charging at home?
You can buy a home charging point as this offers the best solution to charging your electric vehicle at home. It offers a faster and safer solution to charging your battery and offers the flexibility to charging you cars battery overnight. You can use a standard 3-pin plug with an EVSE cable (electric vehicle supply equipment) to charge your car but this is not recommended as a permanent solution, this should be only used when no other option is available.
Electric Home Charging Point Grants
There is an OLEV Grant (office for law emission vehicle) is available for home charging solutions. The grant's name is ‘Electric Vehicle Homecharging Scheme (EVHS), as the name suggests it’s to provide financial relief to the cost of adding a home charging point to your home. This grant currently provides up to £500 off the cost of the purchase and the installation of a home charging point.
You can claim for a 1-charging point per eligible vehicle but you are only allowed up to 2 eligible vehicles per household. If you live in Scotland your able to get access to an additional grant, this is up to another £300. This grant is available through the Energy Savings Trust Scotland.
Electric car charging points installation
We would advise you to always enlist a professional to install your home charging point. The reason we give this advice, to install a level-2 charging point that uses 240 volts. You need the correct circuit breaker installed to your home’s circuit board. You will then need to run a newly installed 4-strand cable to your chosen charging location to connect to your charging pod. If you don’t understand any of what we’ve said here, please have a professional to install your charging point at home.
Electric car grant
Can you get an electric car grant, you ask? The answer is YES, with some stipulations. To be eligible for a plug-in car grant you must have purchased a new electric car. But this can’t be just any electric car, it needs to be an electric car that qualifies for the grant. A qualifying electric vehicle must have a range of at least 70-miles.
You can get up to £3,500 off a new electric car that qualifies for a grant. To clear up this confusion take a look at the Plug-In Government Grant page, here they clear up which cars qualify as well as give you the full information about the grant.
Longest range electric car
There are many new electric cars in the automotive market in the UK, every year a new car brand will launch a brand new model or an updated model. Car manufacturers are constantly working on solving the issue of battery range. In the current electric car market, there are the following cars that are ranked by the longest range.
