56
Is charging electric car at holiday house "theft"?
(www.express.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
56 points (95.2% liked)
United Kingdom
4060 readers
295 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You have circuit breakers specifically if it's using too much power.
While this is true, extended high current usage through a 3 pin plug isn't ideal - especially if the house wiring is a bit old and imperfect (and the breaker won't trip until imperfect old wiring breaks down). It's generally not recommended to regularly charge cars off standard 3 pin plugs, although a one off usage will probably be just fine.
Don't you have 240v mains power in the UK? Trying to charge a car off 120v only adds 3 miles of range per hour in the US so I had to have a dedicated circuit installed. It might be the same in the UK for amperage reasons. What's a three pin plug?
AFAIK (and i could be totally wrong here; 3 phase is where my knowledge of electricity takes a sharp dip!) you can get up to 480V total on a 3 phase circuit in the US… 3 phase is what a lot of dedicated car charging circuits would run off
i had heard that US properties get 3 phase power by default and a lot of your circuits are split between the phases, where a lot of 230/240V countries get a single phase, and that you have certain 240V circuits for speciality things like clothes driers that operate somehow using multiple phases at once? or that could be total nonsense misremembering
… but also, houses in 240V countries (i’m in australia for example and we have 240) can also get 3 phase, and that’s often what’s added for electric vehicles
You can get 3-phase in the UK, but it's very much down to what's available in the street.
And you're definitely getting into commercial pricing for the install when you call the electric company.
Most of the time, home chargers are just up-rated cables from a standard single-phase supply (most houses are 100A or 60A, so 30A for a car isn't insane, while giving 7.2KWh)
A three pin plug is just the UK standard plug, it has three pins on it, with the top pin being longer than the other two which engages firsts and prevents electrocution. They are also fused instead of the actual wall socket.
Yeah circuit breakers are there to protect the cables in the wall. Only the newer ones protect you and the cables.