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I wasn’t sure if the home charging was just an issue with the standard leads or higher duty ones.
We don’t have off street parking, that’s one reason we went hybrid over electric.
Is your Volvo hybrid? We only got it yesterday and I have no idea best settings etc.
GoatandTricycle-
Yeah, the Volvo is a twin engine thing... petrol up front and electric on the rear. They can run together as a hybrid, or they can run as pure electric (low range of 25 miles), or as majority petrol (super long range around 480 miles on the motorway, enough for London to Glasgow without topping up).
I don't have off-street parking... and needed to run the granny lead out of the window and across the front garden and path (under an anti-slip thing).
I no longer do that at all since melting the socket and plug.
Instead I will just always hunt for chargers at destinations using ZapMap. In London I have a strong preference towards PodPoint (typically free in supermarket car parks) or Ubitricity lamp post charging (reasonably priced, pay as you go with credit card, works extremely well without requiring an app).
I seldom run in pure electric due to having no reliable access to charging infrastructure and for Haringey being particularly bad on this.
I've not had a lot of success with Source London (nearly always occupied) or Polar (nearly always out of service or has issues with the app that prevent charging).
The hybrid is a huge piece of mind given that I can just fill up and carry on. A pure EV would still work without off-street parking so long as you never went below 50% charge... but with a hybrid the low range on pure EV is too low to fully survive on electric alone given the poor infrastructure and high contention to use what does exist.
Velocio
Yes and no.
Best to install an EV charger if you have off-street parking.
You can run from a socket, but I melted mine... so buyer beware on that. There's a few posts about it earlier in this thread, and electricians I spoke to basically warned against doing this long-term as things are rated for peak load based on assumption of it being a spike/temporary load rather than a continuous load. That is, rating a home circuit, socket and plug for 13A (3KwH) expects only the use of a 3-bar heater (with thermostat), kettle or toaster... all of which only peak for 5 minutes at a time so things cool between peaks. But a Hybrid EV is going to be at peak for 2-5 hours. You can change plug sockets to cater for this, i.e. get rid of fancy aesthetic ones and go to the MK standard... but in reality, only use the granny lead for emergency top-ups rather than regular top-ups, never do it unattended, and if you have off-street parking get a charger installed as soon as you can, it will absolutely be worth it.