Just Bought an Electric Car in Shard End? Here's How to Get Your Home Charger Sorted

The dealership hands you a three-pin lead, tells you to sort out home charging, and that is roughly where the advice stops. Most people then spend an evening reading charger reviews written by people who have never seen a Shard End semi.

This is the practical version. We are based in B36, we fit charge points on these streets, and the questions below are the ones we get asked on the phone most weeks.

In Shard End the answer usually comes down to parking. If you have a driveway or hardstanding — and most of the post-war semis and the newer infill housing around Packington Avenue and Heathway do — then home charging is straightforward and will be the cheapest way you ever put energy into the car.

Public charging is fine occasionally, but relying on it for daily mileage is both more expensive and a regular waste of your evening. The rapid chargers on the retail parks are there for topping up, not for living off.

The three-pin lead in the boot is a get-you-home device rather than a daily habit. It pulls a modest current for hours on end from a socket never designed for that duty. A proper charge point sits on its own protected circuit, charges far quicker, and runs to a schedule while you sleep.

We install BG SyncEV and Ohme. Both are proper smart chargers and both get fitted the same way — the honest deciding factor is your electricity tariff and how you use the car, not a spec sheet.

Most Shard End installations we do are ordinary houses with a straightforward run from the board to the driveway, and on those jobs BG SyncEV is usually where we start. If you have already moved onto an EV tariff for overnight charging, Ohme is worth a conversation.

There is a full side-by-side here: BG SyncEV vs Ohme.

On most straightforward Shard End installations, BG SyncEV is the unit our electrician reaches for first. We fit them regularly, we know how they behave on a typical semi here, and they do the thing most households actually want: charge the car overnight without drama.

That is a preference built on the jobs we actually do, not a claim that nothing better exists. If your set-up points somewhere else, we will tell you.

More about the unit: BG SyncEV home chargers.

If you have moved onto an EV tariff with cheap night-time hours, Ohme's scheduling is the reason people pick it. What you save depends on your supplier, tariff and mileage, so we will not put a number on it — but say so when you ring and we will talk it through.

More about the unit: Ohme home chargers.

Almost certainly. Virtually every house in Shard End is on a single-phase supply, which puts a home charger at around 7kW, and every plug-in car sold here uses the same Type 2 socket.

What differs is how much of that your car takes. Each vehicle has its own onboard limit and will not exceed it however big the wall unit is. That is why 22kW rarely comes up at home — it usually needs a three-phase supply you do not have.

Normally yes, and it is the sensible order. The work depends on your house, not on the car being parked outside.

If delivery is a few weeks away, that is the moment to ring. It means the charger is tested and live on the day the car lands, instead of a fortnight of retail-park charging.

• A check of your main fuse, earthing arrangement and consumer unit
• Agreeing where the unit goes and how the cable is routed
• A dedicated, protected circuit back to the board
• Mounting, connecting and commissioning the charge point
• Testing, certification and a walk through the app before we leave

On the typical Shard End semi, the consumer unit is under the stairs or in the hall cupboard and the car sits on a driveway at the front. That is a short, tidy run through the front wall, which is the cheapest kind of installation to do properly.

Where it gets more involved is the older stock with a meter box on the side elevation and parking round the back, or corner plots where the cable has to travel the length of the house. Neither is a problem — it just needs looking at before anyone quotes you.

We do not publish one headline price, because it genuinely depends on the house. The distance from the board to the parking spot, how awkward that route is, the state of the existing board and any earthing work are what move the figure.

Most Shard End houses fall into the straightforward bracket: short cable run, modern enough board, nothing unusual about the supply. Where the price climbs is usually an old board that is due replacing anyway, or a long run round the back of the property.

Full breakdown: what affects the cost of a home charger installation.

We are a Birmingham electrical contractor working out of B36, so Shard End is effectively on the doorstep. You speak to the electrician who will be doing the work, and you can ask him about your specific car rather than getting a call centre script.

If you are ready for a quote rather than a read, our Shard End EV charger installation page has the detail.

We cover the surrounding area from the same base, including Castle Bromwich, Lea Village, Kitts Green, Tile Cross, Chelmsley Wood.