There are many different ways to charge your electric vehicle. In this guide, we go through all the different solutions and the advantages and disadvantages of each one.
You can charge your electric vehicle (EV) at home if you have a home charging station installed. These usually come in 3kW, 7kW or the latest 11kW and 22kW fast chargers. A 3kW or less charge can be done via a standard three-pin wall plug you find at home. Moving up to the 7kW and beyond will usually require a 'Type 2' seven-pin plug that attaches to the cable of your car.
There are currently over 42,000 public chargers in the UK, with at least 4,000 of them being rapid chargers. If you want to locate your nearest public charger, you can use a tool like Zap-Maps and input your postcode to find your nearest one. Public chargers offer a variety of different kWh (kiloWatt hour) speeds. From 3.6kW, 7kW, 11kW, 22kW, 50kW and 150kW chargers such as the Tesla Supercharger network.
You can find more information about local free chargers by visiting this guide.
There are several different types of EV charging cables. These simply plug into your EV the same way you would put fuel into a car. What type of charging connector you should use depends on the power rating of each charging plug and what is available to you at the time. Some EVs have a maximum power output they can accept, so make sure to check this if you're going for a rapid fast charge.
You can learn more about charging cables and plugs by visiting this guide.
This is entirely dependent on the size of the battery your EV has and the maximum capacity of charging it can take at a time:
Most free charging points will have at least a 7kW charge point, with plenty offering a 22kW faster charge point. Wondering how long each one takes on average from 10% to 100%?
Zap-Map has a public charging calculator which lets you pick what EV you have, the cost of the charge point and how long it will take to charge your EV.