2020 was time for a change of car, my previous car is a diesel although it uses adblu which is supposedly a green car (only £20 road tax each year), I have become very conscious of my impact on the world and want to improve and be more green with a zero impact on our environment.
Electric cars seem a good way to go with the least impact on the environment (currently)
At my yearly service in 2019 the current garage I use changed its sales from peugeot/citroen to MG. I was loaned a new MG during my service (not electric), as soon as I sat in the car the door handle fell off. During my 24 hours with this car I was very disappointed with the build quality and features of the car, it used a huge amount of petrol also. The price of this car was very good.
Over the next 6 months I looked at different web sites and investigated electric cars
There are a number of great youtube channels that offer reviews and daily living with EVs.
Our decision back in April was to find an EV that was designed from the ground up, there aren’t a huge amount of these around, most are conversions from liquid fuelled cars.
I decided on an EV and ordered this during May, I will go into this when I take delivery of the car.
We decided we needed a home charging point, this was a VERY difficult part of our journey. There are so many around, but locally to be we are poorly served with EV charge points and companies that install them.
Youtube was again really helpful.
I initially contacted BP chargemaster, this was a painful process made more difficult due to the COVID restrictions. Our house is quite new we moved in during December 2018. This company wanted a huge amount of information even asking for our land registry documents,
The company didn’t offer a single point of contact either, with emails being randomly answered by people. I was put off from using them as a company from my personal experience.
I started to look around on youtube again, I found a really great channel called artisan electics
The owner is hugely positive about electric vehicles and chargers, there are lots of examples of him installing chargers on this youtube channel. Unfortunately they are based in Cambridge and I live north of Hull on the coast.
Eventually I found a local installer and they were able to visit to complete a survey.
I was offered eight different chargers from four different brands
| Brand | Socket or Plug | Kw output | WiFi Or GPRS | Recommended | Price |
| Project EV | Socket (MATTE) | 7Kw | WiFi | £640.00 | |
| Project EV | Socket | 7Kw | WiFi | £545.00 | |
| Pod Point | Socket | 7Kw | WiFi | £575.00 | |
| EO Mini | Socket | 7Kw | WiFi | £745.00 | |
| EO Mini | Wired | 7Kw | WiFi | Yes | £865.00 |
| ROLEC | Socket | 7Kw | GPRS | £730.00 | |
| ROLEC | Wired | 7Kw | GPRS | £794.00 |
For my needs I selected the EO mini wired unit, each household will have different needs and this suited me. This took quite a bit of watching videos and research to find out what would suit us.
The local company will install this next week and I will update the blog with photos, car to be delivered in the second week of September.