Charging an EV is something that concerns a lot of people when we talk about changing to an EV. This mainly because refuelling an EV is very different to a petrol or diesel.
Time taken to recharge
Whilst many compare the time taken to refuel a petrol car and an EV they are very different. A petrol car needs you to take it to a petrol station and pump petrol into it. I often hear this referred to as 5 minutes.
An EV can take longer to charge depending on the rate of charge. The difference is you can plug it in, set it to recharge and go do something else as it doesn't need the driver present whilst recharging.
Whilst I will go through the different types of charging below one thing to consider is that the RAC say the average car or van in England is driven just 4 per cent of the time. For the rest of the time the car or van is either parked at home (73 per cent) or parked elsewhere (23 per cent), for example at work. This means there is potentially a lot of time available when an EV can be recharged where it doesn't need the driver present to recharge.
Home Charging
One of the cheapest and easiest ways to charge an EV is via home charging. To do this at present you must have off road parking (or accessible on road parking where you can install an approved safe way to cross public footpaths with council consent). Once you have a charger installed (granny or dedicated EV charger) there are different EV tariffs you can use such as Octopus Go where you get 5 hours of off peak rate electricity to charge your car using a time schedule in the car or charger.
If you have a compatible car or charger you could use smart EV tariff's such as Intelligent Octopus Go. With this tariff you set the amount of charge you want (battery % to recharge) and the time by which it needs to be done. Octopus then set up a smart charging schedule that recharges the car at the greenest and cheapest times.
This EV tariff charges your EV for just 7p per kWh when using the smart schedule charging. This means you can drive for under 2p per mile.
Octopus have also released a new Intelligent Drive Pack where you get unlimited smart charging for one vehicle for just £30 a month.
Unlike the Intelligent Octopus Go tariff that has its own day rate Intelligent Drive Pack is an add on tariff which (at present) needs either the Standard Variable Rate tariff or a fixed rate tariff to cover your normal house consumption cost.
It can also only be used for one EV households so if you have two or more EV's you can't use it.
Intelligent Octopus Go or Intelligent Drive Pack?
Which is best for you depends on the amount of EV charging you do per month. The quick way would be to calculate £30 by 7p/kWh which is 428kWh. Thats equivalent to 18,000 miles per year at 3.5 miles/kWh.
So if you home charge more than 428kWh per month and only have one EV then the Intelligent Drive Pack may be right for you. If you home charge less than 428kWh per month or have 2 or more EV's than Intelligent Octopus Go may be better for you.
Another point to think about is that the day kWh on Intelligent Octopus Go is slightly higher than the Standard Variable Rate or Fixed 12 month tariffs. If you can't/don't load shift to the Intelligent Octopus Go low rate period (23:30-0530) it could cost you £30 to £135 a year more.
Is a Home EV charger worth it?
One thing thats not spoken about for those with off road parking is the cost of installing a home charger. I'd personally recommend anyone with an EV thats charged at home gets a good quality EV charger installed by a competent and qualified electrician. Whilst a 3 pin plug 'granny charger' can used, they are slower (circa 2kW power output) compared to 7kW of a dedicated EV home charger, and not as safe to use as they have less electrical protection built in.
If you install a good quality EV home charger it will be much safer and faster. The likes of the MyEnergi Zappi has built in PEN protection that protects you from electric shocks in the event of a PEN fault in the electricity network. Whilst many won't understand why this is a good thing, the easy way to exoplain it is there is less chance of electrocution if a electrical fault occurs.
'Granny Chargers' can be a fire risk too. They will be pulling a constant power of 2kW for several hours, which can lead to fires caused by overheated plug sockets. My work has banned the use of 'granny chargers' for company EV's because fires have occurred through overheated 230V sockets. Many 230V 13A electrical sockets just are't designed to output a constant 2kW load for numerous hours at a time.
Example of an overheated plug socket
https://theevfeed.substack.com/p/the-risks-of-charging-your-ev-from-uk-socket
Many are put off installing a dedicated EV charger due to the additional cost. It can cost anything from £700 to £1149 depending on the type of charger you choose.
Whilst this is a considerable amount of money, the pay back time for installing an EV charger isn't as bad as you think.
If we compare the pay back period to the equivalent cost of a petrol car of 12p per mile, the EV chargers installed by Octopus Energy would pay off the charger installation cost within 9,000 to 11,500 miles.
Our charger Myenergi Zappi charger cost us £1,500 through our solar installer. At the time it was a bit higher than other installers by we wanted to ensure our solar and EV charger had been installed by the same company so that if there were any compatibility issues between the solar and EV charger there could be two different companies blaming each other. Even with the higher cost of ourt EV charger paid for itself within 15,000 miles (its now at 46K miles so paid back a long time ago).
If we also compare the cost of someone receiving a potentially fatal electric shock from an EV due to a PEN fault is obviously well worth the £899 to £1149 install cost if it saves someone from a fatal electric shock.
There is also an added benefit that some EV chargers can integrate with energy suppliers who can then offer cheaper EV charging tariffs. Intelligent Octopus Go is one example of this where all EV charging is charged at 7p/kWh and there isn't necessarily a limit to the charging hours (there is a general fair use policy).
Public Charging
If you can't install your own EV charger, or are away from home you will need to use public charging.
There are two types of public charging:
* Destination Charging - 7kW to 22kW AC
* Rapid Charging - 50kW to 350kW DC
destination charging
Destination charging is generally slow so you'd use this type of charging once you've reached your destination (or somewhere you're staying for several hours). You shouldn't use it as On-Route charging if you want a quick stop as it will take several hours to recharge an EV battery from 20% to 80% at 7kW/11kW.
Destination charging also costs much more than charging at home. As can be seen below the cost of public destination charging (7kW/22kW) can be as much as 50-60p/kWh.
Using Connected Kerb at 53p/kWh @3.5 miles/kWh would mean a cost per mile of 15p. Thats 3p/mile more than the cost of a petrol car (11.8p/mile at £1.30 per litre at 50mpg).
Its possible to get a 8% discount through the likes of Octopus Electroverse roaming if your an Intelligent Octopus Go customer. Other roaming providers can provide discounted rates too.
Rapid Charging
Rapid charging is best described as On-Route charging where you want a quick stop. 20% to 80% can be recharged in some EV less than 20 minutes.
Rapid or ultra rapid charging is generally more expensive than destination charging.
You can get monthly subscriptions which can help reduce the cost of public charging. If you are lucky to live near a Tesla 'Open to All' Supercharger it could reduce your cost per mile down to around 8p per mile at 3.5 miles/kWh efficiency.
The cost of rapid charging can be very different from company to company, and can differ greatly. Just like with a petrol car where you generally don't refill at an expensive motorway services if you can't help it you can generally vote with your wallet and use the cheaper rapid charging providers/locations with a bit of planning.
Cost of charging on a long distance trip
In November 2023 we completed a long trip to the Lake District in our EV. For this trip we had to rely on the public charging network. We used a variety of charging providers from the more expensive rapid chargers like InstaVolt (85p/kWh at the time) to cheaper rapid charging from the likes of Tesla (48p/kWh at the time). We also used cheaper destination charging from Charge My Street. Initially I hadn't spotted there was a discount via Electroverse. That discount dropped the price from 59p/kWh to 44p/kWh so very worth having!
When you compare the type of charging we used on this trip there was nearly an even split between home, destination and rapid charging.
Overall the cost of charging was 12.6p per mile. Petrol at the time was £1.46 per litre so that would have been 13p per mile at 50MPG.
For us public charging is generally a one off activity that we either do on long trips away or longer day trips that are above the range of our EV. When we factor in the cost of our normal home charging costs the average cost per mile over the year is relatively low.
I've calculated our charging costs of both public charging and home charging for the first 8 months of 2025 (January to August). I've used a conservative 3.5 miles per kWh to calculate miles driven.
You can see public charging costs raise the cost per mile from 2p (home charging only) to 2.4p over an 8 month period. As long as you can mostly charge from home the higher cost of occasional public charging shouldn't make a huge difference. Currently I'd never recommend an EV for anyone who can't charge at home using an EV tariff.