UKC

We have a looped in electricity supply, ie our supply comes from the road and then our neighbour is fed from our house.

Am I right in thinking that before we can have a car charger installed our neighbour will have to be unlooped, ie they will need to be connected to the cable in the road directly? 

Presumably problems arise if the neighbour refuses, maybe because they don't want their drive dug up for example.

Has anyone got any insights?

Thanks

I'm no expert but having some knowledge of how electricity distribution works I'd say 'it depends'

The network operator would need to figure out if the cables in the 'loop' could be overloaded, and this would depend on the size of the conductors in the cable, how they are joined with the main cable in the road, the ratings of the incoming supplies to the properties and the type of car charger you want to install.

Could you install a car charger without needing to increase the size of your incoming supply?

Don't know. I guess that's the 64k$ question that only the DNO can answer. Be good if you could just call them out to look, but not sure if that's how it works.

I've heard a few people defend the concept of fitting slow chargers rather than paying big money for things like upgrading supplies. Their logic being that people still think about charging an EV like they fill with petrol a ICE, ie. full to empty then top up. when that majority of the time you don't use a full tank in one journey then need to fill to full. So if you just have say a 32 A charger and plug in whenever you are at the house to get a few extra miles and charge over night you'll still be fine for 99.9% of cases. For example, with something like a Hyundai IQ5, an hour on a small 7 kW charger will give you 30 miles and the average UK commute by car is less than 10 miles each way. 

Yes, you are correct. There is a big push on at the moment to do this. It's at the DNOs expense as well

You are correct again. Notwithstanding the fact the neighbours may not get on. Access to both meter positions at the same time will be required to remove the loop.

Spare a thought to those who live in a long row of terrace houses and have their supply fed from overhead and their service cables fixed to the outside of their properties. House on the end wants a car charger, no one else does. Big problems there.

Which begs the question;

Why can't (most) people commute by bicycle ?

They'd be an awful lot healthier, and it would most probably take less time (including parking), as well as being cheaper.

(Oh and all the little children wouldn't be getting run over by their big heavy EV's !)

Well yes, indeed. I'm a big advocate of cycling as a mode of transport but as life becomes more complicated with children/childcare and jobs that require carrying a reasonable volume/weight of stuff I fear I'm going to be looking at a life of car commuting for a few years at least. 

I've commuted by bicycle for years, through many jobs. Unfortunately, they've just announced that our office will be closing and jobs relocated to another city.

I really like my current job, and the total time for public transport would be a bit silly, so I will have to consider driving again. 

I might start looking at electric motorbikes.

I wouldn’t defend the position but it’s exactly what we do and I’ll happily advocate it.  Got a ”charger” I can set to 8A or 16A and that does us fine.  Charges way more than a day’s typical usage overnight and in the exceptionally rare case we can’t plan to have it fully charged when needed, a 15 minute call to a McDonalds with a rapid charger fixes that.  We’ve spent orders of magnitude less on McDs than we would have getting a higher rated cable to the garage.

The 8A option is to make more efficient use of our solar and is what we almost always use.  The charger unit cost about £200.

(I say “charger” as really it’s a very glorified and clever mains cable to an onboard charger).

Edit: it’s a portable unit on a blue 16A commando plug; it hangs on wall in a bin store.  It comes with us when we go an visit an elderly relative along with a most unusual adapter as I don’t want to risk the car’s default 10A charger on the ancient round pin socket in their garage…). If doing this check with an electrician if you need a DC sensitive RCD or RCBO on the circuit it uses.

We had this, except that we were the end of the loop,.as it were. Electricity NW dug up our drive, connected us directly to the mains in the street and chopped the loop at the neighbours meter box.

We get on well with the neighbour but even if we hadn't he couldn't actually stop ENW doing the work, as they own the supply cables and meters and have a statutory right of access to the meter boxes. 

In the end it took 2 visits for the work to be completed so they sent us a cheque for the inconvenience!

Cheers, looks like being at the end of the loop is a better position to be in - not so reliant on the cooperation of the neighbour.

For us it was a simpler process than most have said so far. Local distribution company dug a hole in our path under the meter box and moved the cable for next door from our meter box into the bottom of the hole then came back a couple of days later and filled the hole in and replaced the slabs, only impact on the neighbours was a brief power cut. Wasn't expensive either might even have been free

Yep - super simple for us.

even if you don’t want a electric charger. Moving to ASHP etc may require the supply to houses to be updated. 
 

People are lazy and infrastructure is poor. People misunderstand that a cycle commute is a leisurely activity, not an all-out sweatfest (again, because of my first point which leads to poor fitness).

If only the government would fund cycling infrastructure not car infrastructure. 

It's not just EVs, ICE cars have been getting bigger and heavier for a while now as well. This is largely reflected in EVs because a) they a premium models and b) people want big and heavy from their premium models (that said, if I had need for a car I'd be getting a new Renault 5, which for a 'small' car is still big and heavy). 

edit typos

Look at a load cycle (cargo bike?). Plenty of people use them for the exact thing you describe in cycling friendly countries. 

I cycle commuted for about a decade.  Lived two miles down a dead end road without a car in the household for half of that 20 years ago before supermarket delivery was a thing.  All the grocery was either cycling or a 2 mile walk from the bus stop.  It worked for me at the time, inconceivable that it could work now I have a family.

I would include “weather”, “near by schooling” and “affordable, quality family housing where it’s needed” as parts of being a cycle friendly country.  

We are so very far removed from being a cycle friendly country.  

It's complicated. Apart from unlocking, another option might be to use load balancing on your supply so that the charger limits what power it draws if overall incoming current needs what it should. A place you will find more relevant experience where people who have got looped supplies and a charger will probably be able to tell you what is possible is the speakev forum. It might depend on the DNO in your area.

Most DNOs only deal with a qualified installer rather than with a home owner, but it does vary.

+1 for speakev.