Our technology editor answers your trickiest tech questions\n<\/p>\n
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The electricity supply to some older homes is not suitable for consistent car charging. Photo: Getty<\/p>\n
I bought an electric car and installed a home charger but I\u2019m having terrible trouble with the set-up. The charger keeps cutting out and restarting, sometimes taking hours for just a fraction of the charge it should be providing. It\u2019s particularly touchy when I do something like boil a kettle or have a shower.<\/p>\n
I live in a small former corporation terraced house and the ESB has told me it\u2019s 8kVA and this is likely the problem. I\u2019m annoyed because I spent a fair bit getting the home charger and wasn\u2019t told this might be an issue by anyone. Any advice?<\/p>\n
\u2014 Tanya McCarthy<\/p>\n
Answer<\/p>\n
Electricity voltage issues are a very under-reported challenge for homeowners thinking of switching to an electric car. As is depressingly usual in this industry, no-one \u2013 from the car dealer to the home charger installer \u2013 will mention it to you until you find it\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n
Think of kilo-volt-amperes (kVA) as being the size of the pipe of electricity into your home. The bigger it is, the more things you can power at the same time. Most modern homes have either 12kVA or 16kVA connections.<\/p>\n
By comparison, your old corporation house appears to have much less. Charging an electric car is one of the more intensive electric draws on your home, especially as it usually takes over an hour.<\/p>\n
What you can do is to apply to the ESB to upgrade your home from 8kVA to at least 12kVA. Unfortunately, this can take weeks, or even months to be properly processed by the ESB, which is under a lot of pressure from all sides at the moment.<\/p>\n
Until then, other than using expensive and scarce public chargers \u2013 often the same price as diesel or petrol \u2013 the only thing you can do is to use a \u2018trickle charger\u2019: a charging lead with a three-pin plug that goes into a regular wall socket.<\/p>\n
Email your questions to \u00adaweckler@independent.ie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our technology editor answers your trickiest tech questions The electricity supply to some older homes is not suitable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8819,22250,61,60,279,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-331552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-adrian-weckler","9":"tag-esb-group","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-review-magazine","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}