316 The No Home Charge Issue Episode

Gary Comerford (: 00:00

Every time you talk about electric vehicles on social media, the talk ultimately ends up moving to some variation of Eevees are great because they can get really cheap overnight charging at home. Now, this is 100% accurate, and it's one of the main differentiators between electric vehicles and ice vehicles. Nobody in the history of internal combustion vehicles outside of a perhaps a few specialist chemists has a petroleum plant on their driveway, allowing them to refuel at home.

Of course, what's often ignored or conveniently left out when these conversations take place is the fact that a chunk of people in the UK and worldwide don't have the ability to charge a home. Their costs are, by definition, going a bit higher than those who can charge a home. And this is often referred to as the pavement tax. Before we go any further, I think it's important to say that we're probably never ever going to be able to get rid of

The payment tax, there's always going to be costs associated with charging in public that simply aren't included when charging at home. Things like buying the equipment, installing and maintaining it, putting on a help desk all need to be included in the cost of public charging. And these costs, well, they also exist for home charging, but they're accounted for in a different way and not included in the price per kilowatt hour you pay to charge overnight. Now the best we can do is to minimize the payment tax.

With that mind, I wanted to see what the so-called payment tax actually works out to be.

Hi, I'm Gary, and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

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Gary Comerford Zapmap Intro (: 01:48

The EV Music's podcast is sponsored by ZapMap, the go to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Gary Comerford (: 01:56

Now, if you look at the cost of home charging, which can be as low as 7 pence a kilowatt hour, and compare that with the cost of public rapid charging, which can be as high as 92 pence a kilowatt hour at the time of writing, the difference seems to be irreconcilable. But in reality, the figures are a lot closer than they may appear to be on a day-to-day basis. For a start,

92 pence a kilowatt hour is not the rate that most people who only charge in public are going to pay. This generally is the price associated with CPOs such as GridServe, who are operating mainly at the motorway service areas. I would suggest that few people who don't have home charging will drive to a motorway service area exclusively to charge their EV. That would be like only refilling your petrol car at the services and paying whatever premium they add on for that privilege.

Friend of the podcast Shane Reese, for example, has taken advantage of the BEV charging bundles and now pays for his charging in advance at a price of around 36 pence a kilowatt hour. That's less than I pay for electricity at home during the day, by the way. Secondly, the majority of people who don't have home charging are going to be looking for a cheaper solution that allows them to charge on something like a lamppost charger or another AC charger located reasonably close to where they live.

Or they're looking for subscriptions to rapid charging networks, or they're using workplace charging. If we look at places such as Norway, where almost 100% of new vehicles sold are electric, or the Netherlands, where electric cars are a large proportion of new sales, but a lot of people live in dwellings without off street parking, how do they deal with things? Well, let's take a look.

Norway, it must be said, has cheaper charging than the UK. A lot of this is due to the natural resources, hydroenergy for a start. So even if people can't charge at home, they've set up a huge charging network that allows people to charge cheaply in public. Now, as a side note, I've often said that the high cost of public charging would be less egregious if it was lower than the price of wet fuel, with some offers in place and the current high price of wet fuel due to.

Whatever crisis is highlighting our dependence on things like that. This week, we are far off. Now, a recent paper from Research in Transportation, Business and Management says, and I quote, the vast majority of Norwegian EV users charge primarily at home. This is strongly linked to Norway's housing structure, with a high share of detached and semi detached houses and widespread access to reserved parking. Even EV owners with access to home charging.

Regularly rely on public fast charges, mainly for long distance and occasional trips. Home charging and fast charging therefore function as complementary infrastructures rather than alternatives. End quote. So, how about somewhere like the Netherlands? It's a different story in the Netherlands. More people live without off-street parking, but their charging infrastructure is denser than ours in the UK.

As at December 25, they had 140,000 public chargers where you can charge a car. That gives the Netherlands the densest network of public chargers in the world. But all this discussion isn't getting me any close to working out what it's actually like to live without a home charger. And

This left me with two options. One, I could physically disconnect my home charge and pretend like I lived without one. Or two, I could find someone who actually lives without a home charger and get them to send me in some video of a typical week or so in the life. Guess which one I did.

And I wanted to get some idea of what that actually looks like on a day-to-day basis by asking someone to record video of themselves and the charging situations they encounter.

So enter Nick Theobald

Nicholas Theobald (: 05:32

I'm Nick and I work wise, I'm sort of a bit of freelance stuff from home really, education, that sort of thing. I'm a retired GP and hospital doctor. I made the switch from petrol to EV in February, so that's about seven months ago. After much thought about, you know, now's the right time to swap, what should I do and so on. Saw a...

ot dealer. We'd had a Peugeot: 3008

Gary Comerford (: 06:12

Excellent. Now we're chatting today primarily because notwithstanding what you've just said, you are one of the minority of people at the moment who own an electric vehicle but don't have off-street parking. So you're reliant 100% on public charging. now we've had guests

Nicholas Theobald (: 06:27

Okay.

Gary Comerford (: 06:28

on before on and this situation, and we know it can be done. I mean, it's it's not one of those things that's my god, how am I gonna deal with this? But there are

There are certain hurdles that need to be overcome. There are certain things that need to be thought about in advance. Now, what I asked you to do and what you've done very kindly is over the last few weeks, maybe a couple of months, when you've been out doing charging, you've been taking some video footage, and we're going to be showing that as we do the as we have the conversation. and this will talk about some of your day-to-day challenges when we're charging. So

Before we look at some of that, just give me the thirty second overview of your charging situation where you actually live, 'cause you're out in West London, I believe, aren't you?

Nicholas Theobald (: 07:10

Yes, so I'm in West London in Hammersmith and Fulham. And I guess what makes life easier as someone who can't charge from home is that our borough was very proactive and ahead of the curve in terms of infrastructure for charging EVs. So quite a lot of the lampposts have got EV charges. There's a few slightly faster ones dotted around the borough as well. So I've got a 5, 6 kilowatt hour charger.

within 50 meters in one direction, which is on a lamppost. And then there's a slightly faster so-called 22 kilowatt one, the other direction. So within 50 meters, I've got those two. I've not got to go that far and there's many, many more. I if you look at the ZAP map for this area, it's very generous. They're pretty reliable. I think I only think of once when I've had issues where it's not delivered.

But, you know, so we get by. We get by with that.

Gary Comerford (: 08:05

So just so that people understand the particulars about your situation, what sort of mileage will you do in your EV in a typical week?

Nicholas Theobald (: 08:14

It's very variable from week to week really because if we're just pottering around locally or much longer journeys. it's an average. I I reckon we probably do about 8,000 a year. So you just kind of average that out. there will be, yeah, we do quite a lot of long journeys and quite a lot of very short journeys.

Gary Comerford (: 08:32

And do you have regular that people talk about well, I I I do the run down to the shops or I if I've got kids I do the the school runner things like that. Are there regular day to day journeys that you will do with a certain amount of frequency?

Nicholas Theobald (: 08:46

I suppose funnily enough, the most regular journey is to take the dog for a walk, which sounds funny, but it's just to find somewhere where she can be off lead. So yeah, there are places we go to regularly, none of which have got any charging, to be honest.

Gary Comerford (: 09:00

Okay, well we'll we'll come on and talk about that in a second. what you mentioned that you've got a number of charges nearby. who who are the main CPOs who are providing th those charges? I'm I'm guessing Shell or what used to be Uber Tristis, now Shell Recharge. I guess they're one of the ones that in your area. Are there any others?

Nicholas Theobald (: 09:20

Yes, so that was the initial contract was with Ubitricity that has now become Shell. The slightly faster ones around the corner, they are Believe. There's some down the end of the road that they seem to me like they've been there for about 10 years. They certainly put them in so long ago, they feel like they've always been there. I'm not sure who provides them. They're quite expensive and quite slow, so I've not really investigated them to be honest.

Gary Comerford (: 09:46

But the the charges that you've got close to you, you mentioned that there's believe and and and shell. Do you have a preference for which one you you do there or is it guided purely by cost or availability or what how how do you decide whether you're gonna go out and go left or go out and go right?

Nicholas Theobald (: 10:02

Yeah, my preference is certainly guided by cost. And you've got to think about when is the cheapest time to charge. The U-Botricity one, I think, has got three different rates. The Believe one's got two different rates. They're both a lot cheaper overnight. So yeah, by preference, I would find the cheapest and use that. And if that means setting the car or plugging in to go from midnight, I would do that, if I can.

So at the moment the car is sitting waiting for later.

Gary Comerford (: 10:29

And you have no problem sort of I mean we we're getting to you know, the clocks have just gone back as we've recorded this, so it's you know, it's getting dark, it's gonna be really dark at midnight, and you don't have a problem with wandering out down the streets to Hammersmith and plugging in at at midnight.

Nicholas Theobald (: 10:43

In terms of safety, no I don't. But yeah, I accept that it would be an issue for some people to have to cross the road and go out in the dark and so on. So yeah, it's not ideal at all.

Gary Comerford (: 10:54

Mm. Okay. So give me an example of somewhere other than I think if we talk, you know, the the charges in Hammersmith, if we talk of those as your home charges, even though, you know, obviously they're not home charges. Give me an example of somewhere other than home where you've charged recently, please.

Nicholas Theobald (: 11:13

gosh, a huge variety. So we were down in Somerset last week and we were very pleased to find at the National Trust property at Laycock that there were charges. I wasn't expecting it, but yeah, we managed to charge for an hour or so while we were wandering around there. We picked up some at the Reading Eastbound Services on the way back while we did a bit of shopping.

Thinking further back, I in the summer we stayed in a caravan park in Cornwall. That had chargers, which was great. And we found ourselves at a bed and breakfast in Staffordshire. Again, you know, they had a charger. So I've been pleasantly surprised how often you find that there will be charging somewhere that you can just top up overnight, making life actually pretty easy. So it's not been a problem. I did once, in terms of home charging,

I did a couple of times charge at my mother's using the 13 amp 3 pin root, which was so slow that I probably had to put it on at 4 o'clock in the afternoon to get it up to 80 % by 8 o'clock the next morning. But yeah, it was cheap.

Gary Comerford (: 12:14

Yeah. Yeah, I've I've done exactly the same thing at my mother's on more than one occasion. I always make sure to leave her, you know, her ten pound note or something just to so she could put against the the electricity bill. let me look back to Lake Alc

Lake Oak Abbey. Talk to me about the charging there. Who who was the provider?

Nicholas Theobald (: 12:31

I believe it was raw charging yeah

Gary Comerford (: 12:33

All right. Do you remember what the costs were on that?

Nicholas Theobald (: 12:36

60 pence per kilowatt hour.

Gary Comerford (: 12:39

Fantastic. Now, what one of the reasons I I'm on record as saying that I think that AC charging, AC destination charging, which is the sort that they provide at at Lacock Park, is it's kind of the secret source when it comes to EV adoption. If you have more of that, you won't need as many of the DC charges there. So one of the benefits obviously of doing something like that at Lacock Park is you can plug in while you're going around, you spend the day there, etc. And then you don't necessarily need to charge on the way back. So

When you plugged in on the raw charging unit there, was it with the intention of putting enough in to get back home? Or was it just well, we'll just put as much in as we can while we're there and if we need to stop on the way home, we'll stop on the way home? What what was the reasoning or the thought process?

Nicholas Theobald (: 13:25

I think very much the latter, as I said, I wasn't expecting to find it there. So it was just question of opportunistically charging while we were going around really just to sort of, in a way, to top up what we'd used getting there. So that we were at the same situation when we got back to our friend's house as we had been.

Gary Comerford (: 13:42

Now you've also done something which I haven't yet done, which is that and you mentioned it earlier, you use the moto charge devices. I assume did you say they were at Reading Services?

Nicholas Theobald (: 13:53

Yeah, Reading East Services.

Yeah, we've used them a couple of times coming back into London on the M4 because that tends to be the direction we come back in. And yeah, they've funny, I would say they're the fastest chargers we've come across. We charged there in July and the average speed I got was about 100 kilowatt So that was pretty good for our car.

Gary Comerford (: 14:16

let's jump back because you the I'm gonna show some footage now of blink chargers. I believe they were in Q Park in Manchester sometime in September. talk

Nicholas Theobald (: 14:27

Yep. Yeah.

Gary Comerford (: 14:28

Talk to me about that charging

session, please.

Nicholas Theobald (: 14:31

So we went into Manchester for the day and I chose the car park on the basis of the fact that it had chargers and I knew we were going to be there for a couple of hours. We were at that time we were on a narrowboat in a marina which didn't have charging so I wanted to actually top up the car so that we could get away afterwards. The coupark was more expensive than other car parks around but the fact that it had EV charging

meant that that's the one we chose. It didn't deliver as much as we'd hoped in the time that we were there, to be honest. So I was a little bit disappointed.

Gary Comerford (: 15:08

As you'll know we had Cupark on early on in the season, so hopefully they'll be listening to that and if there's any anything that needs to be altered then they'll be able to be able to do that. What do you recall what the price was for those for that particular session in in Manchester?

Nicholas Theobald (: 15:22

Looking at my records, yes, it was 72 pence per kilowatt hour, which considering I felt that was perhaps a little bit more than I was getting in terms of what I'd expected.

Gary Comerford (: 15:34

Yes. but as you say, you know, that had the benefit of you s you chose that car park because it had the charging, you had the parking to

Nicholas Theobald (: 15:41

Thank you.

Gary Comerford (: 15:42

do on top of that, so you know, you could have gone there and parked and not charged, and it wouldn't have been of a of benefit to you. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicholas Theobald (: 15:48

no, that's true. That's true, although I could have chosen a car park without a charger.

But at least I didn't have to download yet another app to use it. Unlike, I'm trying to think, there was a car park we popped into in Windsor a couple of months ago and really, you know, it just wasn't worth it. I just thought, no, not going to do that.

Gary Comerford (: 16:08

Which does bring me on quite nicely to something I did want to talk about, which is what is your preference when it comes to paying? Because obviously, if you're going to some of the rapid charges, the motor charge, et cetera, you buy by rights under the public charge point regulations 2023, you should be able to just use a payment card of some sort, slap that onto the reader, and it should start the the charge.

Nicholas Theobald (: 16:30

I mean.

Gary Comerford (: 16:31

But when it comes down to some of the charges that you're using, some of the seven kilowatt ones, for example, there is no requirement to have a payment card reader. So you're you're stuck to either getting an app for every single CPO, which nobody really wants, or using some sort of a roaming provider such as Electroverse or my personal favorite, Zapmap. So what's your thought process when it comes to how you pay for a charge?

Nicholas Theobald (: 17:00

Exactly that, those two. It's much quicker. The number of times if I've tried using a credit card and the machine sits there, thinks about it, scratches its head and then says no. So I found that those two, Electroversions App Map, between them really cover all my needs, either using the card or using the app.

Gary Comerford (: 17:19

Yes, yeah. I'm I'm a huge fan of the the RFID card for exactly the same reason. I I came back from my parents over the weekend, got down to six percent on a car that I'd not been driven before, somebody had loaned it to me. and I was aiming for one particular charger, and just I I stopped. I had about seven miles to go and I thought I I could do it, but I'm just too much of a chicken. So I I pulled into the nearest motorway services, there was an apple green there.

Pulled out the charge the RFID card, boom, literally two seconds it took to authenticate and we were charging after that. So I fully understand why you like things like that rather than having to sort of cross your fingers and pray that the card payment works.

Nicholas Theobald (: 18:00

You know,

the only time in my life when I ran out of petrol was exactly that, thinking if I carry on a bit further, it'll be a bit cheaper. So, definitely take the opportunity, I agree.

Gary Comerford (: 18:10

False economy.

now we've got some footage here of you charging in I think West Kensington, Glazbury Road, I believe.

Nicholas Theobald (: 18:18

Yep, that's the slightly faster Believe one. So what I'll tend to do is to go up to 80 % on the cheaper Ubitricity Lamp Post one and then pop it around the corner and top it up on the slightly faster one before we leave.

Gary Comerford (: 18:35

okay. So you mentioned earlier the BP Pulse unit down at Cromwell Road. for those who don't know, it's on the A4, but it's you can only access it if you're heading out of town. if you're

Nicholas Theobald (: 18:47

Thank

Gary Comerford (: 18:48

coming in, you've got to go down and round the Hammersmith gyratry or or somewhere close to that and then come back on yourself. How often would you find yourself going down and using that?

Nicholas Theobald (: 18:57

I think we've used it once. It's just nice to know it's there. I mean, we watched its development from demolishing a traditional petrol station to putting that up. And I have to say, when we drive past it alone, it's well used, but we have only used it the once. But yeah.

It's there if I suddenly found that, I don't know, the car was sitting outside with 15 % and suddenly I needed to do a mercy dash to somewhere, then that would be where I'd go to quickly get enough to get away.

Gary Comerford (: 19:25

it is worth and I know we had Dan McLaren for BP Pulse on a couple of weeks ago. I know he is conscious of the fact that one of the largest users of BP Pulse in the London area are Uber drivers. So one of the reasons there's always quite

Nicholas Theobald (: 19:38

Mm.

Gary Comerford (: 19:39

a few people using that Cromwell Road site is because a lot of them are Uber drivers, probably on their way out to Heathrow to pick somebody up. So

Nicholas Theobald (: 19:48

Key throw.

Gary Comerford (: 19:48

yeah, might be worth bearing that in mind. Can we

Can we talk about cost? Now we've we've already mentioned that you you're quite happy to go out at at midnight and plug in to get the the reduced costs on the ubotristi shat slash shell recharge units. Are there any other methods that you will use to try and reduce your price per kilowatt hour when charging?

Nicholas Theobald (: 20:15

That's pretty much the cheapest I've found, to be honest. So I don't know what else I could do other than beg the council to let me have some charging at home.

Gary Comerford (: 20:25

No, that makes that makes sense.

Nicholas Theobald (: 20:26

which would be so much

cheaper.

Gary Comerford (: 20:28

Well, let's talk about that. if we look forward in the future, I notice we've got some footage here of the pavement, which I assume is the pavement outside outside your house. is that the kind of place that you would expect something like a cross pavement solution to be installed?

Nicholas Theobald (: 20:45

I would hope so and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be. It's a short distance from the road to the outside of our property if you like. It's a fairly short distance to the electricity supply. If for any reason the council didn't want the socket to be visible it could be inside a cupboard.

so I can't really see the objections to that. The lampposts, funnily enough, on our side of the road are set away from the pavement, so they're against the garden walls, so to speak. So actually lamppost charges on our side of the road are not viable. So I can't really see the problem. The issue only is that the recent changes have specifically excluded conservation areas, which is...

bit of a nuisance for us because we are in a conservation area. So I think my understanding is that means we are still beholden to the council to decide whether or not we can do it. But they I suppose I mean I went down this route started looking at the reality on and the options before we.

bought the car in the knowledge that the borough had applied for the grant for the pilot schemes which had been granted to them and I assumed therefore they were keen to progress this and that was January and we're now in October and things are moving.

at a glacial pace. talked about having a pilot. It was going to be launched during the summer. Eventually the sort of expressions of interest and so on and applications happened towards the end of September. Still waiting, still waiting. So I don't know.

Gary Comerford (: 22:20

Interesting. do we do you have any idea how many other people along your street also drive electric? I I would assume you're not the only one.

Nicholas Theobald (: 22:30

Absolutely not, Funny enough there's an ordinary taxi, so a black cab, and he uses the same charger as I do, intermittently.

I've been chatting to a guy who, funnily enough, is an Uber driver. There's a couple of others that intermittently charge around here as well. But yeah, yeah, certainly it's not just me. But as I say, there are enough chargers for no one to ever feel that they can't charge when they want to. There are a couple of drivers around here who do hang around a bit longer than they should. I know that some people find that ICE cars parked in electric charging

bays are a nuisance but I have to say around here it's more been people who've been still plugged in 26 hours after they started and I know they're not charging anymore and they could at least take the cable out you know I think EV drivers should know better.

Gary Comerford (: 23:21

Yep. Yes, that is one of my personal bugbears. You know, if there's if there's a general combustion engine vehicle on there and it's kind of well, that's one thing, 'cause maybe they don't know. We might be able to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if it's

Nicholas Theobald (: 23:31

Thanks.

Gary Comerford (: 23:32

an E V driver and they're plugged in and they're not charging and they've been on for twenty six hours, that's yeah, that

that rubs me up the wrong way, so

Nicholas Theobald (: 23:38

I don't expect people

necessarily to move because they are just ordinary parking spaces, most of them, because there are so many lampposts and chargers. the cables are long enough for more than one person to use the same lamppost,

Gary Comerford (: 23:52

Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Theobald (: 23:53

not at the same time.

Gary Comerford (: 23:55

Hmm. Let me throw a hypothetical at you. because we had

Nicholas Theobald (: 23:59

Mm-hmm.

Gary Comerford (: 23:59

the peop we had the guys from Kerbocharge on the podcast a couple of seasons back. And at the time they said that one of their their business model was based I don't know whether this is still accurate. I've no reason to believe it isn't. They said their business model is they wouldn't put a a cable in on every house. They'd put a cable in on every third house. And then

That gave you the option of being able to park in three different places with the long enough charger

Nicholas Theobald (: 24:23

Mm-hmm.

Gary Comerford (: 24:24

in case you can't park outside your house. But it also means that if people on either side of you have an electric vehicle, you can share the cable, you can share your electricity with them using a co-charging type facility. So if somebody perhaps on the other side of the road where they may be able to put a cable charger in there,

a curbo charge in there, whereas maybe you couldn't on your side, or if somebody further down could do that, would you be up to co-charging with them? Because the chances are they'd be able to get it even cheaper than you're getting at the Uberity that you're having to plug in at midnight. And you'd have the benefit of not having to go out at midnight to plug in.

Nicholas Theobald (: 25:05

Absolutely, yeah, no problem at all. I think it would be absurd for every single property to have a charging gully. I think it's absolutely reasonable to share that with your neighbours, be they

Gary Comerford (: 25:16

Mm.

Nicholas Theobald (: 25:16

next to you or on the other side of the road. I would be up for that. And funnily enough, when the neighbours next door noticed, they said, so you've gone and got an EV. And I talked to them about this option and they're...

Their eyes certainly lit up. It sounded like it was something which would be interesting for them. So I think most

Gary Comerford (: 25:33

Mm. Yeah.

Nicholas Theobald (: 25:34

people would buy it.

Gary Comerford (: 25:36

it used to be that about fifty or fifty-five was the sort of break-even between wet fuel and electricity. So if you were ch if you were paying above fifty or fifty-five per kilowatt hour, it would actually be cheaper to go to wet fuel. Although this was before the current shall we call it the unrest in the Middle East, which has caused

the pricing. So do you believe you're actually paying less than you would if you were driving an equivalent wet fuel in it in a a petrol or a diesel vehicle?

Nicholas Theobald (: 26:08

Certainly, now, absolutely. However, knowing that other people can get it as cheaply as you can, that just seems terribly unfair. I mean, it would be a bit like saying

Gary Comerford (: 26:19

Yes, it certainly does.

Nicholas Theobald (: 26:20

to some people in the country, you can only fill your car in the motorway service station, which is 20 % more expensive than anywhere else, just because of where you live.

Gary Comerford (: 26:29

Mm. Mm.

Nicholas Theobald (: 26:31

It's like, hold on, so fair.

Gary Comerford (: 26:34

It is. Although I'm in in my defense, the nine pence a kilowatt hour does not include things like the fact that I've paid extra because I have a house with a driveway. I've had to pay for a charger to be installed. And there are people who've had to pay for the electricity

Nicholas Theobald (: 26:50

Yeah, of course.

Gary Comerford (: 26:51

to be upgraded. So it obviously it's not gonna bring it up to parity.

Nicholas Theobald (: 26:54

of course.

Gary Comerford (: 26:55

And you're never gonna get parity. Even if you bring the par price of public charging down, you're never gonna get parity. But I think

The difference that we've got at the moment, nine pence a kilowatt hour up to, you know, whatever ninety-two pence that you can be paying in some place. I mean, that is that definitely needs to be brought down. So by the time this episode comes out, the the next budget will have been released. We're recording this before the budget, so we don't know exactly what

Nicholas Theobald (: 27:19

Yeah.

Gary Comerford (: 27:21

that's gonna say. so we'll keep our fingers crossed that there's some good news from that point of view.

Nicholas Theobald (: 27:25

but

we do know that the VAT on domestic electricity has gone down. So that makes the inequity even worse.

Gary Comerford (: 27:33

Mm.

Hundred percent. Hundred percent. now, as we come to the end of our time together, is there anything that you haven't talked about that you'd like the viewers to know about your situation, about living without a home charge, or about some of the issues, benefits, some of the experiences that you've had that we haven't actually talked about?

Nicholas Theobald (: 27:51

It's been a learning journey for me.

and it's all been very interesting but as I say I'm very relaxed about the whole thing about owning an EV, a lot of the anxieties and so on that others put out there that made you think twice are, they're ancient history you know. I think the charging infrastructure has been fine, we've been to some fairly remote places but we've always managed fairly easily to be honest.

Gary Comerford (: 28:16

Yeah. Yeah, I I did Ooh, I think I've done about six hundred miles this week. I've had a car on loan from a a manufacturer and I put a lot of mileage on it. And I've done a lot of public charging. And every sing and I'll be I was out literally in the geographic centre of of Wales, where it was so remote we couldn't even get a telephone connection, but never had a problem ki charging any of them. So

Nicholas Theobald (: 28:38

Exactly. Yeah.

Gary Comerford (: 28:42

yeah, it's defin I mean

There's always gonna be people who've ash who have issues. Personally, touch wood, I haven't encountered any and it sounds like you're in the same situation.

Nicholas Theobald (: 28:52

I think you've got to be in a situation where you think ahead. It's a bit like you charge your mobile so that when you leave home in the morning you've got enough charge to get for the day and if not you take a power pack with you and that sort of thing. And so why should it be any different?

Gary Comerford (: 29:08

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Anyway, Nick, I really appreciate your time. I think it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much.

Nicholas Theobald (: 29:16

Thank you very much.

Gary Comerford (: 29:17

So, what did we learn here? Well, the first thing is that if you have to charge using public charges, going to be looking for the best prices. And we've covered rates on several episodes. Check the archives for details. Nick also mentioned that he's always looking for places at which he can charge, even if it's just a quick stop while he's there. His example at Laycock Park showed that happening in practice. Now I asked Nick what the average price was that he was paying for charging.

He told me it worked out at around 65 pence a kilohour. Now that's quite high, but obviously not as high public charging like grid serve or Instavault. But remember, within there there are trips to quite high-cost units such as the Motocharge 400 kilowatt charges at Reading Eastbound. Now, this will skew his figures somewhat. So, do you live in 100% public charging? What are your favorite places to charge? What hacks?

Have you found to keep the cost down?

That's our show for this week. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. It was put together this week with the help of Nick Theobald. Many thanks for his time

Gary Comerford Zapmap Outro (: 30:24

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence. Zapmap is free to download and use, with thousands of public charge points to choose from, live pricing and availability information, and a range of filters to find the right charge for you. Plus, choose subscription models for enhanced features such as using Zapmap in car, on CarPlay, or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge points.

Gary Comerford Boilerplate (: 30:51

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on BlueSky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there? Many thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon, on a monthly basis, and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one. Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks.

So you've gone electric and so you've gone renewable. They're 99p each or equivalent, and you can get them on Amazon. Check out the links in the show notes for more information, as well as the link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles. Now my stats show that a lot of people watch this on YouTube, but they're not subscribers. So if you're one of those, why not hit that button and the notification bell so you don't miss out? Thank you very much.

Gary Comerford (: 31:47

If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at musingtv.bee's card.social with the words home, home on the range, hashtag if you know you know, nothing else.

And thanks as always to my co-founder Simone. You know, he's got so many electric unicycles and similar personal electric vehicles. They're becoming a storage issue. So he's adding a shed to his house with an aerial ramp so he can launch himself out over the fence and straight onto the pavement. I asked him if the council will give him planning permission for something like that. And he told me,

Nicholas Theobald (: 32:24

I would hope so and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be. It's a short distance from the road to the outside of our property if you

Gary Comerford (: 32:34

Thanks for listening. Bye bye now.