in today's video we're looking at the things customers should think about when they're choosing
an EV charge point i'll take it we're looking at what colour they are today then Gordon are we
i think it comes down to a bit more than colour Gary what's the three things you think about Gary
when you think the EV charge points i think about safety how easy it is to install the cable into
it and then the one you probably like a bit with the app maybe okay how easy it is to set up well
yes that's yeah that's the things that eFIXX viewers tend to worry about but today we're
going to go a little bit further and look at the things that really customers are thinking about
or should be thinking about and to help us in that journey we've brought along Nick Raimo who is
otherwise known as EV Nick who has his own thriving youtube channel
and he's in the process of reviewing almost every EV charge point that's on the UK market
at the moment so welcome along Nick thank you thank you for having me now now depending on
when you're watching this video you may have already seen Nick on the channel before because he
obviously is part of coming down here to line inside studios you have to undertake
the electrician's challenge so if you haven't seen that i will put a link somewhere around
us and yeah check that out there's a there's a good laugh as always on that so Nick i guess
you know how long have you been youtubing now uh so i've been a youtuber now for just over
three years about three years six months i've been doing youtube for okay and that's always focused
on EV it's always been EV yes so straight away i got into i bought an EV car there wasn't a lot
of information when i bought the EV car you know for me as a customer to research so i thought well
i'll help the next EV owner and or the next buyer by making some videos okay so i couldn't imagine
there's a lot of viewers back then either uh there wasn't as many as there are now because electric
vehicles have got suddenly popular right what's driving them i don't i don't know it's almost
like the government of put a law into ban all petrol cars by a certain date yeah and is that
reflected in the channel now is that yeah so the growth the growth in the market is huge uh i mean
we've gone from seven cars to you know lots lots but lots more like over 70 and even the charger
side so when i first started there was basically two three companies that made charges and they did
nothing but apart from being a outdoor waterproof shower socket wow wow that's a yeah that's a brave
something that's one you're probably playing yes he's i totally agree with Nick i totally agree
with it however we know and we've got a video on your channel yes where we actually look at
whether we could use a 13 amp socket outlet or one of these fancy outside ones yeah and why you would
use the socket that's designed for EV yeah however we're going to be looking at what the consumer's
interested in this is something we're not with foreign turf that's why Nick's with us isn't he
yeah so what day after Nick well they're after a couple of things so first of all is i know
you electricians absolutely hate things that are smart connected but they consumers want a smart
connected app so there's a reason for this we want time of use tariffs now time of use tariffs
are tariffs that basically just change not like eco seven where you get your fixed hours but they
can change every half an hour period or they they might change a four-hour cheap period every single
night right okay so let me just pull that back in for Gaz so you're telling me that the cost of my
electricity could change every 30 minutes yes how is that a benefit to me cost savings so the price
can go negative if there's lots of overproduction of wind energy you can be paid to use electricity
sinking in so so i could charge my car and get paid for the privilege of doing it
you won't just get paid for it you get paid for every bit of electricity you use so obviously
EV's are going to pull seven kilowatts of power but you could be paid for i mean last time they
went negative i baked bread of course yeah it was the second thing i was going to suggest
i'm down for a bit of baking you've finished curling your hair
Gary so okay so so we're talking about being more agile with our device understanding what's
happening with the tariffs in order that it can benefit and that's where the app would come in
for the customer yeah so the app comes in for the customer because customer wants an app that can
take a charger that can take advantage of these benefits and if they're not already thinking
about it which most of them are a lot of the the initial people who bought EV's were very green
and the other people are also concerned about saving money because EV's are cheaper to run
so everyone who buys an EV is a tree-hugging person like me some of them may be buying it
just because it's cheaper to run because they're a lot cheaper to run okay okay i mean considerably
cheaper to run is that considerably cheaper to run um i mean we're talking for we're talking
the equivalent of about 1.2 to 2 p per mile if you're on one of these smart tariffs okay wow
and these smart tariffs i mean yeah we've seen a few of them are they going to change over time
i i think that we are probably a very short probably probably four years away until we see
all big energy companies have these time of use tariffs and i predict that if you're one of these
people who is sat there going i'm not going to have a smart meter i don't believe in smart meters
they will pay an additional price on top for not having a smart meter okay so they're going
to be priced either they're going to price out the market until they get a smart meter or if
you have an EV car which does take a significant amount of energy cheaper to run but over a year
yeah it's a significant amount everyone knows how much they pay for petrol Gary they certainly do
and they will drive past certain four courts to get to other ones using more energy in the car
and probably the saving of one or two pence a litre that they could have got if they'd have
got it maybe six or seven miles ago which is uh what we're talking about is the electrical
equivalent of which petrol stations you fill up at yeah it's exactly that and i think we're also
not far off seeing something a little bit more broader which is all these smart charge points
now because our internet connected can do shed loading so i think we're not that far off an
energy company saying right you have a smart charger we'll connect to its back-end software
you let us shed load it and we will pay you for turning off that charger b for that five or ten or
even just a half an hour period you could be paid to just not charge for a little bit yeah enough
we have seen that in the commercial space those companies already do that with air conditioning
plants in hotels and things like that in a minute and the popular US viewers will yeah nest in their
rush hour rewards and things like that it's yeah people incentivize not to use electricity it's
sort of a new a new thing you know i just used to yeah tell the kids off or leaving lights on but
i don't need to don't need to do that there's a financial incentive behind it there
it's it's a compelling story and one that your channel is taking everybody through and if you
haven't checked out EV Nick's youtube channel it's worth checking it out because he's got a
lot of videos on this and linking to a certain energy provider as well you think that's doing
a great deal out there yeah so i talk about a company called octopus energy and i'm pretty sure
that Gordon is your eFIXX is an octopus customer i believe yes yes we do use them here yeah
there is incentives obviously yeah electricians are leaving money on the table aren't they
they are because if you're an octopus customer or any of these smart customers they offer 50 pound
referral rewards for signing up new customers so if you're an electrician you installed one
of these smart charge points oh hello mr customer um you can charge that your car at five pence per
kilowatt hour would you like 50 pounds to sign up for this energy company um yes please yeah and
you as the electrician would then get 50 quid as well for referring that customer
wow so there's not many downsides at the minute however when we have been looking at these and
this is something maybe you can help us with real estate within these lovely looking charges
remember the customers looking for something that looks pretty on the wall there's not a lot of room
in some of these for us electricians is that no uh some of them are very very cramped inside but
as a customer i don't care you know to put it mildly i do not care how much trouble you're
gonna have as an electrician to install it and if you're thinking of installing as an electrician
customers are going to look for the charges they like and then find the electricians that install
them right okay you've got one there in front of you which i don't think has got a lot of real
estate in it so it's quite tiny Nick do you want to open it up and let's have a little look at the
the pain pressure so it might come in a fancy little box and wow when you put those two
together is there any room uh no so if we just mock it up so if i put that like that
wow okay not a lot of room at all and just just explain the connections to me so this one you
got a couple of problems first of all the back plate here that's fixed to the consumer's wall
is put on the wall it's bottom fed here but the problem is the electrical terminals are on this
part here oh joy so yeah a great great fun one to install and obviously plenty of room for squeezing
down a really thick SWA cable lovely yeah great that's uh very small yeah very cute no room
yeah i mean we obviously talk about apps as well and apps are always we always have a
challenge when it comes to apps because they can be do we i hadn't noticed no you don't
remind me of it we do have a few issues with that's something you explore on your channel
you go through the pain of the app yeah so i go through not only reviewing so
on the charges i review everything i go right from unboxing it showing what's in the box what
the electrician and the customer can expect to both receive because the other thing not
not many people are unboxing these so electricity might get something and wonder
why the screws aren't there or why the raw plugs out there because some of them don't include them
and some do everyone's different but also i want to show how the apps work and how they work with
various things like solar battery storage and also dynamic load balancing and fuse protection
and that links in maybe with that sort of the tariff use doesn't it if you've got the ability to
self-produce your electricity yes could you explain that a little bit further for us
so if for example if you had solar some of the most of these charge points now it's a big thing
because a certain charge manufacturer got into it first and all the other charge manufacturers
were losing sales to a charger that was able to divert all the solar energy from these charges so
if a lot of these charges now have a CT clamp that goes directly on the solar supply and it'll
monitor what you're producing in solar and you can select only charged car from solar because
the fix tariff is gone but people are still interested in buying solar panels battery storage
and having one of these chargers that can charge off that means that a customer can get their
payback of solar a lot quicker than they normally would okay so do you think that's going to drive
people back towards solar the market obviously the incentives went and obviously as soon as yeah as
soon as the incentives went you could get people to fix your roof again because they're not they're
back to fitting tiles not solar panels i think it will definitely increase the
the solar intake and the amount of people who get solar now because because if
if they can effectively they're paying 14p on a regular tariff for example or 15p and they can
fit a solar panel and charge their car for free they're technically saving 14p driving on sunshine
yeah yeah yeah and that's uh i mean that's that's interesting because i mean looking far ahead and
we won't care about by this stage Gary will you make it huh it'll be will it make it yeah
yeah so the DNO said there's two things they won't do and that's invest huge amounts in the
local distribution network right but at the same time they're expecting by 2050 that half of all
generation will take place in the local area yeah so microgeneration from people's roofs effectively
so i'll sell you my electricity here that's that's good of you yeah the premium yeah the premium so
if we pull them together then all those things so we're going to have a rapidly moving tariff so we
could find we're paying 17p one minute and then actually negative and making money so we've got
to optimize the opportunities that gives us and then also maybe think about using some sort of
our own generation in order that we're running our vehicle for free that looks like saving savings
and savings to me yeah not only that there's a lot of extra revenue for electricians to get in here
so they might just originally turn up to install an EV charge point but then the customer might
also be interested in having solar installed or a battery for storing that solar energy as well
as putting in the car and there's also obviously we're getting the ban on gas soon so no more gas
boilers so heat pumps so an electrician's got the opportunity of constant you know regained work
if they've got they installed charge point and mentioned the charge points capable of all these
things they might have to you know repeat work so literally the chargeback is the start of a journey
yeah obviously everyone knows how much the journey costs now because you know how much petrol costs
you're acutely aware once you've put an EV charge point in i always make the joke that buying an
electric car is a bit like a gateway drug to being more green and sustainable people don't buy not
everyone who buys electric car wants to be green but they suddenly start wanting to learn about
how to produce their own energy and save money in other areas and they notice that being green
is actually cheaper for them so they invest and research all these other areas at the same time
okay now obviously these tariffs you know they're going to get more complicated yeah you're going to
need things to happen automatically otherwise you're going to be you're going to be dashing
down the meter checking the display in the house what's the energy market doing things
buy sell doing all this obviously is this the reason now we actually have smart chargers is that
that's the long-term goal the long-term goal is that we'd all be on smart smart
dynamic tariffs and the smart dynamic tariff will handle all the complicated things so there's no
reason why you need to keep messing around plugging and unplugging your car charger you
tell the app i don't want to charge above 6p or i want a full charge in the morning
but by the cheapest possible rate okay and that happens in the back end now obviously
you know when smart meters originally came on they were supposed to talk to
other appliances in the house but that really hasn't happened has it no so we've obviously gone
to two generations of smart meters we've had smet one and we've had smet two uh smet two uses a form
of zigbee communication to talk to various bits of tech in the house um but there's no there's
nothing really that that talks to at the moment as in internal consumer electronics okay so we're
relying on somehow you've got your app that comes with the charger yeah is going to talk to the grid
which you hope will talk to your smart meter no so they don't talk to smart these are all on
their own back end system talking to themselves right so it obviously all it's looking at is
your smart meter reports your meter data every 30 minutes yeah or it's actually every second
but they actually the energy data that all they're bothered about is every half an hour so that data
is being sent to your energy company every half an hour with what you've used in that time period
if your your charger knows the time of the prices of your energy company because you tell it who
you're with if you change companies you say i've switched to this company and the energy all these
charging companies they they know what your energy tariff costs and they basically keep updating that
algorithm so one of these charges for example that i've not actually got right in front of
me at the moment it will change the price every half an hour on the energy tariff and they can
look at the API the back end technology and see what the price changes so all you need to know is
a customer you just put i don't want to charge above 6p and the charger does everything okay
do you like the sound of that i know but obviously i've been through this smart
revolution through some other industries before obviously there's loads of new charger companies
coming to the market there's loads of new apps yeah i know what you're going to say do they
all sort of what happens do they fall over what happens if companies go out of business
honestly i can't 100% say a lot of the tech in these companies i cannot imagine another company
not buying them out and taking them over but if one went bust in theory you now have a dumb stupid
charger again okay but the the way the market's moving and the speed it's moving i can imagine
we are a long way off i mean everyone's going to switch by 2030 we are not even at the height
of the amount of charges that are going to be flooding the market and new companies entering
but i do think they will shrink but we're probably over 10 years away from that and i do see because
of how smart some of them are being bought out by bigger bigger and bigger companies ones that
might sell petrol at the moment is that your thinking my yeah my my thinking is that certain
companies that sell a certain type of fuel may be looking for new revenue streams to make money okay
well yeah put them there you can't there's only so many costa coffees you can put in a petrol
instead yeah yeah and M and S shops yeah so that's really interesting so let's summarize where we are
then so the customer's probably looking at what it physically looks like because it's going to be
screwed to the outside of their house and that's quite important to them but then obviously what it
can do and now it can manipulate the rated value of electricity yeah is another real key feature
i would say that would trump what it looks like to me if it was more agile on the tariff
people care about both so they want they want a good looking charge point and they want it to do
the smart features they want to do most of the chargers do all these things there's a couple
that don't do any that are just effectively smart smart's a very complicated word when it comes to
Ozev because they've changed it now it's not Olev anymore it's Ozev Ozev it's always there
for breaking news because it used to be low emissions now it's zero emissions so it's Ozev
so oh smart for Ozev all it has to do is meter the amount of electricity the charge points used
okay and be internet connected that that's a smart charge point and there is a couple of
charge points on the market that literally just do that there's no app there's no smart abilities
in it at all it they are effectively a dumb charger with a meter built in
well so it just shows you how quickly the market is changing and how quickly some people aren't
you know keeping up with what it's going to be so as always Gordon do you agree we're interested in
your comments and we know this is a consumer-based one but don't forget those little tricks for the
electrician that Nick's give us there can you upsell something like solar pv and battery storage
after someone's had an EV charging point installed obviously we're concerned as electricians of how
to install it physically but we were but imagine we're over that now it's gonna be coming quite a
simple process in it to take a cable out to an EV charging point we're probably comfortable as well
with PEN protection and the type of RCD's were meant to be installed but it's that opportunity
and the little quiet opportunity there offered by octopus energy where you can get 50 pound
for just recommending an agile tariff as well yeah so we'd like all those comments we'd like
them below and what we're going to do is we're going to pass more on to Nick and Nick's going
to answer every single one of those and we're going to have some time off head over to the
next channel make sure you're subscribing and asking is a really difficult question