one of the most contentious issues when it comes to fitting electric vehicle chargers is if you can
put a small consumer unit inside the customer's meter box now this is an incredibly convenient
location especially for existing installations where it's difficult to get back to the consumer
unit that could be buried deep inside the house however are you allowed to do it now we did
explore that in a previous video and I asked all of the UK's DNOs for their opinion and they came
back with some pretty robust advice ranging from absolutely not to not recommended now recommended
is certainly a grey area especially on a box that is actually the customer's responsibility but
that option may not exist because if you open the meter box it may already be full of equipment for
the electrical supply time clocks Henley blocks and there is physically no room to add a consumer
unit in there now the NIC also weighed into this argument after we put our video out there
and also came back with a absolutely not recommended to put a consumer unit in there so
what choices do you have we've seen contractors try to solve this in various ways including an
IP rated plastic consumer unit positioned next to the meter box which at first appears a good
solution but then you need to think about the materials that that consumer unit is built from
most are built from regular plastic whereas the meter box itself is built from GRP so I
can withstand strong ultraviolet light for the decades that it's going to be out there
so our plastic consumer unit might not be the best option for longevity however we have also
seen contractors then buy a consumer unit and put it inside an additional GRP enclosure which
is a great engineering solution but a little bit expensive so we're quite pleased to see this new
solution from BG they've developed a whole range of consumer units for the EV installer including
this one which is IP65 rated but is made from die cast aluminum and the other great thing
about it is you can get it colour coordinated with the BG Sync EV charger that we've fitted
in a previous video we're going to take a look at how we fit this in our little demonstration
installation here to see if it's the right choice for you oh wow it's almost fitted itself
um pretty neat installation well I think so anyway the consumer unit a similar profile to
the meter box and a lot of these meter boxes now are also painted to match the property so it'll
almost blend in and a lot of them on the side return of the house anywhere so let's have a
closer look at the consumer unit itself again a robust design inside there we can see the
gasket that helps us get the IP65 rating and some options on the circuit protection one thing that
isn't an option all of these come with a surge protection device which is obviously a great idea
if you think your EV charger itself probably costs you a good few hundred pounds you might
want to protect that against power surges but then think of the car that's attached to it certainly
tens of thousands of pounds so an option I don't think any customer would refuse in terms of the
options for circuit protection you can have an RCD protecting the outgoing circuits or as we've got
here a double pole at RCB off just for the EV charger the other circuit breaker there is the
over current for the surge protection device you can also have this just with an MCB fitted to it
but obviously this depends upon what protections built into the EV charger and the cable route that
you're taking to the charger itself whether it needs additional protection so let's have a look
under the cover see how we've wired it so to get the cover off we just have to remove the
four screws that are hidden behind these little rubber bunks that help maintain the IP rating
another great design feature all those screws are captive common with a lot of other BG consumer
units you really only need one screwdriver for most of this installation the cover screws and all
of the terminals on the MCBs the main switch and the bus bar all slotted pozi 2 we've used EV Ultra
cable to wire out to the EV charger which brings up the question of that data cable and how you
route that back to the meter box in this instance to connect a current transformer so we strip back
probably a meter of excess on that cable and I've looped the data cable from the land out
of the charger and then back down this flexible conduit and into the meter box lots of cable entry
options on the consumer unit itself we've gone in underneath here it's a robust design again nice
gasket seal around it uh even on uneven walls this box isn't going to twist so I don't think you'll
have any trouble uh making those connections to fix it to the wall there's some screw knockouts
in the back you just have to remember to put the waterproof screw caps on them when you fit the
installation again to maintain that IP rating so deep breath as we go into the meter box again a
grey area on how you make your cable entry into the meter box itself we've gone in this corner
here because it was just a suggestion in the molding of the box itself that there was a an
entry point there um so we've come in there with a conduit gland we drilled a bigger hole underneath
um so we could bring the conduit through and then a 25 millimeter hole in the top there to terminate
the gland we didn't go in uh these points here where the uh there's a hockey stick would come in
because these are wafer thin so that's probably not the best option we have seen examples where
people coming in the side but again you know trying to maintain or keep water out of these
meter boxes can be a bit of a challenge because what the last thing you want to do is get water on
the chipboard because they just turned to Weetabix and you need to replace everything in there um so
what we added we've added in um a Henley block so double pole Henley block there intersecting
the existing tails for the property and earth block and then we've also terminated our current
transformer so we brought in the CAT5 that's part of the EV Ultra cable and then made a heat shrink
joint there to the two cores that go off to a current transform that you'd typically have to
do when you've got to do some load management as part of the install so while we're on the subject
of tidying up our EV installs obviously keep the customer happy nobody wants the house looking
like a factory and now in the past we've tried to disguise the cable fixings with these ones from
d-line here that create that almost invisible look but one thing you can't disguise is a black cable
on a white house or think of those modern houses where you have got coloured render or perhaps you
live in Balamory and you want to somehow tidy up that cable or sort of blend in to the house
itself and get your opinion on this we've got this trunking from d-line that's yeah normally used to
hide the cables going up to the television but they're suggesting it's a good idea for
EV charge installs where you need to blend in with the render let's get your opinion about what you
think of that pretty easy to install and again we fired through it with the existing d-line clips
you can also get this consuming in the interior version so which is in available in white unless
you've painted your house charcoal grey that might be a better option and it has got the same circuit
protection options in there I will leave a link in the description to the full range and check
out the full install we did of the BG Sync EV charger in this video here well I'm doodles
cleaning