See all Motoring AdviceWith winter on the way, it’s that time of year when electric vehicles (EVs) aren’t quite at their best in terms of getting the most range out of them. And that means you might be charging your car up more often than usual. We’ve come up with a few pointers to keep your bills down as a result.
Home charging is key
Electricity costs more per kilowatt-hour (kWh) at a public charging point than it does from your home supply. So, unless it’s absolutely impossible for you to charge at home – as in, you live in a flat or somewhere there’s no off-street parking – then your best way of keeping bills down is to charge at home, often, rather than using pricey rapid units.
Take advantage of off-peak charging rates and smart meters/chargers
Following on from our first point, you can save even more money if you charge your EV at off-peak hours, which is typically through the night. You can do this ‘manually’, if you will, by only plugging the car in just before you go to bed at night (at around 10- or 11pm depending on your tariff) and then taking it off charge as soon as you get up in the morning to get ready for work (around 7am), but a better way of doing it is to install a smart charger. This communicates with your domestic supply’s smart meter and will only start charging the EV when the electricity demand is at its lowest, usually at unsociable hours of the night. Scrutinise your electricity supply bill to learn the cheapest times of the night to charge up and programme either your charger or your car to only charge up then.
Try not to charge every day
Even though your electric car will typically do fewer kilometres overall to every charge during winter and the colder months, almost all modern EVs should be capable of more than 200km to a battery top-up, and if your daily commute is around 30-40km, you should really only have to charge the car once a week. This will mean driving carefully when you’re in it to maximise the range, and we’ve got a series of tips on how to do that for you elsewhere on the site, but if you only charge it when absolutely necessary, rather than ‘comfort-charging’ it every night for peace of mind, then you’ll find your electricity bills are lower through winter.
Take full advantage of pre-conditioning
To ultimately require less home-charging, you need to activate a function on the car which draws power while it is parked and charging. Sounds counter-intuitive, right? But it’s not. One of the biggest drains on an EV’s battery pack besides the propulsion motor is the climate control in the interior, and if you’re asking the car to drive along and heat its cabin up from near-zero temperatures every morning, that will really sap range and mean the battery will need replenishing sooner rather than later. But if you use the pre-conditioning app on your smartphone that’s linked to your EV (almost all have them now), then you can warm the cabin up in the morning while the car is still hooked up to the mains and charging, and before you even get into it. This will take less of a draw from the battery and won’t affect the charging process significantly.