George Nixon, writing in the Sunday Times recently drew attention to the huge benefit of home-charging an electric car - and the difficulty in achieving it if you don't have off-street parking at home.

The cost savings are startling:-

Besides the huge cost saving, there are also convenience benefits to the owner, and several benefits to the nation:-

	EV Owners = Save at least £500 per year. Off-peak, they buy the cheapest possible electricity (9p/kWh), or even use free electricity if they have solar panels. = They don’t have to park at a distant charge point, and walk in the dark to move the car to avoid overstay charges. = They can park outside their house, convenient for unloading kids and shopping, and where they can keep an eye on their car.
	EV Transition  and Air Quality Having access to off peak electricity at home, removes an obstacle to ownership of an EV and improves urban air quality for everyone.
	Electricity Generation Facilitating overnight charging will:- = Reduce the peak load on the grid, = Make better use of overnight wind power, = Minimise the need to build new power stations (to replace our end-of life nuclear plants). = When the change from gas central heating to heat pumps increases the daytime electricity demand, it would be very helpful to push EV charging into the night, when the heat pumps are off
	Vehicle to Grid and Vehicle to Home The Octopus PowerLoop Trial with Nissan and Mitsubishi demonstrated that the huge batteries in cars can store solar or off-peak electricity for use in the home, or to profitably sell back to the grid at peak times. It’s another way to relieve pressure on the generating capacity, and it needs cars to stay connected for long periods – at home.
	Electricity Distribution Many public charge point installations are now held up, waiting for connection to the grid. Home charge points don’t need any new grid connection because a 7kW home charger is no greater load than a 7kW electric shower, or an electric cooker.
	Levelling Up The 6 million households who have to park on the street – unable to use their own cheap overnight electricity should not have to pay more to charge their cars.

Two products lead the field in terms of minimising the cross-pavement trip hazard by holding the cable below ground level:- Stormguard and Kerbo Charge.

Stormguard use brush strips to hold the cable down, which makes it marginally easier to insert the cable than Kerbo Charge (it requires less bending down), while Kerbo Charge use a rubber flap to hold the cable down, and the flap removes any concern about stiletto heels entering the channel.

Stormguard have mainly sold to the building trade, providing an anti-trip solution on private land.

 



Kerbo Charge have a higher public profile, having secured investment by Deborah Meaden on Dragons Den, and have put a lot of time into persuading about 10% of the UK's 300 local authorities to approve their product.


Both products require only a 5cm wide and 5cm deep incision in the pavement, but public pavement installation has to be carried out by a council approved contractor, and the cost tends towards £1,000 unless any grant funding can be applied.

Those councils who resist this innovation, express concern about whose responsibility it would be if the product failed generating a hazard in some way, or required the council to rectify any problem.

So there appears to be a need for a quick-to-install and low-cost way of keeping the cable out of the way of pedestrians without disturbing the pavement.

How would FlexEV compare with the cable channels:-

• Visually: Much less discrete than the channels, but also only deployed when needed, and quick to remove.
  
• Very tolerant of variable parking position:
  The arc covered by the wands gives flexibility.
  
   
• No disturbance of council-owned pavements.
  
  
• Speed of installation: Only three screws are needed to fix the base wand to a wall or post.
  
  
• Speed of removal: the wands and cable can be simply lifted off the base and put away - or the assembly can be simply swivelled around, away from the street and over the owner's property. (Low-mileage users might only deploy the wands for a few hours once a week).
  
  
• Low Cost: If used to enable cheap off-peak home charging, the cost of £50 could be recovered in just a couple of weeks.

  (E.G. 9p/kWh instead of 60p, and the car travels 3 miles per kWh =3x£50/51p= 294 miles to recover the cost - that's about 2 weeks at the average 8,000 miles per year)

£49.50 including postage.

Ebay  item:- 227094215096

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