Electric cars might not be as popular as petrol, but this clever charging solution from Ohme might change your mind about going battery-powered.
Refilling your car for under £7 might sound like a pipe dream but it’s now a reality. Mirror Online has recently been testing out a very smart device from the team at Ohme that can get your tank from flat to full for less than a tenner. The clever Home Pro charger offers a convenient way to refill your electric car (EV), and with the UK government still hell-bent on getting us moving away from polluting fuels, it’s a solution more of us might want to consider in the future.
The small Home Pro box is simply installed on your driveway – by a professional team of electricians – and then uses smart tech to make sure it only tops up your battery at the cheapest times of the day. Many electricity suppliers, such as Octopus, offer ludicrously low-priced energy in the middle of the night, and that’s when the Ohme Home Pro gets to work, topping up the power.
All you have to do is plug in your EV when you get home from work, tell the charger what percentage you need in the morning – via the neat smartphone app – and it does the rest.
Because it only refills when the cost is low, you’ll wake up to a car that’s ready to go for the price of a pint. Other than the £1,000 upfront cost for the Pro charging box, the installation process is pretty painless and only takes a couple of hours.
Once it’s on your drive, you then link up your phone, tell it the days you want your battery topped up – and by what percentage – and it does the rest of the hard work for you.
If you need an instant refill rather than waiting overnight, you can just plug in and hit the charge button – there’s even a nifty electronic lock which means no boosting can take place unless you confirm it on your phone. That means the neighbours can’t get a cheeky top up when you aren’t watching.
Home charging will never be as rapid as some fast refilling networks you’ll find dotted around the country but the idea of this system is that you plug it in when you get home and top up the tank during the night.
As a guide, our test car – a new Mercedes EQB – got around 30 miles of range back in the tank after an hour with the plug pushed in. You’ll get speeds over ten times faster at motorway service stations but the charging price is also 10 times more expensive.
Having put it through its paces there’s no question that the Ohme Home Pro is a solid option if you own, or are thinking of buying an EV but are there any downsides?
Obviously the £1,000 price tag is a bit of sticking point although you should easily make your money back over time thanks to that cheap refilling. You will need to switch to an intelligent EV tariff to get the cheaper charging benefits and these plans can be slightly more expensive to use during the day (the cheap times kick in at night).
Our installation was super easy as we live in an end terrace but it’s worth checking with Ohme about extra costs if you think the connection is going to be more complicated.
CHARGING PRICES
Ohme home charging (Octopus Go tariff ) – From 7p/kWh
Ohme home charging (standard tariff ) -around 25p/kWh
Fast charging away from home – around 75p/kWh
Finally, the Home Pro has a charging cable attached which, whilst very convenient, can look slightly messy on your drive. If you don’t like the look, there’s also a slightly cheaper ePod model which is simply a box with a socket that you plug your car’s own cable into.
That’s not quite as practical and, unlike the Home Pro there’s no in-built screen for checking the refilling process, but the ePod definitely does look neater.
If the government sticks to its plans we could see the end of new petrol cars being sold by 2035 and if that’s got thinking that it could be a good time to go electric the Ohme charger proves why there are benefits of ditching petrol.
You can simply refill at home and save some pretty vast sums in the process.
Of course, going electric still has its drawbacks and the UK’s infrastructure needs some serious improvement before EVs are anywhere near as easy for long journeys as petrol-powered cars but for those who simply pop into town each day or commute a few miles to work in their cars, home charging really is a very promising technology and Ohme’s solution is seriously smart.
If you need convincing that going electric is the future of motoring, this ludicrously cheap charging solution will go a long way to help.
