The vast majority of owners of an electric vehicle choose to equip their home or their private parking space for those who live in an apartment building, with a charging station. It is true that it is the most comfortable solution for recharging your vehicle quietly at home.
However, this charging system nevertheless proves to be quite expensive. And, problem, it is not always possible to be equipped with a charging station depending in particular on the configuration of your accommodation or if you do not have your own parking space. Fortunately, there are solutions to do without a charging station for your electric car.
Recharge your electric car at home without a charging station
The charging station is the most comfortable solution, and also the one that guarantees maximum safety, to recharge your electric car in complete peace of mind. Available in several powers, it is true that charging stations, or wallboxes, adapt to all types of electric vehicles, provide fast charging times, and are easy to install. In addition, equipping yourself with a charging station for personal use at home or in a private parking space makes it possible to benefit from public aid to finance its purchase and installation.
Despite everything, equipping yourself with a charging station represents a significant purchase cost, all the more so if its power is high, and for its installation which, for most of them, must be carried out by a certified professional.
So, what to do when you can’t or don’t want to invest in a charging station? Fortunately, there are solutions other than these home charging stations to comfortably charge your electric car at home.
Use a household electrical outlet
It is possible, for example, to use a simple household electrical outlet. All manufacturers of electric vehicles, in fact, provide an adapter cable that allows the car to be connected to the electrical network of the house via an electrical outlet.
One of the disadvantages of this solution, however, is the low electrical power delivered which does not allow you to recharge your electric car quickly, in principle it takes more than 10 hours. On the other hand, using a household socket to charge your electric vehicle is not completely risk-free from a safety point of view. Doing without a charging station at home and using a household outlet should remain occasional.
Use a reinforced Green’Up electrical outlet
While plugging your electric vehicle into a simple household socket makes it possible to dispense with the acquisition and installation of a charging station at home, as we have seen, it is not a very efficient solution.
In order to save charging time, but also to guarantee better safety, it is preferable, if you do not wish to be equipped with a charging station, to use a so-called “reinforced” electrical outlet, such as example the Green’Up socket.
This is an electrical outlet which has the advantage of increasing the power required to recharge an electric car up to 3.2 kW (in single-phase alternating current at 14 amps maximum), when a simple outlet domestic delivers a power of only 2.3 kW. Thus, if the charging time is still slower than with the use of a charging station, it is about twice as fast as with a household outlet.
A reinforced socket is very easy to install on a wall of the house, the only constraint being that it must be fixed 80 cm from the ground. Then just connect the charging cable with which it is supplied to the battery of the electric vehicle.
On the other hand, the materials that make up a reinforced electrical outlet guarantee to be less exposed to risks of overheating of the electrical circuit.
Use public charging areas to charge your electric car
Solutions therefore exist to do without a charging station for your electric car at home. For those who do not want to recharge their vehicle at all costs at home, it is possible to use the charging areas accessible to the general public.
These may be charging stations installed, for example, on public property by local authorities, charging points made available in service stations, public car parks, those of large shopping centers, places of culture or leisure areas, in motorway rest areas, or even in company parking spaces.
These types of charging stations, still infrequent a few years ago, are increasingly deployed in the public domain today given the growing enthusiasm of the French for electric vehicles. More than 30,000 recharging points open to all are thus available in France according to the educational information site je-roule-en-electric.fr published by the national association for the development of electric mobility (Avere-France) in cooperation in particular with the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
Local authorities in particular even have a role defined by law (article L2224-37 of the General Code of Territorial Authorities) in terms of the creation and maintenance of charging infrastructure. This is why the majority of them meet the needs of owners of electric cars by installing more and more charging stations accessible to the public, but also to anticipate future developments in terms of electric mobility.
For example, as indicated by the je-roule-en-electric.fr website, certain municipalities ” deployed charging stations in the street to allow drivers who do not have a garage or a dedicated parking space to recharge their electric vehicle. It should be noted that many charging networks also offer “night” packages at advantageous rates allowing residents to plug in their car in the evening to leave with a full battery the next day. “. Other local authorities also offer residents who own an electric vehicle the option of installing a charging station near their home on demand.
Finally, to do without installing a charging station at your home or in your condominium, owners of an electric car also have the option of charging their vehicle while they work if their employer has installed such charging points in their company car park.