I was then contacted by Reece from British Gas who wanted to check our wiring, along with other pieces, because the Hive system can also do things like control your heating and turn on your lights remotely. Reece had the voice of Top Gear presenter Paddy McGuinness and the patience of a saint. Can I send him photos or videos of our water stopcock, gas meter, fuse box and additional fuses in the garage and summer house, along with pieces of the house’s exterior from where the fuse box was located to where I wanted the charger? My wife was baking and got irritated while I was scurrying around in the kitchen, taking pictures and cursing when the phone signal died and Reece disappeared.
Yet three calls later and we were all done. On the plus side, this process took half an hour rather than the 60 minutes predicted, and we discovered that I would need a new zipper switch and the above beefier fuse.
It also turned out that some of my “tails” were too thin. These are cables that connect the fuse box to a house’s wiring and mine had to be fatter to cope with the power pulled by an electric car’s onboard charger.
It was OVO’s job to fit the isolator switch and tails, and I gave up a fruitless hour and 20 minutes on a guard to listen to 1980s pop songs on a loop, but gave up almost the next day. There was a lead time of about three weeks for an engineer, who arrived about 48 hours after the National Power duo and made friends with the dog. His work took 20 minutes. “I do one of these a day,” he said.
This may explain why British Gas for a few weeks could not set a date to fit the charger itself, but I received several calls from a real person apologizing for the delay, and finally a time confirmed.
Meanwhile, another British Gas engineer showed up with a Hive router, “smart light bulbs” and plugs, showed my wife and I how to download the Hive application, and quickly let us control our heating and turn lights on and off with our antique iPhones. He also found that one of our carbon monoxide alarms was dead and said the submersible heater pump was sick.
When the day of our installation dawned, my wife was busy with wall-to-wall Zoom meetings at home. “They will drill and turn off the power,” she said through clenched teeth. Two British Gas passers-by – Dusan, originally from Slovakia, and Gavin from London – appeared properly at 09:00. Negotiations on when to turn off the power followed and they agreed to do so at the end of the installation rather than the beginning.
For people drilling holes through brickwork, they were surprisingly discreet because they pulled a very long cable around the back of the house and tied it to a white plastic locker. The predicted two-hour power outage turned into an hour, and they remained untouched even when the window cleaner arrived and planted his ladder in the midst of the electrically organized chaos. Five and a half hours later, Dusan and Gavin helped me connect the app and the charger and we sincerely said goodbye to them.
It all involves dealing with four organizations over three and a half months (and spending about four hours of my time), but at the end of it I managed to navigate the process successfully, and recently spent £ 10.76 to fully charge a Vauxhall Mokka, which has a theoretical range of 201 miles. As I write this, I apparently manage to charge a neighbor’s MG5 electric car as well.
If an aging, analog-brain car heel like me can make this work well, that’s a good sign – but the acid test will still be true in six months’ time.
For electric car reviews, advice and features, visit telegraph.co.uk/electric-cars
This article is updated with the latest information.