Switching to an EV: Everything You Need to Know

* NOTES SINCE PUBLICATION * You don't need to be with Octopus Energy to use Electroverse - it's a service open to everyone. If you ARE an Octopus customer though, you get a discount on charging rates at many stations. You can also add a payment card instead of linking it to your Octopus energy account.

Great video Gary. EV + home battery + solar, was a game changer for us. Even an older EV (2018 Kia Soul) allowed us to switch to an EV tariff with Octopus, which meant the home battery is charging each night at 7p a kWh and supplies all our household needs for the next day. Servicing of the Kia is £100 a year and after 54k miles, the brake discs have 10% wear and the pads 20% wear. When we owned two petrol cars (averaging around 47mpg) we'd spend around £250 on petrol a month and around £230 on electricity a month (pre solar/battery). Now during the summer covering the same number of miles each month in two EVs + our household electricity needs, the combined total is £11 a month. This rises to £60 a month in the depths of winter. We have easily saved over £400 a month since switching to EVs/solar/home battery. Thanks for your videos which were instrumental in setting me down this path two years ago 👏

My experience of driving an EV is that many friends who don't have one are keen to tell me how i cant do various things in an EV that they actually know i do / have done. Eg i drive all over the UK, ive driven to Norway (1300 miles) on a 4 day road trip, ive done many 200-400 mile day trips. Yet according to many my EV is only useful for nipping to the shops after which Ill have to charge for 36 hours before i can go out again,

Great Video Gary, as ever. May I add a couple of beginner tips. 1) use heated seats. The fan heater is then enemy of range. In the winter preheat the car when it is plugged in. If experiencing range issues on a motorway. Slow down. It make a massive difference.2) charging a battery from under20% to 80% is normally as quick as charging from 80 to 100%. Therefore when you hit 80% unplug and move onto the next charger. Free up the space for someone else.

I have done the journey from HEV to BEV over the years by way of PHEV. I certainly wouldn’t go back to an ICE car. I have had no problems using public chargers on the relatively rare occasions I have needed to. The motto I follow on a long journey is charge when you stop don’t stop to charge. I would recommend the YouTube channel “Dave takes it on” for more about EVs and especially charging. Now what really needs to move forward is vehicle to home ( or vehicle to grid).

Should mention that many Tesla Superchargers are open to non-Teslas now and are waaaay cheaper and more reliable than all other chargers - approx half the price. A monthly subscription reduces this still further if your mileage warrants it. I rarely use any other public chargers now, despite driving a Renault Zoe 🌞

I also hired a Polestar 2 from Hertz to see if I could live with an EV. I was so impressed that I ordered a one from Polestar. It costs £5.75 to fully charge at home (7p/kWh) and can do 300 miles.

Thanks Gary. My experience of EV brakes is if you don't use them due to regen, they will rot with rust pitting and scoring, long before wearing out. So a good dab on the brakes once every few days really helps this challenge. 👍

Thanks Gary. We’ve been fully BEV for 5 years now & in every way a it’s a superior ownership experience. We’ve travelled all over Europe & have never had problems finding a working charge point. Financially it’s an absolute no-brainer, particularly charging from home. We would NEVER go back to ICE!

We went fully electric a couple of years ago and realised the second hand EV is the gateway to cheaper octopus and a low cost driving, heating hot water etc great videos.

Another excellent video. We were relatively early adopters with our 2017 30 kWh Nissan Leaf. We are also a fully electric household - solar PV, Tesla Powerwall and an ASHP. As semi-retirees these have saved us a fortune in energy bills and running costs for the car. The Leaf is now decidedly long in the tooth but it has been completely reliable and we still use it for most journeys even though it’s range is 80 miles at best.

Hello again Gary. We are at this particular stage now. From what I can see lease prices are broadly equivalent between ICE and BV’s. We would not generally have any range anxiety but the Electroverse section was of particular use as we are Octopus customers. As always an informative and well explained presentation. Many thanks.

Great video. Having a card from your energy provider that can be used at public chargers is brilliant. Wish we had that in Australia

Hi Gary good video. We bought our first EV nearly 9 months ago (now done 13,000 klm (8,000 miles)). I had done my research before we decided on what to buy, therefore i was confidant that all would be ok. Even though! We were still a little apprehensive on our first long drive 2 weeks after delivery, which was all across Spain from my villa here in Valencia through Portugal to Gibralter and back to Valencia via Malaga. No need for the apprehension as we thought it was actually a better experience than using my 900klm range diesel (I never drove it 900 klm without stopping normally every 300klm or so for the usual needs 🤣). Only annoying thing is the tesla finishes charging before I have finished eating 🤣, so I have to go move it 😂. The one thing I found so much better and got rid of a lot of the stress, was finding, would you believe charging stations, this will mainly only be applicable to teslas, I accept, because our cars navigation all you have to do is put the end point of your journey into the nav and it will immediately work out your route, every charge stop, how much battery you will arrive with, how long to stop to charge before you can continue, and of course routing directly to the tesla supercharger, no hunting for it like a petrol station, yes I can hear you saying but petrol stations are everywhere and indeed, if you just use the motorway and only stop at motorway services ok. But as there can be as much as 20 cents a liter difference to the motorway service to one off of the motorway for our diesel that is like 15 euros less for every fill up. So as I am tight 🤣we looked for one off of the motorway and try to never use motorways. I think this is something people do not really appreiate until you drive one. I have worked out our tesla cost about 1.1 cents per klm charging at home and 5.5 cents per klm using tesla superchargers, my diesel costs a litttle over 15 cents per kilometer. so over the 13000 klmI have saved at least 1600 euros over the diesel, I say at least because i have charged quite a lot at free chargers in that time and of course when I get the solar panels up will be nearer to free 🤣. August we start our proper 🤣 long journey from here in Valencia, Spain, through France to UK, over to Ipswich up to Scotland down to wales, London and back again to Valencia visiting my family and as many places as my wife has never seen, but because of my experience so far, we have no quarms at all about this journey, in fact we are looking forward to it as I actually love driving our tesla. So keep the great vids coming

I’ve had solar here in Thailand for 8 years and EVs for 4. We now power the house, 2 EVs and an electric motorbike 100% from solar - we don’t have a meter. We found that having EVs and solar greatly shortened our pay-back on the solar system. I have the V2L from my BYD Seal plugged into my solar system to give us more backup power at night - videos on my channel.

I bought an EV last week off the back of a different youtube channel - after watching your videos i've now bought a home battery. Thanks for your content, i cant believe how big the savings are. I bought a kia E-niro that is basically free over 4 years due to the petrol savings and is fully warrantied for the next 5 years!

That was a very good presentation, clear and concise. I will be watching more.

Thanks for this Gary. Here in New Zealand my wife and I went solar + EV (Kia e-Niro, 2022 model) in 2021 and I have been following your channel since then. I do not assume that I know it all, so try to keep up. Hence I tuned into this latest about EVs, where you cover a lot of good stuff. It was interesting to hear how you installed your Zappi charger a year before getting your BEV! Our experience was the reverse. We installed solar a month or two before the Kia arrived, and over the next couple of years progressively installed a MyEnergi suite of controls, including replacing our almost 20-year-old gas-fired hot water cylinder with a dual-element electric one. But inscrutable government bureaucrats had been holding up signing off the Zappi-2 until 2023, so we waited a year for that! We love our e-Niro... Had to use its granny charger till the Zappi arrived. Most of our driving is around the city, so this initially needed three nights a week, and with the Zappi we charge once a week (maintaining charge between 40% and 80%, as currently recommended for longest battery life). All of this is on a Contact Energy plan with free charging for 3 hours at night, so our total of about 13,000 km has almost all been free. Much of our hot water is also free, apart from the 5 winter months when I schedule a brief daytime boost of the hot water via our Eddi control box. For 7 months of the year our solar generation means that winter schedule is not needed. In the next few months I will do a comparison of Contact Energy vs Octopus Energy (the latter being a relative newcomer in New Zealand). Our charging network down here has been expanding at a slower rate than in the UK, but even so I had been planning for over a year to do a road trip from Wellington, via ferry across Cook Strait, down south as far as Dunedin. As you say, careful planning would have seen us doing overnight charging at a couple of hotels, and just a few quick top-ups en route. But recent mismanagement of our ageing ferry fleet has put the lid on our plans. There was one loss of power of a ferry in stormy weather, and a recent grounding as a result of a fiasco from fumbling the autopilot controls. Luck was with them both times, but we all remember the Wahine disaster of 1968. So we are confining long-distance travel to the North Island for the conceivable future. Keep up the good work, Gary! 😀

Thanks for the informative and genuine video. I think for the sake of completeness, it would be worth mentioning 2 things: 1) if you have a solar system at home you can have a "smart" wallbox mounted that communicates with the inverter. This implies that you can select a charging mode in which it will charge the car ONLY with energy in excess not used in the house. This also take care of these days where the sun is coming and going, so you end up not paying a single penny to recharge. And if in the middle of the recharge process you need to use your oven or your wash machine, the recharge could automatically be put in stand-by (depending on the size of your solar system) for a short while, to then resume. Second relevant thing to mention is the difference in recharging experience between EVs and ... Tesla. In the first case I share your experience having owned an ID.3, in the second case... it is completely hassle-free since there are several supercharger stations, and even before reaching them you can check prices, typical daily/hourly usage, realtime occupancy, etc. And once you get there all you need to do is plug-in your car which gets automatically recognized and eventually your credit card charged. (Prices are reasonable, typically just slightly higher that electricity costs at home).

We got our first ever EV a year ago, a used 1 year old 64kWh Hyundai Kona which was half the price when it was new & it's a great local run about car. We charged it a bit last summer from solar at home but mainly from cheap rate electric overnight at home. Haven't needed to use a public charger yet. Now we are Octopus Intelligent Go tariff we only charge it to 80% over night at 7p & export as much solar as possible during the day which results in negative household electric bills - at least for the summer months. My wife uses the EV most for local trips but I do drive it as well when we are travelling together. Longest trip so far was a 240 mile day trip to see family. No need to re-charge it until we got home. I keep my ICE car for longer trips & holidays. Not quite ready to go EV only just yet. I reckon the EV is saving us £175 / month on fuel alone.