4 Reasons Why You Should Get a 'Smart' EV Home Charger

What is a Smart chargepoint?

In a nutshell, we call it technology that empowers you to easily understand, optimise and control your energy usage.

Having a ‘smart’ unit means that your electric car chargepoint is intelligent and in simplified terms not ‘dumb’. This is down to the unit being connected to WiFi coupled with the software behind it. Another term you may have heard of is a ‘communicating unit’.

Why should I get a Smart EV chargepoint?

At Pod Point, we're always working on products and features which enable our customers to save money, save carbon and get the most from their EV charging. We have a bunch of features which will be released very shortly, and have many more coming soon. Keep your eyes on pod-point.com for more details.

In order to have any of our new feature releases, your unit needs to be ‘Smart’ i.e. connected to WiFi. Otherwise, there’s no way for us to send you the software updates.

Here are 4 reasons why Smart charging will benefit you:

1. Energy Usage Reports

Having a Smart unit means you can view your energy usage on our App. You can also download these as .csv reports. This information has several uses from; recording how much energy you’ve used, monitoring how green your charging is (in terms of real-world carbon intensity geCO2/km) and recording work expenses.

2. Remote diagnostics, remote resolution

Occasionally things go wrong, cars don’t behave as they should and chargepoints enter fault states. Being connected means that Pod Point can diagnose and remedy most faults without having to send a Pod Point Expert to your home, reducing the time that chargers are down.

3. “Over the Air” (OTA) updates

We periodically make tweaks to our software. These tweaks can be as simple as updates to account for subtle differences in how new vehicles to market behave while charging, or can be related to the rollout of whole new Smart product features. Being connected means these updates can be done instantaneously and at scale, meaning chargepoints can be kept up to date long after their installation.

4. Remotely manage and schedule charge events

Smart charging will allow remote control of groups of chargers in future to balance the grid during times of unusually high demand. For example, the World Cup typically sees power surges as the UK makes tea in unison for 5 minute periods at half time, ramping charge down during this 5 mins could save starting some dirty, quick response power plants without materially inconveniencing EV drivers.

The Pod Point Charge Scheduling feature will let you take advantage of dual-rate electricity tariffs designed for EV drivers, which can help significantly reduce the cost of charging. You could save up to 70% on electricity costs by scheduling your EV to charge during off-peak hours. This is based on an average electricity tariff of 15p/kWh compared with EDF’s GoElectric Exclusive 35 tariff which offers a rate of 4.5p/kWh during off-peak hours.

You can:

• Remotely schedule a charging session in the Pod Point App.
• Create a weekly charging schedule to suit your driving needs.
• Schedule your charging during off-peak hours with a dual-rate EV electricity tariff.

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