Do I need an electrician to install an EV charger at home?

A portable cable that plugs into an ordinary power point is not an installation and needs no electrician, though it is slow and it is worth having the socket and circuit checked before you rely on it nightly. Anything wall mounted is different. It is a permanently connected appliance drawing a large, sustained current on a dedicated circuit, and that is licensed work.

The switchboard is usually the real job

A charger draws more continuously than almost anything else in a house. On an older board with limited spare capacity, no main switch of adequate rating, or no residual current protection, the charger is the easy part and the board is the expense. This is why quotes for the same charger vary so much between two houses in the same street.

What else is involved

• The distance from the switchboard to where the car parks, because the cable run is a real cost and it is priced per metre.
• Whether the property is single phase or three phase, which sets the maximum charging speed available to you.
• Load management, so the charger reduces its draw when the oven and the air conditioner are also running rather than tripping the main.
• Notification to the local electricity distributor, which many distributors require for a charger above a certain rating.