Tested: Enphase IQ EV home charger
• 7kW or 22kW output
• Tethered cable length of 7.5m as standard
• 24/7 customer support
• £779.23 plus installation
For the most part, your car charger is a faithful servant which will get on with the job so efficiently that you will take it for granted. You plug it in, come back in the morning and your car is charged. In the case of my elderly (well, five year old) BP Pulse unit though, one day it just didn’t. And no amount of turning it on and off again would bring it back to life. I knew that another member of the team, Helen, had experienced the same with her identical unit a few months before and no amount of cajoling had revived it.
With the company no longer servicing home units I was forced to look around for a replacement, and the sting of this was eased by the thought that technology has moved on. No longer would I need to have a ‘dumb’ unit, and I could have a new charger which links to an app and can be controlled from anywhere. This would allow me to make use of the cheapest tariffs. As an added bonus I would get something which doesn’t look quite so tired and dated on the side of my house.
After a bit of online shopping, I decided to try an Enphase IQ EV – partly because it was a unit we had not tested before, but also because the company has a good reputation for its solar panels. More than 4.9 million Enphase solar and battery systems have been installed in over 160 countries, which means its chargers offer full integration into home energy ecosystems from the same app. Although I don’t have solar or battery storage yet, it’s good to have the option to ensure I can upgrade in future.
I was given the option of three local installers for the Enphase unit and went with SW3 Green Energy Services. After sending a few photos of my existing fuse box and set up via WhatsApp, Chris from SW3 advised they would be able to install the unit within two weeks.
The engineer arrived on time and quickly removed the BP Pulse unit. The Enphase unit was beautifully packaged and seemed straightforward to fit, especially since the wiring was already in place for the old BP.
Within 90 minutes the installation was complete and the engineer had set me up on the Enphase App. This is again very intuitive; you can schedule your charging sessions to match your off-peak tariff and take advantage of any low rates - I have Octopus Go, so set the charger to work between the hours of 00:30 and 05:30. The app will then tell you how much energy you have put into the car and the estimated range added to the total – useful if you want to keep an eye on your consumption.
If you’ve added Enphase’s solar or battery storage products, these can all be monitored by the App. The thought of installing a battery to store all that cheap energy at night to then use during the day is appealing.
Before I tried my first charge, there were some issues with the unit which were highlighted to me on the App and also through a red light on the face of the unit. These were reported to Enphase via my installer, which meant they were able to remotely adjust the settings on the unit to ensure all was working.
Being one of the first units fitted in the UK, I guess these were teething issues and am pleased to report that all is working well now. There is a customer service phone number prominently displayed on the App which offers '24/7 Customer Support’ – handy if things should go wrong. It’s also reassuring to know Enphase is an established company with an international footprint rather than a fly-by-night who will have disappeared in a few months.
I have scheduled several charges since without any issues. The unit looks lovely too – the materials and build quality seem top notch so far. The IQ EV is only available with a tethered cable and it is unusually long as standard – 7.5m, while most rivals only have 6m or 5m available. This means I don’t have to reverse into my drive to ensure the plug reaches my charge port.
Hopefully I will soon be able to take it for granted, and it will have a longer life than my old charger.
