How To Install A Chargepoint Supercharger At Home [Is It Possible?]
I think electricity will create a new world. I feel like the world will change a lot with electricity, and I wonder how it will change. It’s scary and it’s going to be fun. I think there are so many things to think about when it comes to electric cars.
J Hope
The electric car has ushered in a new age of driving, one in which, someday soon, we’ll all be able to charge our cars at home and bypass the need to fuel up at a gas station in order to get where we need to go.
As well as helping to save the planet and preserve the future by reducing tailpipe and harmful emissions, electric cars have made and will continue to make travel more affordable as they’ll make gasoline bills a thing of the last and allow you to fill the tank (or more accurately the batteries) of your car up from the grid and the comfort of your own home.
And if you do run out of juice while you’re out and about, you can always use one of the charging stations that are starting to pop up all over America to charge your car. The automotive revolution has begun, and tomorrow belongs to electricity.
Choosing the right EV (electric vehicle) charger to install in your home is a tough choice, as you’ll want it to be as quick and easy to use as the chargers you can juice your car up everywhere else.
After all, who doesn’t love the ease and simplicity of a fast charger and the functionality and speed of a supercharger. Which leads us to the inevitable question, how can you install a ChargePoint Supercharger at home?
Installing A Supercharger At Home
We hate to be the ones to burst your bubble and ruin your day, but the simple truth is, that you can’t install a supercharger at home.
It’s disappointing, we know, but there are two economic reasons why it doesn’t make financial sense to try and install one and two unavoidable reasons that make it impossible for you to install one.
And we’re going to take a look at each of them and explain why you can’t power your electric car with a supercharger that you’ve fitted and plugged in at home.
What Is A Supercharger?
Before we explain why you can’t fit a supercharger at home, we thought it might be a good idea to actually explain what a supercharger is and does.
Basically, a supercharger is a far more powerful version of the home chargers that you use to charge your electric car, and because they’re part of the national charger infrastructure, they’re designed to charge the batteries of your electric car more efficiently and faster than your home charging station can.
Maybe efficiently was the wrong choice of word, as they work on the same principle as your home charger does.
But while your EV Level 2 charger will restore 300 or so miles of range to your car’s batteries in around 8 hours, a supercharger will do the same job in 60 minutes. In other words, it’ll completely charge your car in an hour.
While that makes them an incredibly tempting home charging option, it can’t be done, and we’re going to tell you why.
Infrastructure
The power that superchargers need to deliver that much high-speed burst of juice to your car isn’t supported by the residential grid.
Your home doesn’t have enough power to support a supercharger, and even if it did, almost every residential permit governing electrical supply doesn’t permit the usage of the high voltage that they need to function.
But, and if it’s an incredibly big but, even if they did and somehow you obtained the necessary permission to install a supercharger, the service time that it would take to fit, and the fact that you’d have to have your entire home completely rewired to support a supercharger, are the sort of hoops that no one should ever have to try and leap through.
They Cost How Much?
Trying to figure out how much a ChargePoint Supercharger actually costs is next to impossible, as they don’t publish the figures on any public platform or make them available for residential sale.
There are, however, varying degrees of impossible, and as we know someone who works for a company that had the superchargers installed, we’ve got a rough idea of how much they cost per unit.
Are you sitting comfortably? Are you sure? Okay then, we’ll tell you how much ChargePoint Supercharger costs, but it isn’t exactly cheap. Each and every Supercharger, before installation, costs somewhere in the region of $70,000 dollars.
That’s right, one supercharger costs 70 large. It’s around this point, when they discover how much each one costs, that most people decide that they don’t actually want or need a supercharger.
Battery Life
While we don’t want to rub any extra salt in the supercharger wound, we feel like we also need to point out that most eclectic car batteries were designed to work with Level 2 chargers, and the sudden surge of power that superchargers deliver can, over time and with repeated usage, damage the battery of your car and reduce its performance.
They’re perfectly safe to use a couple of times a week, but if you hit the charge button on one every single day, it would, sooner rather than later, destroy your car’s battery. This article covers how a Tesla’s battery life is affected by supercharging, and the same lessons apply to other vehicles not using the Tesla supercharging network.
The ChargePoint Problem
We’ve left the biggest hurdle to installing a supercharger at home until last because it’s the reason that taps the final nail into the idea’s coffin. ChargePoint doesn’t and won’t sell its supercharging units and stations to residential customers. They never have, and they never will.
The ChargePoint Solution
There is, however, a solution to the Supercharger problem, and that’s the next best thing, which is the ChargePoint Home Flex, a unit that was purposely designed to charge your electric car at home.
Yes, it’ll take longer to charge your car, but as you can just plug it in overnight and let it fill your car up, why would you care how long it takes? The Home Flex has fantastic power output, and it’ll connect to WiFi seamlessly for convenient smart charging.
And best of all, it’s easy to fit, simple to use, and a far more affordable option than a supercharger.
