EV Charging Free Plans or Subscriptions

Keeping this separate from the other EV thread, as that is about EV cars, and this is specifically about charging them.

I have an EV car but don't have any home charging and would like the ability to charge anywhere at a reasonable cost. Trouble is most places seem to be 65p to 80p/kWh.

Someone on the other thread said they use Elli and get Shell charging for 43p/kWh, and I'd never heard of this. So, thought I'd ask the question, what am I or others missing?

Any tips for free or subscription EV charging plans would be really helpful. Need to get this sorted before I undertake my summer road trips to Scotland and Cornwall.

Thanks in advance.

I don’t have home charging. I consider five factors :

Base tariff
Membership scheme tariffs
Car park based chargers
Idle time
Charge speed

I’m in london so we get very expensive BP chargers (80p) , cheaper (42p /kw) that are based in car parks where you must pay.

Best so far are pubs and hotels where charging is free.

Idle time is a bugger especially if the trigger point is less than the tariff in the car park.

What do you do on the motorways? Just suck up the 80p/kWh, or use the dirty diesel for that?

Just sold our diesel (thanks ULEZ extension), so I’m down to the EV and an old city car I wouldn’t trust, or want to drive more than 10 mile from home.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by noTAGlove

Someone on the other thread said they use Elli and get Shell charging for 43p/kWh, and I'd never heard of this. So, thought I'd ask the question, what am I or others missing?

Any tips for free or subscription EV charging plans would be really helpful. Need to get this sorted before I undertake my summer road trips to Scotland and Cornwall.

Thanks in advance.

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The Elli subs and per kWh charge costs recently went up, which is odd as wholesale costs have come down, but still gets you a more reasonable cost than pay as you go, especially as without home charging you’ll be using quite a lot of it each month.

You need to balance the lower price with a subscription cost versus just the PAYG price, I don’t know how much you use your car.

As you mention Scotland, it’s worth getting a ChargePoint Scotland RFID card via the App after you’ve set up an account, they’re often the only chargers outside of the cities or main routes (Oban as an example) and they only seem to work reliably with a physical card. The App is very hit and miss. Otherwise there are good charging hubs, and a few of the Tesla sites are open to all cars now as well. You can subscribe to them via the App for short periods of time to get a better price than just PAYG as well, might be good for those periods like holidays.

Other subscriptions/models to look at would be BP Pulse as you get cheaper charging both rapid and destination with that membership, including last time I looked some slower chargers that were free/part of the subscription.

Doesn’t work for me, but have a look at Bonnet as well, it depends where you normally charge and/or the places you go to.

I only charge at 4 of the 29 Charge Point Operators as the majority offer a terrible service. I never charge at BP or Shell as they’re such unreliable networks