EV charger + garage consumer unit — Cranleigh

The Brief

A couple in a rural spot outside Cranleigh had just taken delivery of an electric car and had been charging it — nervously — off a 13A socket in the detached garage with an extension lead trailing across the drive. The garage sat about 20 metres from the house and had only a single old lighting circuit fed from the house. They wanted a proper charger, and they wanted the trailing-lead situation gone for good.

What we did

The socket-and-lead setup was the priority — a continuous near-maximum load through a domestic socket and extension is a genuine fire risk, and we told them so plainly. We ran a correctly-sized armoured (SWA) cable from the house across to the garage, buried at proper depth, and fitted a small new consumer unit in the garage to serve both a 7kW charger and upgraded garage lighting and sockets off one tidy board. The charger got its own dedicated, protected circuit with load management so it eases off if the house is already drawing hard. We notified the DNO (the network operator) on their behalf — a legal step most people don’t know about — and issued the certificate. They can now charge overnight at full speed with nothing trailing across the drive.