EV charge point bases, ducting & parking bays

Installing a home charge point is two jobs done by two trades. The electrical installation — the circuit, the protective devices, the earthing arrangement and the unit itself — is a qualified electrician's work and is notifiable under Part P of the Building Regulations. The groundworks — the duct route, the trench, the base for a post, the bay and the reinstatement — is this trade. Doing them in the right order saves a great deal of money and mess.

The single most valuable thing on this page is this: lay a duct while the drive is open, even if you have no charger and no electric car. A 50mm or larger duct with a draw cord, running from near the consumer unit to where a car will park, costs very little when the ground is already dug. Retro-fitting the same duct into a finished drive means cutting, trenching and reinstating — which on tarmac, resin or imprinted concrete leaves a permanent visible line, and on imprinted concrete cannot be made to match at all.

The route wants thinking about rather than taking the shortest line. It should avoid crossing under a garage threshold where water could track, keep a sensible separation from other buried services, come up in a position where a post or a wall unit makes sense, and reach a place where the cable will actually stretch to the car's charging port without crossing a walkway. That last point is the one most often missed and the one people live with daily.

Where a wall-mounted unit is not practical — because the parking space is away from the house, or the wall is a boundary — a post or bollard needs a base. That is a small concrete foundation sized for the unit, set square and true, with the duct brought up through it, and finished so that surface water cannot sit around it. Getting the height and the orientation right matters: a charge point that faces the wrong way puts the cable across the walking route.

There is one situation that is genuinely worth flagging early, because it can change the whole design. Where a charge point cable would have to cross a public footway to reach a car parked on the street, that is not something that can be arranged privately — trailing a cable across a pavement is a hazard and generally not permitted, and any cross-pavement solution needs the highway authority's involvement. If off-street parking is the reason for the charge point, the crossover and the parking bay come first.

Finally, the bay itself. A parking space for a car that gets plugged in every day benefits from being set out deliberately: level enough that a cable does not sit in a puddle, wide enough to open a door and reach the port, and surfaced so that the cable is not being dragged over sharp aggregate. None of that is expensive when the drive is being built, and all of it is a nuisance to change afterwards.