EV Charging Installation in Manchester
qualified electric vehicle charger installation for homes, businesses, and commercial fleets across Greater Manchester. From single home chargers to multi-point fleet solutions, we handle everything from survey to certification.
What actually decides whether your home can take a charger
The charger itself is rarely the constraint. Three things decide the job: the rating of your main incoming fuse, the state of your consumer unit, and your earthing arrangement. Most homes have a 60A, 80A or 100A main fuse, and a 7kW charger draws around 32A on its own — so on a 60A supply with an electric shower and a hob already fitted, the installation needs either a load-management device that throttles the charger when the house is busy, or an upgrade to the supply.
Earthing is the part people never expect. Most modern homes are on a PME (TN-C-S) earthing arrangement, and the wiring regulations do not permit that earth to be exported to a vehicle outside without protection. In practice that means either a charger with built-in open-PEN detection, or a separate earth electrode driven into the ground. Either is fine; both need designing in rather than discovering on the day.
If you have no off-street parking, the answer depends entirely on your council
This is the single biggest difference across the areas we cover, and it catches people out constantly. Manchester City Council will install a cross-pavement cable channel, priced between £949 and £1,424.50 and free if you are in council tax band A, hold a blue badge, are on Motability or hold a Manchester taxi or private hire licence. Salford runs its own channel scheme under a Highways Act licence, and will only approve it where you have, or intend to install, a BS 7671-compliant chargepoint.
Tameside and Trafford both refuse outright to authorise cables trailed across a footway, and neither offers a channel or gully alternative. Stockport also refuses gully installations in the highway, but does permit a surface cable protector to a written specification. So the same terraced house gets four different answers depending which side of a boundary it sits on. We can tell you which applies to your address before you order a car. (Council positions checked August 2026 - confirm with your own council before committing.)
Tethered or untethered, and when each is the wrong choice
A tethered unit has the cable permanently attached: quicker to use day to day, and the usual choice where the charger sits beside a driveway you park on every night. An untethered unit takes a separate cable, which looks tidier, suits a shared or awkward parking arrangement, and future-proofs you against a change of connector standard on a future car.
Tethered is the wrong choice if the charger has to sit some distance from where the car actually parks, because you are then stuck with whatever cable length was supplied. Untethered is the wrong choice if the person using it daily would rather not handle and store a heavy cable. Neither costs meaningfully more than the other once installed, so pick on how the car is actually parked rather than on price.
What makes one quote higher than another
For a straightforward install the variables are cable run length, whether the wall is cavity or solid, whether the route is internal or needs external clipping and weatherproofing, and how much of the existing installation has to change. The costs that genuinely move a quote are a consumer unit replacement where there is no spare way or no RCD protection, an earth electrode where open-PEN protection is not built into the unit, a load-management device on a constrained supply, and surge protection.
A quote that is much cheaper than the others usually means one of those has been left out rather than that the work is cheaper. It is worth asking any installer to be explicit about the earthing arrangement and the consumer unit, because those are the two that get quietly omitted.
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