Do I need a proper home charger, or is a normal socket genuinely fine?

The money question has an answer people usually miss: the charger pays back through the tariff, not through the charging.

Electricity is the same price either way. What a proper charger buys you financially is access to arrangements that require one: many time-of-use tariffs with very cheap overnight rates expect a smart charger, and some grants and schemes require an approved installation.

If you can get on a tariff with a cheap overnight window, the saving on charging alone frequently covers the installation within a year or two, and after that it keeps paying. That is where the payback actually is, and it makes the decision straightforward.

The other financial angle: a smart charger can be scheduled reliably. Charging in the cheap window matters only if it actually happens in the window, and doing that from the car's own timer works until an update changes something.

So the order I would go in:

1. Find out what tariffs are available to you and what they require
2. Work out your realistic overnight charging need in kilowatt hours
3. If a cheap-rate tariff is available and needs a charger, install one - the arithmetic usually makes itself
4. If not, and your daily need is small, the lead is a legitimate long-term answer rather than a stopgap

I charged from a normal socket for a year, so here is the honest version.

What the lead gives you. Roughly a slow trickle, in the region of ten to fifteen kilometres of range per hour on a standard domestic socket. Overnight that is often enough. If your daily driving is modest and the car sits on the drive every night, it genuinely works, and a lot of people are talked out of finding that out.

Where it stops working:

• A day of long driving that needs a full charge overnight rather than a top-up
• Winter, when consumption rises and charging is less efficient
• A bigger battery, which takes proportionally longer
• Any household where the car does not sit still for eight hours

On safety, honestly: it is drawing near the continuous limit of a domestic circuit for many hours at a time. On modern, sound wiring with a dedicated outlet in good condition, that is within specification. On old wiring, a worn socket, or through an extension lead, it is not, and this is the real risk - extension leads and multi-way adaptors are the thing that actually causes problems.

So: have the circuit and the socket checked before relying on it, never use an extension, and feel the plug after an hour of charging. Warm is expected; hot is a stop signal.

The thing that eventually pushed me to a charger was not speed or money, it was that the lead lives in the boot and you have to get it out and put it away every single day in whatever weather. Six hundred times a year of a small annoyance.

Nobody lists that as a reason and it is the reason most people I know actually switched.

Reading this with a driveway-shaped hole in my life.

If you do get one installed, the things that actually vary between quotes:

Cable run length. The distance from your consumer unit to where the charger goes is the biggest driver of price. A charger on the wall next to the fuse box is cheap; one at the far end of a garden needs a lot of armoured cable and trenching.

Whether your consumer unit has capacity and the right protection. An older board sometimes needs work first, and that is where a modest quote becomes a large one. Ask specifically whether the quote assumes any board work.

Whether load management is needed. In homes where the supply cannot comfortably take a full-rate charger plus everything else, a device that throttles charging when the house is drawing heavily is required. Adds cost and it is not optional where it applies.

Earthing arrangements, which sometimes need extra equipment depending on your supply type.

Questions worth asking every installer: what does the price include if the board needs work, is load management included, and what warranty covers the unit versus the installation.

And on the unit itself: tethered cable or a socket is mostly preference; the tethered one is more convenient daily, the socket is tidier and survives you changing car. Neither justifies a large price difference.