How to charge your EV for less

Home charging, especially overnight on an off-peak tariff, is almost always the cheapest electricity your car will ever see. Treat the public network as top-ups for journeys, not as your default, and most of your driving costs very little.

The gap is not marginal. An overnight home rate is routinely a third or a quarter of what the same energy costs from a rapid charger beside a motorway. If most of your kilometres go in at home, the public network stops being your cost base and becomes an occasional convenience, which is a completely different relationship with the price.

CCS and CHAdeMO are the fast DC standards; Type 2 is the common AC one. Knowing which your car takes, and a point's power in kW, tells you at a glance whether a stop means ten minutes or an hour. Fillz shows both on every charger.

Ultra-rapid DC is brilliant on a long trip and overkill for a supermarket stop. Slower AC charging is usually cheaper per kWh and gentler on the battery, so save the rapid chargers for when you genuinely need the speed.

There is a second reason beyond price. A car that accepts 50 kW will not charge any faster on a 300 kW post, so you pay the premium rate for the privilege of not using it. Match the charger to what the car can actually take, and the only thing you give up is a queue you were never going to beat.

The last 20 percent charges slowly, so on a journey you spend a lot of time, and often money where you pay per minute, for little range. Unplugging around 80 percent and moving on is almost always faster overall.

The charging curve is the reason. Speed drops sharply as the battery fills, so the last twenty percent can take as long as the first eighty. On a long drive, two shorter stops to eighty are usually faster overall than one long stop to full, and they cost less per kilometre when the tariff is charged by time.

If you rarely use public chargers, walk-up pricing is fine. If you road-trip often, a subscription can pay for itself. In Fillz you can set your supplier or your exact price per kWh and see what you would really pay at each point, instead of the counter price.

Arriving at a full or out-of-service charger is the classic EV frustration. Where the network shares it, Fillz shows how many connectors are free in real time, so you head for one that is actually available.

This is where live data earns its place. Knowing a site has six posts tells you nothing at seven in the evening; knowing four of them are free right now tells you everything. Where a country publishes that feed, Fillz shows the free count rather than the total, because the total is not the number you need.

Some supermarkets, hotels and car parks still offer free or token charging. A short top-up while you shop or sleep is range you did not pay for, and it adds up over a month.

Batteries charge fastest when they are warm. On a cold day, plugging in right after driving, while the battery is still warm, is quicker than after the car has sat for hours. Plan rapid stops for when you have been on the move.

Take a driver covering fifteen thousand kilometres a year in a car using around eighteen kilowatt hours per hundred, so roughly two thousand seven hundred kilowatt hours. Taken entirely at a cheap overnight home rate, that is a modest bill. Taken entirely from rapid public chargers, the same energy can cost three to four times more, and the difference across the year runs into several hundred.

Almost nobody sits at either extreme, which is the useful part. The number that decides your year is the share of those kilowatt hours you take at the cheap rate. Moving that share from half to three quarters does more for your annual cost than any amount of hunting for the best public tariff, and it costs nothing beyond plugging in when you get home.

Does rapid charging damage the battery?

Occasional rapid charging is what the car is built for, and modern packs manage it with active cooling. What batteries genuinely dislike is sitting at a very high or very low state of charge for long stretches, which is why keeping daily use in a middle band matters more than avoiding rapid chargers on a trip.

Why does the same charger cost different amounts on different days?

Tariffs vary by operator, by time of day, and by whether you are roaming on somebody else's card. Two posts side by side under different networks can differ substantially, and the price quoted through a third-party app is not always the price the operator charges directly.

Is it cheaper to charge to full at home or top up on the road?

Home, almost always, when you have the option. The exception is a long journey where filling at home means carrying weight you did not need. For daily driving, home charging wins on price so decisively that the comparison is not close.

What does a charging point's power rating actually promise?

The maximum the post can deliver, not what you will get. The car's own limit, the state of the battery, the temperature and whether another car shares the same cabinet all pull the real figure down. Treat the rating as a ceiling rather than a rate.