You pay for
the peak,not the kilowatt-hours.

The capacity component of the Flemish distribution charge is calculated from your monthly peak, which is the highest quarter-hourly average offtake recorded during that month, and the figure used is the average of those monthly peaks across the preceding twelve months, subject to a floor. The practical meaning is that a quarter of an hour of heavy simultaneous use does not cost you once; it sits in a rolling average for the next year. That is why we ask what else runs in the evening before specifying a charge point, and why the answer changes the design.

It is the difference between a charger that costs you only energy and one that also raises your capacity charge. Dynamic balancing measures what the rest of the building is drawing and allocates the remainder to the car, so the total never pushes past a set ceiling. On most evenings nothing is noticeable. On the few evenings when the oven, the heat pump and the car would have coincided, the car charges a little more slowly and no new peak is created. Static limiting caps the charger at a fixed figure regardless of the house, which is cruder but still far better than nothing.

It should reduce the capacity component, and we will not put a figure on it. The amount depends on the tariff applicable to you, on your supply contract, and above all on how you actually use electricity, none of which we control. Anyone who quotes you a precise annual saving before seeing a year of your consumption is guessing, and the guess will be optimistic. What we can say is what creates a peak and what prevents one, which is the part within an installer's control.

Because of the kind of fault current it can produce. Charging equipment can generate smooth direct residual current, and a device of type AC or type A may be unable to detect it — worse, that current can impair the device so it fails to operate on faults it would otherwise catch. Protection therefore has to be a type B device, or a type A device combined with equipment detecting smooth DC residual current at six milliamps, which many chargers provide internally. The circuit is also dedicated. If a quotation does not mention any of this, it is worth asking which arrangement is being proposed.

Only if your connection carries it, which is the first thing to establish rather than the last. Many homes are on a single-phase connection that simply will not support an eleven kilowatt charge point, and raising the capacity or converting to three phase means applying to the distribution network operator, which sets the cost and the timescale. We find out before quoting. Quite often the better answer is a slower charger with good load management, because a car parked overnight does not need to be charged in forty minutes.

No, and this answer exists because one of our registered activity codes refers to the manufacture of electrical and electronic equipment for motor vehicles. We install and work on charging infrastructure and building electrical systems. We do not place electrical or electronic equipment for vehicles on the market under our own name, which would carry its own type-approval and electromagnetic compatibility obligations, and we make no declaration of conformity as a manufacturer of such equipment.