“Do not increase the power at home. Turning it up and not taking advantage of it is wasting money”

In the first six months of 2026, 63,201 electric cars have been purchased in Spain, according to ANFAC data. Its market share is already close to 10% and in June it exceeded one more point. The growth compared to 2025 is 36.69%. If we add plug-in hybrids to this data, 21.79% of the cars purchased in our country have a zero-emissions label.

To understand what we need if we want to buy one of these cars and the cases that revolve around installing a plug, we have spoken with Antonio José Pérez, CEO and co-founder of My Car Charger.

a boom. “Since 2023 we have no truce. Since the beginning of Moves II Planspecifically. When you set up the business you have to be knocking on all the doors and sowing the seed, insisting a lot when sending a budget; but now there is no time, the clients come to you. Since 2023 we are not in Christmas, nor in summer, nor anything. This doesn’t let up. Last year I was only able to take a week’s vacation in June,” explains Antonio José Pérez about the boom that the plug-in car is experiencing in our country.

Also, they explain to us, “we offered training to salespeople because they know about the car, they have the information on the specifications, but when a client asks them: ‘Well, where do I charge this? Can I take advantage of my solar panel installation to charge the car?’, well, they didn’t know.

The aids. From Mi Car Charger they explain that one of the reasons why the electric car seems to be taking off is the aid. Antonio José explains that the MOVES II Plan was a before and after. Later the third edition of the same project arrived and today the Auto+ Plan. “Waiting for it, many people are waiting for it. It was said that it was going to be in May, after the end of July… at the moment, nothing“, they remind us.

And it was promised that the Auto+ Plan would be ready in January 2026 and that the aid discount would be applied at the time of purchase. At the moment it is announced but not active and it has been said that it will be retroactive to January 1. This implies that there are companies advancing aid with interest-free loans but It is money that the client has to return because, supposedly, at some point that help will come in.

Of course, they are aid for the purchase of cars and this time a subsidy for the installation of the charger is not contemplated. “I always say that the aid has little help if you have to pay 100% at the beginning, receive it over time and, to make matters worse, pay it on income the following year. In the end, what was going to be 70% ends up being much less,” the company complains.

And how much does it cost? The installation of a charger for an electric car varies greatly depending on whether we live in an individual house or store the car in a community garage. And the fact is that in a house it is very easy to reach the electrical network and pull the cable to where the charger is most convenient, not so in a garage where the square will be more or less far from the meter panel.

“In a single-family home it usually takes about 3 or 4 hours of work. The charger has a more or less fixed price, but what varies is the meter of wiring, the labor and the amount of material. It usually ranges between 1,200 and 1,500 euros with VAT,” explains Antonio José Pérez.

The difference with a community garage is “the hours of work and the meter of cable,” he emphasizes. And being more or less close to the meter panel varies a lot in the final bill. “We connect from there and we have to see the path to the garage.”

The neighbors. “You have to see if the line passes over a neighbor’s square. If you have to drill a hole there, you have to ask for permission to work in their square for that time because logically there can’t be any cars,” they tell us from Mi Car Charger. That can be a problem.

“Normally nothing happens, although in Seville we had the case of a neighbor who was an opponent of the electric car and did not want to see one near his square. We looked for an alternative on the route. We had to go around more and pull more meters of cable, which makes the installation more expensive because you always look for the shortest path, but in the end it was done,” he explains to us.

Can I refuse to have them work on my garage space? The point is that in a community garage, the owner of the electric car You just have to inform the community of owners of the works but it cannot deny you the right to mount the charger. But a parking space, its space, is private.

“We have even been presented with the Civil Guard in some installation. There is a figure that is the right of way. If your garage space falls in the way of the common services, such as the meter room, you are obliged to allow work to be done in your garage space. Although luckily we have never had to use that figure,” Antonio José Pérez explains to us.

Essential. “What I recommend, and it almost comes from the factory, is that it has dynamic charging. It is what is called the ‘power balancer’. If you have 4 kW contracted, the system distributes those 4 kW between the consumption of the house and the charger. If less is consumed in the house, the more power the charger has. It is an intelligent load.

And finally, another essential: “support is paramount. We have been testing many brands from the beginning and in the end we have been limiting the number of brands and models because we do not want the client to have problems, nor do we. It is not a dish of good taste to receive calls or WhatsApp from clients at all hours with errors and have to eat your head without technical support behind you.”

And what can we forget about? There are clients who ask you for a charger with many functionalities and I ask them: But are you really going to use them? Because you are going to pay too much. The ideal is that it fulfills the functions that the client needs.

For example, there are hourly programmable chargers. This is interesting to prioritize slow charging at night when electricity is cheaper, but the installer recommends using the car’s functions for the latter, which most already include because he considers it more convenient than doing it from the charger or the latter’s application.

The debate about power. “They always ask us if it is necessary to increase the power and we tell them: ‘Try with what you have’. If you have 3.5 kW, try. If you find yourself short, you will increase it. Paying more every month to go up to 4.6 or 5 kW and then not using that power is wasting money“, they advance us.

The key is, they assure from My Car Charger, in the type of use of it. “If they tell me that they travel 15 kilometers round trip to move around the metropolitan area and take a long trip a couple of times a year, I tell them to try what they have. Another thing is if they are a salesperson or a teacher who travels perfectly 150 kilometers a day; then you do need more power because the night may be short for you to fully charge the battery,” they clarify.

And at night, if the client has contracted 3.5 kW (a typical power in a single-family home), “it would charge at about 3.2 or 3.3 kW. With the house in night maintenance mode, the rest goes to the charger. If you go to bed at 11 and get up at 7, you have 8 hours available with almost all the power for the car.”

What if I don’t have a garage? Antonio José Pérez, in addition to co-founder of Mi Cargador de Coche, is known for his activity on social networks as X. There he published the case of a neighbor who took his plug to the street. Is this possible?

He tells us the story:

It was a very particular case because the client had a vision of the future. He lives in a town in Seville, on a fairly wide street with little traffic where the neighbors respect the square in front of their door. When he built his new house, he asked the bricklayer to leave a buried pipe from the garage to the curb. How we knew that curb chargers were being tested in Germanywhat we did was place the protected charger inside his garage and run the wires through the tube to a watertight connector embedded in the curb. The bricklayer adapted the hole to the size of the type 2 connector. The customer arrives, connects his conventional hose from the car to the curb and loads. He assumes the risk that if one day another neighbor parks there, he will not be able to charge his car.

The case is especially particular because, he explains, he had to ask permission from the City Council and from there they granted it. “They asked him if he could mount it at the front, because they wanted to see how it worked to replicate it in more areas of the town. The city council was on board. The only real risk is that the curb connector is not magnetically locked like the one on the car, so anyone could come and unplug the hose, although they can’t take it because on the other side it is closed inside the garage. Since it is a quiet street, he hasn’t had any problems,” he explains.

Photo | My Car Charger and Maxim Hopman

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