Can I charge my car in a socket?
Yes, but you shouldn’t because of fire hazards.
In 2018, more than half of Norwegian electric car owners charged their cars through regular household sockets. In 2022, the Norwegian Electrotechnical Committee (NEK) made it illegal* to install a regular socket as a charging point. The reason was simple: fire safety.
The battery requires a lot of power, regardless of which car you have. And since your car needs so much power stored in its battery to drive, it will probably pull more power than any other electrical appliance in your home. With that much power, there’s a risk of overheating and fire. Unlike a dedicated EV charger, a socket is simply not equipped to handle the amount of electricity needed to charge a car battery.
It’s not the first time high-power appliance has left the socket either. New regulations made it a requirement to wire water heaters directly to the fusebox in 2010. Before that, in Norway at least, it was common to have them plugged into a random, regular socket. But water heaters shared the same risk of causing overheating and fire as an electrical car, so regulatory bodies stepped in to remove those risks by banning regular sockets as a source of power.
Emergency charger vs ev charger
So, know you know why it’s risky to charge your car in a socket. Most houses have a few sockets on the exterior wall of the house, and many garages have electricity installed. When you buy an electric car, you get a charging cable that fits snugly into these sockets, so no one would fault you for intuitively expecting it to be safe to use a socket to charge your car.
But that cable is called an ‘emergency charger’ for a reason: you’re only supposed to use it in an emergency, when there are no other options available and you don’t have enough battery power to get to a dedicated EV charger. In the simplest of terms, regular sockets were designed, engineered and installed to power simpler things than cars.
An EV charger, on the other hand, can handle a much higher load than a socket, and it includes extra safety features. With an EV charger, it’s also completely safe to charge your electric car while you sleep. You can safely plug in your EV before going to bed with peace of mind – and wake up to a fully charged battery in the morning.
*The Norwegian national ban on installing a standard socket as a charging point only applies to new installations. It’s still legal to charge your EV using a dedicated socket that has been installed before 01.06.2022, given that it’s in accordance with NEK 400, the Norwegian Electrotechnical Committee’s installation standard.
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