Ohme Home Pro EV Charger — Mayfair Townhouse

Installing an EV charger in a Grade II listed Mayfair townhouse is not the same as bolting a box to a garage wall. The constraints stack up quickly, and most electrical contractors walk away from the first one.

The client — a private homeowner on Mount Street — had taken delivery of a Porsche Taycan and needed a home charger. The property had three immediate complications. First, the facade was Grade II listed: no external penetrations, no visible surface-mounted cable, no charger visible from the street. Second, the electrical supply entered the property via a 100-year-old service head in the basement, and the consumer unit was a 15-year-old Wylex board with no spare ways. Third, the only viable route from the consumer unit to the parking area ran through a finished hallway with original Victorian encaustic tiles, a marble skirting, and custom joinery that the client was very clear must not be damaged.

The client had already had two contractors visit. Both had proposed surface-mounted PVC conduit running down the hallway. Both had been shown the door. What the client wanted — and what RARE understood immediately — was an installation that was invisible, safe, and respectful of the property.

RARE's Part P certified electrician carried out a full electrical load assessment on the first visit. The 100A service head had sufficient capacity for a 7kW charger, but only with dynamic load balancing — a technology that monitors the property's total electrical demand in real time and automatically reduces the charger's output when the house is drawing heavily, preventing nuisance tripping. The Ohme Home Pro was specified for exactly this capability: it communicates with the property's CT clamp and modulates charge rate dynamically, from 7kW down to 1.4kW, ensuring the charger never overloads the supply.

The consumer unit was upgraded first. The old Wylex board was replaced with a 17th Edition (Amendment 2) dual-RCD consumer unit with a dedicated 32A RCBO for the EV circuit — a circuit that, under BS 7671, must be electrically separate from the rest of the installation. This was completed in the morning, with the old board carefully disconnected and the new one commissioned and tested before lunch.

The cable run was the part that required patience and care. RARE's engineer traced an existing service void behind a section of removable skirting in the hallway — a void that had been used for the original gas pipework and was now redundant. The 6mm² SWA cable was run through this void, emerging at the rear of the property through an existing service penetration. No tiles were lifted. No skirting was cut. No surface mounting was used anywhere in the property.

Throughout the installation, the hallway was fully protected: heavy-duty dust sheets over the encaustic tiles, corner guards on the marble skirting, and protective booties on the engineer's boots. The client commented that the protection setup alone was more thorough than the entire installation process of the two previous contractors.

The Ohme Home Pro was mounted on a discreet bracket in the parking area, connected to the property's Wi-Fi for app-based scheduling and off-peak tariff integration, and commissioned with the client's Octopus Agile tariff pre-configured. The charger automatically charges the Taycan during the cheapest tariff windows overnight.