About EV Charger Data

EV Charger Data compares home EV chargers on what their manufacturers publish, measured against what the rest of the category publishes. We do not test chargers, and we are not electricians.

Why this site exists

An EV charger is bought once, kept for a decade, and chosen from listings that make it genuinely hard to compare like with like. Output appears in amps on one listing and kilowatts on the next. “Level 2” covers everything from a 16 A travel unit to a 48 A wall box. And the specification that decides what the installation costs — the circuit the charger requires — appears on almost none of them.

Reading one listing tells you very little. Reading 71 of them, normalised into the same units, tells you what an ordinary charger in each class looks like. The median here outputs 40 A and needs a 50 A breaker.

What we do

We collect charger listings, extract every specification the manufacturer publishes, convert them into consistent units, and compute a baseline for each install method, output class and connector. Every page then measures individual units against the baseline for their own class, and every unit carries the breaker its output implies.

The work that matters most is the cleaning. Adapters and extension cords outnumber chargers in these search results, and they publish an amperage and a connector exactly as a charger does. Each one is excluded before any figure is published, and the methodology page documents exactly how.

What we do not do

We do not physically test chargers. No unit described on this site has drawn current for us. We say so on every page rather than implying hands-on experience we do not have.

We are also not electricians, and nothing here is electrical advice. The breaker figures on this site are the manufacturer’s published output multiplied by 1.25 and rounded up to the next standard size, which is what the continuous-load rule requires. They are arithmetic, offered so you know what to expect before you call someone. They are not a design, they say nothing about your panel’s capacity or the wire a run needs, and they do not replace a licensed electrician or a permit.

We do not publish star ratings or review counts, and we do not publish exact prices — where price context is needed, we describe a band. Where a manufacturer has not published a specification, we print not stated.

Who writes this

Imogen Halvard, Editor, is the byline on this site. Imogen is a pen name, and we would rather say so plainly than let a fabricated biography do work it has not earned. There are no trade credentials behind it, and there should not be: a site that states on every page that it does not test chargers and is not an electrician has no business presenting a licensed one as its author.

What stands behind the figures is the method, not the persona. It is written down, it is repeatable, and where it fails we would rather publish the gap than paper over it.

Why baselines, and not verdicts

Most buying advice ends in a ranking. Rankings are useful when someone has genuinely tested the field. Where nobody has tested anything, a ranking is an opinion dressed as a result, and the confidence it projects is the part that misleads.

A baseline makes a weaker claim and keeps it: here is what an ordinary charger of this install type and this output class looks like, and here is where this one sits against it. That is a fact about the market rather than a judgement about the product, and it is the strongest honest thing a site without a lab can offer.

The limits, stated plainly

This site inherits every weakness of its source. If a manufacturer publishes an optimistic output, we repeat it. If a listing omits a specification, we cannot supply it. If a charger is sold only through electrical wholesalers and never appears in the catalogue we read, it is absent from our baselines entirely and we will not know it is missing.

Coverage is uneven in ways that constrain what can be compared. Enclosure ratings, operating temperature range and warranty terms are all too sparsely published to compare fairly, so we offer no comparison rather than one built on the fraction of listings that happen to state them.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is worth more to us to know than to look right. Specification errors are usually traceable, and all of them are fixable.