HACKER Q&A
📣 readonthegoapp

How did you get the electric car charger fixed at your apt complex?


How did you get the electric car charger fixed at your apt complex?


  👤 ggm Accepted Answer ✓
Sidebar comment, not EV owner yet. We asked for 10amp ringmain to as many apt carparks as possible, owners paid. We get a minimeter off the mains, so it can be accounted for. Five of us paid for what I think is up to ten future fits in a 420 apt complex.

Nothing like as good as a proper charge port, but it didn't require a new 3phase delivery from the street. We expect to get trickle charge benefit at car park and share fast charge at the few places we can budget for as a body. Adding high load boards into the basement is not cheap but with exposed ducting at least the cabling isn't bad. The main cost is the new pad mount transformer on the street and fixing local supply: older buildings have lower quality Volts coming in off the network basically. (OK the fast charge hardware isn't cheap but I'm talking the infrastructure one level back) the body corporate is nervous about this cost. The 10amp ring main was so cheap it glided in on cost recovery to specific owners who asked for it. I do not care if some johnny-come-lately dodges some cost, its worth it to me right now to have guaranteed power at my park.

This is retrofit to a 7 year old build. 1 block away has EV charge stations built in from day #1 including public charge but has retail as co build tenancies. Another got ringmain to every carpark. New design spec requires some minimum eg 2 per complex > 50 units (this is eg. I have no idea what the spec is) and also requires bicycle storage.

Queensland, Australia.


👤 speedgoose
It was simple because the apartment complex was relatively new and was ready to have a charger at every spot, with load balancing and energy measuring for billing. About half of the spots had a charger installed and mine didn’t because the previous owner didn’t think it was necessary.

I asked the board to get one, and their contractor installed it.