EV chargers
EV Charger Installation
A level 2 charger is a continuous forty-amp load. Whether your service can carry it is the whole question, and it is answered before the charger is chosen.
The charger is the cheap part. What decides the price of an EV install is the distance from the panel, and whether the service has room for a forty-amp continuous load once everything else in the house is counted.
The load calculation comes first
A level 2 charger is treated as a continuous load, which means it is counted at 125 percent of its rating. On a 100 A service already carrying an electric range, a dryer and a heat pump, there is frequently no room, and the honest answer is a service upgrade before a charger rather than a charger that trips the main.
There is a second path worth asking about: an energy management system that sheds the charger when other loads run. It can make a charger work on a service that a straight calculation says is full, and it is far cheaper than a service upgrade.
What the run costs
A charger on the garage wall directly behind the panel is a short job. A charger at a detached garage forty metres down a rural driveway is a trenched feeder, a subpanel and a grounding electrode at the far end, and it is a different quote entirely. In this region the second case is common, because a lot of the housing is not on a suburban lot.
Seasonal properties and the cottage charger
Cottage installs on the bay and through Muskoka have their own wrinkle: the property is unoccupied for long stretches, the service is often small, and the owner wants the car charged by the time they arrive. That points at scheduling and load management rather than at a bigger charger.
Talk to a Midland electrical contractor
Tell us the town, roughly when the building was put up, and what the panel looks like — fuses or breakers, and the number on the main. Those three things decide whether you are looking at an afternoon, a scheduled job, or a conversation with your distributor first, and they are usually enough to price it without anybody driving anywhere.