EV chargers
EV Charger Installation
The charger is the cheap part. Whether your service can carry it is the whole question, and there is a cheaper answer than most people get offered.
The charger is the cheap part. Two things decide what an EV charger installation costs: how far it sits from the panel, and whether your service has room for a forty-amp continuous load once everything else in the house has been counted.
The load calculation comes first
A level 2 charger counts as a continuous load, which means it goes into the sums at 125 percent of its rating. Your 40 A charger is calculated as 50 A.
On a 100 A service already running an electric range, a dryer and a heat pump, there is frequently no room at all. The honest answer then is a service upgrade first, rather than a charger that trips your main every time somebody puts the oven on.
The answer most people never get offered
Ask about an energy management system before you accept a service upgrade quote.
It sheds the charger when other big loads run, so the charger and the range never draw at the same moment. Because the calculation is really about that coincident peak, preventing it can make a charger work on a service the arithmetic says is full — for a fraction of the cost of upgrading.
It is not right for every house. If your service is genuinely undersized for the building it serves, the upgrade is the correct spend and the management system is a patch on a real problem. But it belongs on the table, and it usually is not put there.
Then there is the run
A charger on the garage wall directly behind the panel is a short job and a short invoice.
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. Different quote entirely. Around here that second case is common, because a lot of the housing is not on a suburban lot — the properties out past Bracebridge and Parry Sound especially.
Cottages have their own wrinkle
Places on the bay and through Muskoka sit empty for stretches, usually on a small service, and the owner wants the car charged by the time they arrive on Friday evening.
That points at scheduling and load management rather than at a bigger charger. There is no benefit to charging fast when the car has been sitting in the same spot since Sunday.
Talk to a Midland electrical contractor
Tell us three things: the town, roughly when the building went up, and what the panel looks like — fuses or breakers, and the number on the main. That is usually enough to say whether you are looking at an afternoon, a scheduled job, or a conversation with your distributor first. Often enough to price it, too, without anybody driving anywhere.