This video is quite a bit different from my usual subject matter.
I know my subscribers largely didn’t subscribe for this, but I hope you’ll find it at least
somewhat interesting and/or thought provoking.
Anyone who’s browsed my older videos knows that I drive a Chevy Volt, and when it came
time to get my own place to live, I ended up signing the next 30 years of my life over
to a bank and “bought” a condo, or at least will have done so by 2046.
That hurts to say out loud.
Now a large part of why I got my Volt (a used 2013 model) back in 2015 was that I didn’t
know what living situation I’d be in when I got out of school, and I didn’t want to
discover I couldn’t get around with a pure EV.
From when I moved in September of 2016 until May 1st of 2017, I could only charge it at
work, which still got me around 70 miles per gallon as the 8 and a half hours of charging
from a 110 outlet would pretty much take me one way.
But it felt like a waste as my 70 mile commute could have been 100% electric if only I could
also charge at home.
I really wanted to install an EV charging station in my parking spot, but didn’t really
know how to get that done.
Well...
This is my parking spot, and as you can see, there’s an EV charging station on the wall.
In this video, I want to share my experience with you.
More than anything this is storytime, but I hope that this video can serve as both an
inspirational video to those who want to install an EVSE and are in a situation like mine,
and as a resource for property owners/managers who would like ideas of how to handle a request
from a unit owner or renter to install a charger.
First, who should you talk to?
This will obviously depend on your building’s ownership and management, but a good place
to start is almost certainly your building’s management company if you have one.
I’ll start out by saying that currently, condo owners will probably have it much easier
than apartment renters.
Because condominium owners generally have a percentage ownership of the real property
itself, you have more weight on the decisions that get made.
For example, in the deed to my unit is exclusive use of the portion of the common area that
is my parking space.
Essentially I own easement rights to this space, and so long as I don’t break any
rules, it’s mine to deal with.
People in rental apartments have to convince the owners that installing a charging station
would be a good investment for encouraging new rentals or maintaining current residents.
That might be hard.
If you live in a condo building, the management company is probably gonna tell you that you
need to bring this up with the homeowners association.
Cool.
To make this as frictionless as possible, you should make clear that you in no way want
to be a burden to the association or your fellow owners.
I think in general no one should expect the association to pay for even part of your installation,
particularly since you’ll probably be the only one who can use the charger, at least
initially.
I approached the condo board in two steps, which will probably be how you’ll have to
do it, too.
The first thing I did was find a good contact.
It turns out that the board member who gave me my welcoming orientation and who in general
was an awesome resource was board president.
So that was handy.
I worked with her as well as the property manager to explain what I wanted to do, and
asked if I could arrange for some electricians to investigate how we would get power to the
spot, and how much the installation would cost.
We worked together to create a proposal for the board, and at the meeting in February,
the board approved my request.
So I started looking for electricians.
Note that they did not approve the installation, merely the information search.
Here’s a word of advice: look for far more bids than you think you want.
I contacted four electricians, and only one actually managed to show up.
I don’t know if this was due to the fact that they didn’t want to work with a condo
building or what, but keep that in mind.
The one electrician who did show his face gave me a proposal that was unsettling, but
this was largely due to distance.
On that note, a bit about technicalities.
Every building is unique.
Obviously.
And there are a whole lot of factors that will influence how your installation gets
done.
The biggest among them is how power is distributed in the building.
Ideally, the electric meters for the units would be located in or near to the garage.
If this were the case, it would be pretty straight forward for an electrician to run
a new circuit from that meter.
If your building is set up like this, congratulations!
You’ve got it easy.
If the supply can be tapped from the unit owner’s (or renter’s) meter, the only
thing to get sorted is how to run the wiring.
I wasn’t so lucky.
My building is pretty old, circa 1975-ish, and as such the need for metered electricity
to parking spots was in nobody’s mind at the time it was built.
Inside this electrical room, you will find only one electric meter--that for the common
supply of the building--hallways and parking lot lights, common area A/C, the garage heaters,
etc.
And therein lies the biggest issue.
You see, the electric meters for the units are on the floors, with this area only having
these large Buck-Rodgersy Zinsco service disconnects that each feed two floors.
The meters for individual units are on the floors, and there was no feasible way to run
wiring back downstairs into the electrical room.
Like most large buildings, we’ve got a three phase electrical supply.
Three phase electricity is, weird, at least to someone who has never dealt with anything
but general household split phase service.
But, it’s not a concern for EV charging.
In fact, you might want to make this clear to your electrician.
When he gave me my first estimate, my electrician thought I would need a step-up transformer
to bring the 208v supplied by the three-phase panels up to 240V.
You should know this is completely unnecessary.
You see, the people who were coming up with the standards for EV charging, namely the
Society of Automotive Engineers, knew that 208/120 three phase power is common as dirt
in large industrial buildings in the US, and as such, it would really suck if EV’s couldn’t
charge from this voltage.
So, they made sure that they can, and most if not all EV charging units will accept this
voltage.
The fact that my electrician apparently didn’t know this was, shall I say, concerning.
To his credit, upon showing him in the installation instructions for my EVSE that it can in fact
be run on two legs of a three-phase supply, he quickly corrected the estimate.
As a side note, if you are working with 208 volts for your installation, you should know
this will have an impact on charge time.
My Clipper Creek HCS-40 supplies the car with 32 amps, which is 7.7 kW of power at standard
split phase 240.
At 208 volts, this is only 6.6 kW charging, or about 86% of that at 240.
When sizing your charger, you should keep this in mind.
My Chevy Volt only accepts 3.3 kW so this is a bit overkill at this point, but I like
to keep the future in mind.
Back to the installation.
My initial estimate was about 5 thousand dollars.
That made my heart sink a lot.
I was prepared to spend around 2 thousand, especially since local code requires hard
pipe conduit for the entire install, with armored cable being out of the question.
But 5 was outlandish.
Turns out, more than half of that cost was due to installation length.
Back to that tricky logistics crap.
This is a map of our garage’s layout, not to scale.
My spot when I moved in was here.
That meant electricity had to get all the way from the electrical room to this spot.
The longer you go, the beefier your wire gauge has to be, which means not only is more conduit
and labor needed, but the wire gauge had to go from 8 gauge up to 2 gauge.
Yikes.
As I was singing the blues to our board president about how expensive it would be, I jokingly
offered to switch spots with her.
You see, this is her spot.
Much closer to the electric room.
And much to my surprise, she was on board.
In fact she was elated because her spot kinda sucks.
You have to navigate your car between a column and a wall, like this.
With her Ford Edge, her car at the time she bought her unit, this was a chore to say the
least.
She actually downsized to the Escape because of her spot.
We agreed to change spaces, and this brought the cost of my installation down to just under
two thousand dollars.
This was certainly a matter of luck, so I don’t expect your experience to be the same.
But in case you do run into a similar opportunity, you should know that because the use of the
space is included in the deed, we had to send a form to the County Recorder’s office to
legally change spaces.
Exciting.
This is the last part unique to my installation, and then I’ll spin the focus a bit back
to the side of property managers and HOA boards.
Because we could only get power from the common supply, it would only be fair to account for
my electricity use and reimburse the association.
I don’t want anyone paying for my fuel, and neither does the board.
Initially, I thought it would be easy to use the reports generated from OnStar to determine
my usage, but there were two headwinds.
First was that this shows consumption from the battery, not from the wall, so the consumption
here will be low.
Second was that I also charge at work.
In fact close to 50% of this figure comes from my free electricity at work.
I had worked out a way to account for the number of charges at work in a month, and
even built a Google Sheets doc to calculate this, but I realized this would be a pain
and it also might leave room for suspicion of false accounting.
Therefore, I asked my electrician how much it would cost to install a sub-meter on the
charger, where everyone could see the amount of electricity my vehicle was responsible
for.
It would add about $500 to the install, which I thought was reasonable.
So, I approached the board at the next meeting with my proposal, estimate, certificate of
insurance from the electrician, and a little something else.
If your board is only familiar with the giant display-like EV charging stations at malls,
they might be put-off by thinking about that monstrosity being in the garage.
I had already purchased my EVSE from Clipper Creek, and decided to use a little photo-shop
trickery to allow the board to see roughly what this would look like when finished.
And with no hesitation, it was approved.
On May 1st the install was completed, and since then I’ve driven over 6,000 miles
and since roughly half of my charging is free at work, it’s cost me about 90 bucks.
With gas prices around $2.50, this is like driving a car that gets 166 mpg.
And that’s why I wanted to do this.
At the beginning of each month, I send in my latest consumption figure along with a
check to cover the cost to my association via the management company.
I’m sure we could work out a deal where my monthly assessments are increased by 25
dollars or so to cover my charging, but I’m worried that when I sell my unit, the assessment
amount won’t be corrected back.
For now, I’m content spending a few minutes to write and mail a check to save over 75
bucks every month.
And now, here’s some things for property managers to consider.
Firstly, who pays for it?
If this is for one individual, obviously that individual.
You should also make clear who’s responsible for the actual charging station.
As I financed the installation, the charging station, wires, conduit running to it, and
the circuit breaker inside the electrical panel are all essentially my property and
my problem.
Although it’s in the common area, I know that should anything go wrong with it, that’s
on me.
It may be wise to have that established in writing if you’re worried about someone
pulling a fast one.
But here’s another angle: especially for those apartment building owners, you could
make this a profit center.
If you install a bank of charging stations, you could charge a premium parking fee for
these spots.
Combined with time-of-use metering, this could be a significant profit center if charging
were limited to off-peak hours.
Condo associations could do the same thing, perhaps to boost reserves.
However, you should be careful with your fees.
If your fees make operating an EV approach the cost of conventional fuels, you won’t
get any takers.
One of the central issues will be that of expansion.
What happens when someone else wants to do this?
Well, there’s no reason the next person couldn’t go through the same process as
the person before.
However, there will eventually be the issue of building capacity.
From my untrained eye, the capacity of our electrical room suggests that perhaps another
4 to 5 people could install a 40 amp charger before something else has to be done.
There are some chargers available now that can share a set capacity supply, and they
automatically halve the charging rate between two cars if both are plugged in simultaneously,
and will provide the full output if only one is plugged in.
This could potentially double the number of available chargers, at the occasional expense
of speed.
For the record, I will totally let the next person in my building who wants an EV share
my installation’s supply.
So person in the spot next to me, let me know.
Still, 10 chargers in a 57 spot garage is not too impressive.
I suspect that as EVs become more popular, local utility companies will have to start
adding infrastructure and coming up with new service schemes in garages and parking lots
with metered EVSE solutions.
To be honest, I’m surprised utilities aren’t going hog wild to start these sorts of programs.
Their product is essentially electricity after all, so why not find new ways to sell it?
If they built a bank of chargers and arranged a way for the owner of a particular car to
be billed for their usage, that’s just more money for them.
But I digress.
Reimbursing the association for electricity consumption might require creating a new line-item
in the budget.
If residents want to pay for electricity as it’s consumed, as I do, a new source of
income has appeared.
Might I suggest coding it as miscellaneous revenue, if such a line-item doesn’t already
exist, or simply add it to the operational fund since it is in effect a supplemental
assessment.
Lastly, anyone worried that the electric bill will go nuts from a unit owner going this
route, may I suggest you hold your horses.
Last year, my condo association spent $17,000 on electricity Just for the common elements.
At the rate I’m going, my car will add less than 2 percent to that amount.
No big deal.
I hope you found this video useful, informative, thought provoking, or something along those
lines.
I’m a real advocate for electric vehicles for many reasons, and cost is a big one.
I may have spent $2,500 getting this installed, but I spend much less money on fuel compared
to my old car (a 36 mpg compact).
If I don’t change my commute or charging habits, this station will have paid for itself
in less than 3 years assuming gas stays around $2.50 per gallon.
And I’ll tell you a neat trick to beating that premium price point of electric cars:
buy a used one.
Thanks for watching.