EV Charger Installation in Altona

Very few Altona houses have an integrated double garage. What you usually have is a driveway running down the boundary to a carport, a lean-to or a detached single garage near the back fence. That gives us three sensible options: mount the charger on the house wall near the meter box and let the lead reach the car, run cable along the eaves to the carport post, or take a submain to the detached garage.

The first option is nearly always the cheapest and it is the one we recommend when the car parks on the driveway anyway. Where the garage is a genuine separate structure at the rear, the cable run turns into the main piece of work, and the quote follows the metres rather than the charger brand.

Altona still has a lot of unrenovated post war homes carrying their original ceramic rewireable fuse boards. Those cannot take an EV charger. There is no spare way, no RCD protection and often a main switch that was sized when the biggest load in the house was an electric kettle and a bar heater.

A 1990s or later board with circuit breakers, RCDs and a couple of spare ways will usually take a charger straight up. A board upgrade runs $800 to $3,500 or more depending on whether the meter panel and consumer mains also need attention. We quote it as a separate line so you can see what is charger and what is catching up on twenty years of deferred electrical work.

Altona sits on the Powercor network and the residential streets are single phase. On single phase the practical ceiling is 32A, about 7.4kW, which gives you 40 to 50km of range per hour. Plug in after dinner with a quarter charge and the car is full before breakfast. For a household driving 40 to 60km a day, that is finished technology.

Converting a single phase supply to three phase purely to charge faster overnight is rarely worth the money in Altona. The upgrade involves the distributor, new consumer mains and a new board, and the car still sits in the driveway for the same twelve hours. We will say so rather than quote you the bigger job.

Altona is a bay suburb and the air carries salt. We see it constantly on outdoor isolators, antenna fixings and condenser coils. An EV charger is a sealed outdoor rated unit and it copes, but the fixings, the gland plates and the isolator beside it are what corrode first.

Where there is a carport or an eave, we mount under it. Where there is not, we choose a wall that does not take the full westerly weather and use stainless fixings rather than the plated screws that come in the box. It is a fifteen dollar difference on the day and it is the reason the unit is still solid in year eight.

Every EV charger install is prescribed electrical work. It gets its own final subcircuit back to the board, a breaker sized for continuous load, and RCD protection of the correct type for DC leakage under AS/NZS 3000. There is no legitimate version of this job that shares a circuit with your power points.