EV Charger Installation in Armstrong Creek

Every house here is on slab with no subfloor, so a new circuit cannot be run under the floor the way it can in an older weatherboard. New circuits generally go through the roof space instead, which is straightforward on a new truss roof but limits where a run can drop down a wall.

In practice that is rarely a problem, because the board is usually in or beside the attached garage and the charger goes on the garage wall a few metres away. It becomes relevant when someone wants the charger on the far side of the house or on a rear pergola post, and it is worth knowing before you settle on a position.

Everything here was built to current wiring rules, so residual current protection and a compliant board are already in place. There is no ceramic fuse conversation, no rubber wiring in the roof, and usually no board replacement line on the quote at all.

What we still check is spare ways and headroom. A new Armstrong Creek home commonly runs ducted reverse cycle, induction cooking, a heat pump hot water service and sometimes a battery inverter, all on a single phase supply. Adding a 32A continuous load to that gets calculated properly rather than assumed.

Greenfield lots of 350 to 550 square metres on 12.5 to 16 metre frontages with double garages to the boundary leave a 900mm path on one side only. Homes are close together, which matters less for a charger than it does for a heat pump because a charger is silent, but it does affect where conduit and an isolator can physically sit.

The other consequence is that the garage is genuinely the right place for the unit here. It is sheltered, it is next to the board, the car is inside it, and it keeps the whole installation off an external wall that is a metre from a neighbouring dwelling.

The estates were built single phase on the Powercor network, so 32A and about 7.4kW is the ceiling. That gives 40 to 50km of range per hour, and for a household commuting to Melbourne it recovers a long round trip in a few hours overnight on an off peak schedule.

A growing number of homes here have solar and a battery as well, and the three systems have to be told what their priorities are or they fight each other. Left alone, a battery will happily discharge into the car overnight, which achieves nothing except an extra cycle on the battery. We set solar surplus for daylight, grid off peak for overnight, and leave the battery to cover the evening.

EV charging equipment is prescribed electrical work. The charger takes its own final subcircuit back to the board, cable sized for a continuous load, a correctly rated breaker and RCD protection suited to DC leakage under AS/NZS 3000. It cannot share a circuit with the garage power points, however tempting that looks on a new build.

Powercor is told about the load addition through the connection process, and where the incoming supply is constrained they can require load management as a condition rather than approving unrestricted current. We commission the unit at its configured current and issue the Certificate of Electrical Safety under REC 37223.