EV Charger Installation in Sunshine

The un-subdivided Sunshine stock commonly still has its original board. No residual current protection, rewireable fuses or early breakers, and a main switch sized for a household that had one heater and no air conditioning.

A charger cannot go on that, and nor should a modern kitchen. Board replacement runs $800 to $3,500 depending on the meter panel and the consumer mains. The upside is that these homes usually have a driveway down one side and a garage or carport at the rear, so once the board is right the charger circuit is simple and the whole job stays at the lower end of the range.

The new multi unit developments have excellent switchboards. RCDs on everything, spare ways, correctly rated main switches. What they have instead is a physical problem. Single or tandem garages under living space, shared driveways, and meter panels frequently banked together on a common wall rather than sitting on your own dwelling.

That determines the cable route and sometimes determines whether you need owners corporation consent. If the charger position or the route crosses common property, you need written approval before we install. We check the arrangement at the site visit and supply the technical detail for an application if one is required.

Townhouse developments here have limited roof area each, and a lot of it faces the wrong way or is broken up by a skillion and a service penetration. A 3 to 5kW array is common, and after household daytime use there is often not much surplus left to push into a car.

That does not make a smart charger pointless, it just changes what you use it for. Scheduling against an off peak tariff is where the money is in a Sunshine townhouse. On the older homes with a full sized roof and a 6.6kW array, solar tracking becomes genuinely worthwhile and we set it up at commissioning.

Sunshine has a high proportion of rental properties, and tenants ask us about chargers regularly. A fixed charger is a permanent alteration to the property, so it needs the owner in writing before we can install it. Some landlords are happy to fund it as a property improvement, and some will agree to the tenant paying.

Where that conversation is not going anywhere, the honest fallback is a properly protected dedicated 10A outlet if one can be justified, which adds roughly 10km of range per hour and suits low daily distances. It is a fraction of the cost and it does not commit anyone to a permanent installation.

Whichever side of Sunshine you are on, the standard is the same. EV charging equipment is prescribed electrical work. The charger takes its own final subcircuit back to the board, cable sized for a continuous rather than an occasional load, a correctly rated breaker and RCD protection suited to DC leakage under AS/NZS 3000.

It cannot share a circuit with your power points or your lights, and it has to be installed by a licensed Registered Electrical Contractor who issues a Certificate of Electrical Safety at the end. We do that under REC 37223, commission the unit at its configured current, confirm it delivers what it claims, and guarantee our workmanship for 12 months.