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Just one should be fine. I believe there are regulations about quantities of flammable fluids that may be stored in ordinary premises. One BBQ gas bottle would be under that limit. The cars have on average a few 10s of litres of highly flammable fluid. Fortunately, gas bottles and petrol tanks are designed to be robust with low risks of leaking.
The remaining members of the EC can appoint another OC member to fill the casual vacancy. Since you will no longer have a chair, the EC will also need to elect one member of the EC to be the new chair.
Re 3) I would suggest the best solution is to propose a motion to amend the existing by-law to swap the allocation of the two parking spaces without changing any of the terms and conditions there might be attached to the use of parking spaces generally. Then register the by-law as amended. The motion could be proposed and seconded by the two unit owners that would benefit from the swap. Nobody else would have grounds to oppose.
…the off plan apartment I’m buying in Melbourne… has recently added the option to include an EV charger for my car space. Unfortunately they can only supply them for around 50% of the available car spaces…
They really should be able to supply them for all. My guess is that
1) They are making them faster than they need to be. They could have have twice as many (i.e.100%) if their power rating were halved. Charging at home does not need to be fast.
2) They are probably relatively high powered outlets 7kW (32A single phase) or 11kW (15A, 3 phase) without a load management system. Consequently, they have to factor in the possibility of all being used at the same time as the evening peak load of the building and they didn’t want to pay for a higher powered supply from the street. If they were load managed, they could have them in 100% of the parking spaces without needing a higher supply from the street. With load management, the chargers would operate at lower power at times of high demand from the rest of the building but then ramp up their output when the building demand was lower, overnight and through the day.
The numbers of fires per 100,000 electric vehicles is about 5-fold fewer than for ICE vehicles. I can’t see how an OC could be held liable for housing road registered vehicles that comply with Australian Design Rules in their car park. I have never seen any suggestion that I could not park my electric car in any public car park. Why would a private strata car park need more stringent restrictions? If insurers were concerned, I think they would have an exclusion already or they would be asking their policy holders.
Where I live, we have an email address that redirects to whoever is a member of the current committee. That way, residents always know a reliable way to get in touch even as committee composition changes from year to year. It helps that the whole committee gets to see any matter being raised. It increases the chance that any urgent matter will be dealt with promptly as there will usually be at least one of us on site at any particular time.
One option would be to buy a couple of Ikea portable induction single ring cooktops. They could sit on top of the damaged cooktop. They are about $50 each and work well plugged into an ordinary power point. We have one we carry in our camper trailer. Since you plan to leave in 6 months, this would give you something good to cook on now and you can take them with you. With the pressure for a quick solution removed, you can explore the options others have suggested at a more leisurely pace.
Our strata committee received a request to use a common property power socket to charge a battery for an electric bicycle… The occupier agreed to install an in-line meter for billing purposes and the strata committee was able to approve the minor works.
I bet the cost of installing the meter was more than cost of the electricity that an electric bicycle would consume in a very long time. For such a low level of consumption, I suggest it would have been more reasonable to calculate the likely consumption over a year (A generous calculation might be 10 cents per day x 365), round it up and request a payment that would be certain to more than cover the expense, say $50 for the year.
It is the same in the ACT. The remaining committee may (not must) appoint an eligible person to fill a casual vacancy until the next AGM when a whole new committee is elected.
In the ACT, at least, don’t know for NSW, the chair of the committee has a vote as a member of the committee and also a casting vote if a committee vote is split 50:50. Depending on what you think of the chair, you may or may not want to let the chair know!
It could be good politics to call for expressions of interest from among the owners or it could be quite reasonable to just invite someone who got substantial support but just missed out on being elected at the AGM. It might also be reasonable for the 4 remaining members to just carry on till the next AGM bearing in mind that the chair could break any deadlocked vote (in the ACT at least).
…mediation agreements aren’t binding even if signed by the strata manager which happened to me…
In the ACT Tribunal at least (I expect other Tribunals operate similarly), if an agreement is reached during mediation/directions hearing, whatever is agreed is made into ‘consent orders’ so long as the parties agree and none of it would be actually illegal. The Tribunal member might privately think some aspect of the agreement is nuts but holds their tongue if all are happy to agree. Consent orders are proper orders of the Tribunal and must be complied with. If a party later goes back on the agreement, the recourse is to seek an enforcement order from the Magistrates Court. The Magistrates Court will order compliance and does not review the merits of the Tribunal’s orders.
At the outset it is important to consider what most owners would want for EV charging both now & into the future & aim to set up accordingly…
While that is a noble sentiment, most people might know what they want but don’t know what they really need for charging. They tend to err on the side of caution and think they need much faster charging that most people really do. They also tend to focus on the time it would take to charge from fully discharged to 100% charged, which is rarely ever relevant.
I have been driving electric cars since 2009. I still don’t have a dedicated wall charging unit and doubt that I would bother to get one for a long time. For most of that time since 2009, I have used an ordinary 10A three pin wall socket for charging. An ordinary wall socket can add almost 200km of range overnight, which is far more than most people drive most days.
As car battery capacities get larger, the need for faster charging goes down, not up. If my car is only charged to 50%, I still have well over 200km of local driving range. In fact I limit charging to 80% except when about to do a longer trip out of town. I also rarely discharge below 40% around town. Operating in the 40-80% range is good for the battery and ample for local driving.
The supply capacity of a building is a resource of the owners corporation that should be shared equitably among residents. Therefore, it is important to resist expectations that fast charging rates are needed and understand that slow trickle charging is ample where people live and park their cars for many hours at a time.
Fast charging is for long trips out of town charging en route.
Another useful resource is here. I tried posting it with just a brief comment but ‘computer says no’ (it was rejected by this site as potential spam). So, now I am typing a longer comment in the hope that the computer will think this message has more useful content.
… I think it should be legislated that all new apartment blocks should have a power point in each car spaces to charge an EV its the only way to force developers to do this…
You might be interested in the Australian Electric Vehicle Association’s submission on recent draft amendments to the National Construction Code. https://aeva.asn.au/news/national-building-code/
The draft suggested 20% of apartment block spaces be ‘EV ready’. AEVA pointed to many problems that could arise and proposed 100%.
A useful thing for an Owners Corporation to have is a staged EV charging plan. For the first few early adopters, it would not cause any problem to do something formalised but simple and temporary such as allowing the use of ordinary common property power points with conditions attached. Those conditions could include a simple kWh counter in line so that the EV driver can reimburse the OC for the costs or a reasonable estimate of costs based on milage.
Another condition would be recognition that such arrangements are temporary until EV numbers are higher and a more sophisticated arrangement may be needed. More sophisticated arrangements could include a building load management system to share the available supply capacity among networked charging outlets by slowing down or stopping charging during the evening peak and speeding up charging as the demand from the rest of the building is reduced during the day and night.
I think this is one where everyone is right. I agree with JT that the tenant is not getting what they paid for a have a legitimate claim for a rent reduction. I also agree with the others that this is the sort of relatively minor inconvenience that sometimes happens while people are doing improvements that would be best handled by people showing a bit of tolerance and give and take. It’s only for a week.