This is a small strata schemes of 9 units; a mix of detached villas and townhouses.
Is the vehicle accommodation individual parking space/garages attached to the individual units?
Two residents are keen to purchase EVs. Advice given to the Owners Committee indicates the power supply is insufficient to support owners installing 15 amp EV chargers.
We need to know more. Is this supposedly the power supply to the whole site or the power available for a circuit in a block of share parking garages? Is it common property power or the supply to individual units we are talking about?
It appears some EVs can be plugged into an existing 3 pin electrical socket. This is called a Level 1 AC Trickle Charge. The committee has been told that an owner would have to submit a renovation application to do this. Why would this be needed when no physical change is required?
All road-registrable EVs can charge with a 10 amp ‘portable EVSE charge cord’, which is usually supplied with the vehicle. This can plug into an ordinary three pin wall socket. The cord has a box of electronics that communicates with the car and tells the car’s on-board charger to take no more than 10A, since that is the rated limit of the power socket that the plug fits. Many people find that a 10A socket is all they need. I use a 32A socket for 3x faster charging but it is certainly not necessary. A 10A socket can add over 100km of range overnight, which is more than enough most of the time.
The charge cord is a standards-compliant device that can be safely plugged into an ordinary power point. It is no different from plugging in 2kW room heater, a toaster or a kettle. The only difference is that 10A is drawn for hours at a time. It would be reasonable for a committee or unit owner to want to get an electrician to check that the wiring and socket are in good condition if they are decades old.
Aside from possibly wanting the wiring checked, I can see no reason not to allow a unit owner to use their own power point with any device that comes supplied with a standard 10A 3 pin plug.
If the parking is in a shared block with power points on a common property circuit, then it is possible that you could have an outlet in every parking space but you could not have an EV charging on every one of them at once. This is because you could have (say) 9 outlets on a circuit that is rated for (say) 32A total. The expectation is that you would not have all nine 10A sockets being used at 10A all at once. An electrician might tell you that you could have 3 cars at 10A but no more. You might decide that you could have 2 cars charging on such a circuit leaving 12A of capacity for minor loads on the other power points. Your OC could agree that 2 cars could charge but when there are 3 or 4 cars, you could still use the circuit but you could have a roster of alternating days so that only 2 are charging at any time. Once you get to half of the owners having EVs, you will then have the numbers to support a better solution.
The better long-term solution could be to have a set of 9 wall-mounted EVSEs that communicate with each other to automatically load manage splitting the available supply between whichever cars are plugged in and charging.
Is permission needed for an owner to garage their EV that is only ever charged at work?
Absolutely not. It is a road-registered vehicle – completely legal. If the concern is about fire risk, that is a complete furphy. The Insurance Council of Australia published a briefing note on EVs in residential buildings. They rated road-registered EVs as “very low risk” in contrast to small personal mobility devices such as scooters and e-bikes that were rated high risk. https://insurancecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ICA_Briefing_Managing-fire-risk-EVs_Nov-2023.pdf
Are there any small strata schemes that have encountered this issue?
Yes.