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@JimmyT said:
…One thing you can’t do is just hook your car up to a mains socket like it was a trickle battery charger. You need a professionally installed three-phase supply that is connected to the buildings power supply. …
Actually a trickle charge on an ordinary socket is exactly what you do nearly always, albeit you ‘trickle’ at 10A.
Electric vehicles happen to one of my ‘things’. I have been driving fully battery electric cars for 8 years. I converted a petrol car when buying one was not an option. About 3 1/2 years ago we got a second EV, a commercial Mitsubishi iMiEV.
One thing people tend to assume is that a fancy fast charger is required, which then requires the 3-phase supply and so on. It might be handy occasionally but in practice virtually everyone finds that an ordinary 10A power point, or at most a 15A outlet, is sufficient. You really don’t want to be routinely charging on a fast charger anyway if you want longevity from your battery. Installing a fast charger for everyone would be prohibitively expensive and unnecessary. Having just one would be nice-to-have but it won’t be fast if it is the only way to charge so there is a queue to use it.
Far better to let everyone charge slowly when they want at their own parking spaces. This works fine if you don’t need the car full in a hurry, which you usually don’t. Far more often you need to have it full in the morning, which can easily be done on an ordinary power point. Sometimes you need to have had a useful top up for when you plan to go out again a little later, which can also be achieved with a couple of hours of ordinary power point charging.
There is no single, best solution for retrofitting EV charging into strata titled properties. My first choice, if it is physically practical, would be to just let everyone have an ordinary 15A socket in their parking place wired back their unit/lot’s meter.
If you have a garage already, and you have an ordinary power point already, and it goes to your personal meter, you are set. You can get an ‘EVSE’ (a special charging cable with some smarts in a box in the cable) which has a bog-standard, moulded 10A plug on one end to go into an normal powerpoint. It will comply with standards that tells the charger in the car to not take charge any faster than 10A. If you have an EVSE with a 15A plug, the box in the cable will tell the car to not take more than 15A. Most cars come with an EVSE with a 15A standard plug. Often this is being conservative as the EVSE actually only takes 10A. Anyway, a 10A or 15A single phase socket is routine, standard stuff.
It gets more complicated if you can’t simply hard-wire back to the lot/unit’s meter. Then, I would still advocate that the OC supplies a 15A outlet at each parking space with some means to sub-meter each unit’s usage. If the OC wants to also have one fast-charger as well, that would be icing on the cake. Charging a higher kWh charge for that would encourage people to only use it when they need it, which won’t be often, so it will be available for people who need their battery full rapidly.
BTW. I could not get a power point wired back from my parking space to my townhouse unit (too far). I park adjacent to a neighbour’s unit in a shared carport. I was fortunate that my neighbour and our OC approved having an ordinary 15A socket in the carport between the neighbour’s space and mine wired back to the neighbour’s meter box. We have had meter on just that outlet and I reimburse my neighbour for what I have added to his bill, a few hundred dollars every 6 months or so. This works while he continues to pay a flat electricity tariff. It would get complicated with time of use metering and so on.