EV charging in small strata schemes

HillsAnn wrote:

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.

chesswood wrote:

There’s also the question of money. Installing a EVSE device to ensure no-one overloads the power supply will cost money.

Not necessarily. They may not need anything nearly as complex as a centralised load management system. It might be enough to install a cheap timer and relay. That is what our OC has. The power to the parking area is simply off during four hours of the evening peak demand period.  Power is available for charging for 20 of 24 hours. The power supply to a site is generally sized to slightly exceed the peak demand. Outside a few hours of peak demand, there is plenty of headroom for additional loads such as EV charging.

And there’ll probably be a periodic licence fee for the software in it and perhaps for occasional updates.

With the system we have (relay and timer), there is no subscription or software required.

Lastly, are you sure the other 8 units will be happy to pay for your electricity while continuing to buy their own petrol? If they aren’t perhaps you’ll also need an EFTPOS device wired in.

With only 9 units, you don’t need a fancy solution. Where I am, we have a simple kWh counter in line with each power outlet in allocated parking spaces. As treasurer, I periodically read the meters and fill in a simple spreadsheet that subtracts the previous reading, multiplies by the c/kWh rate and spits out the amount to bill each EV driver.

I’m the Chair of a scheme of 40 townhouses.  Last year we passed a Motion at the AGM to install 3 EV charging stations.  We repurposed 3 of the 20 visitor car spaces, painted them green, and installed the chargers.  We’ve had no issues.

We also passed a resolution at this year’s AGM to ban charging of “(a) electric bicycles, electric scooters, electric skateboards and the like, and
(b) children’s electric ride-on cars, trucks, motorbikes and similar devices,
but does not include road-registrable vehicles such as electric cars, motorcycles, trucks and the like”.

anywhere in the complex.

We’ve had to be fairly vigilant because we discovered some people had wired powerboards into the light switches of their garages. Aside from the obvious danger of this,   the garage lights are run off the common area circuit.

Thats an interesting bylaw – I wonder if it would survive an NCAT appeal (Assuming your in NSW) or the equivalent tribunal in other jurisdictions.

What is the reasoning behind the need for the law?  If it is the perceived risk Lithium ion and similar batteries, what is next?.  Banning charging phones, laptops, cordless drills, portable fridges, bluetooth headsets?  They all have batteries.

HillsAnn wrote:

Jimmy-T wrote:

HillsAnn wrote:

The committee has been told that an owner would have to submit a renovation application to do this.

By whom?

This was the advice from the strata manager.

Are we talking about using an existing power point within a garage or carport that is attached to the unit and part of the unit area, not common property, with the electricity supplied from the meter of the unit?  If so, the resident can plug in anything they like to that power point as long as it was sold with a fitted 10A three pin plug and has Australian certification, which it certainly would have if it is the portable charge cord supplied with an electric car sold in Australia.

If this is the situation, I recommend that the strata manager be either ignored or challenged to point to legislation that supports their claim.

HillsAnn wrote:

Sir Humphrey wrote:

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?

Each individual unit has its own garage, with at least 2 10 amp power points.There is not enough space in the common property to install a a shared EV charger. The power supply is such that 100 amps is shared by 3 units, so 300 amps for all 9 units (if that makes sense, I don’t really understand electricity!). The residents interested in EVs have roof top solar panels and smart meters. The complex is 25 years old and was set up for a mix of electricity and gas. It might be worthwhile having the wiring checked for the whole complex as people discard gas appliances in favour of electric ones.

Thanks for the extra info. 100A shared by 3 units is a bit tight. You certainly don’t want  three units charging at 32A each leaving nothing over. However, what you can do is allow the existing 10A power points in the garages to be used. Most cars are supplied with portable charge cords that tell the car to draw up to 10A. Some are conservatively set to only 8A. Either way, you are likely to be fine at 10A if you make a rule that charging is not permitted for 4 hours during the evening, say 5PM to 9PM. This is the time of peak demand when people are turning on heaters or air conditioners, cooking, TVs, etc.

Units with solar will be aiming to charge during the day with solar. Most car models can be set to schedule when they charge and when they pause charging. So, you could have the car set so you can plug in any time you like but the car will only charge during solar hours or it will pause its charging during the evening peak period.

Nine cars each charging at 10A each overnight from a 3x100A supply is only 90A out of 300A. That is no problem outside of the peak demand period.