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#ElectricCar — Charged Up
A key part of the process of buying an electric vehicle is setting up the home charging station. This is important if you value your sanity.
Use the regular wall plug and it can take 20 hours to charge your car. Use the special wall-mounted charging appliance and you’re topped off in a few hours while you sleep.
The appliance on the wall is, strictly speaking, known as electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) because the charger, strictly speaking, is inside the car.
I call the thing on the wall a charging station, even if that’s a little imprecise.
Nissan recognizes that you probably don’t have a 240 volt, 40 amp Level 2 EVSE already in your garage. Part of the online wizard ordering process for the Leaf is a required “home assessment” visit. This is where an expert comes to your house, peeks in your circuit breaker panel and measures the distance between it and your garage. Then you get a quote for the price of the EVSE installed.
Except when you don’t.
When Nissan gave me the green light to order the car, Nissan’s trusted “partner” Aerovironment wasn’t ready to schedule these visits in my area. Several days of almosts, hopefullys, and just-abouts later, and I was getting antsy with these trusted partners.
When you’re ordering a car with a four-to-six-month lead time, every day counts. Especially when you need to take delivery of the car before the end-of-year for tax purposes.
Thankfully, I’m familiar enough with the technology to make some buying decisions on my own, but this is not for the faint of heart or the neophyte.
I knew that my house had the required 200 amp service. I also knew there was a (mostly) unobstructed path between my main circuit breaker panel and garage. And I also knew that the EVSE need not be purchased through the home assessment route. There are a half-dozen companies each trying to over charge for their high voltage chargers.
After a phone call to Nissan’s national Leaf call center, my “required” Nissan-arranged home assessment was waived, I was permitted to click the “order now” button in the online interface to get the car, and I was on my own for the EVSE charging station.
A few days later, the EVSE arrives in its sealed box. Shiny bright plastic and a thick manual for your licensed electrician.
The appliance requires a 240 volt, 40 amp circuit. This is comparable to what your electric clothes dryer uses, except the clothes dryer circuit terminates in a big receptacle your dryer plugs into, whereas the EVSE charging station (in my case) is hardwired.
Like most homes, my garage only had 110 volt service (regular outlets), so I needed an electrician to:
(1) confirm my existing electric panel had enough capacity for the extra circuit (it did);
(2) add the additional wiring the 50-or-so feet from the electric panel to the garage; and
(3) mount and connect the charging station to the new garage circuit.
I called a total of three local electricians for quotes. All three were licensed with my local municipality and were highly recommended by neighbors over the past year on my community’s listserv.
During their walk-throughs, each of the electricians agreed that I had enough spare capacity in my electric panel (aka breaker box), so as to avoid a “heavy-up.” Most homes built prior to the mid-1980s did not have 200 amp service standard, and require additional capacity brought in from the street to bring the house service up to snuff.
In my case, I needed a new circuit breaker added to an empty spot, and wire fished through my walls to the garage. Most of the cost, I saw in my estimate, had to do with how much time each contractor expected it would take to fish the wire through or around a short length of finished basement space. In this respect, creativity counts, and each of the three contractors had a different approach for attacking the geometry problem.
In the end, the electrician I was most comfortable with was also had the least expensive quote—but most importantly—was the most creative.
Doing this kind of electrical work requires an electric permit from your local municipality. In my case, there was some confusion at the City’s permitting office about the level of complexity of the job. Where I live, some small electrical jobs can be performed by homeowners even when the work is performed by a licensed electrician.
I applied for and received the permit, but later received a call from the head of the City’s permitting department suggesting that the City was in error for allowing me to pull this particular permit for this particular kind of job.
It all worked out fine in the end. The work was, in fact, performed by a licensed electrician who does work in my City, but my experience underscores that for almost everyone I interact with, the logistics of getting ready for, buying and owning an electric vehicle is very much uncharted territory.
This is the fourth in a series on the state of electric vehicles in 2011. Scratch that. 2012.
« Part 1 of the Electric Car Series: “On the Bleeding Edge”
« Part 2 of the Electric Car Series: “A Recent History”
« Part 3 of the Electric Car Series: “Nissan Leaf Test Drive”
Part 5 of the Electric Car Series: “Mindfulness” »
Part 6 of the Electric Car Series: “Difficult Conversations” »
Part 7 of the Electric Car Series: “Secret Message: Like Really Cheap Gas” »
Part 8 of the Electric Car Series: “Getting Legislative” »
