EV Charging In Strata Buildings

The request arrives one owner at a time. Someone buys an electric car and wants a charger in their space.

The building says yes, an electrician runs a cable from that apartment's meter down to the car park, and it works. Then it happens again. By the fifth or sixth one, the building has a problem it created itself.

The building has one supply

Every apartment building has a total incoming supply, and it was sized for the loads that existed when it was built. Cooking, hot water, lighting, air conditioning.

Car charging was not one of them. A single charger is a large sustained load compared with almost anything else in an apartment, and it runs for hours rather than minutes.

Add enough of them without a plan and the building reaches the limit of what its supply can deliver. At that point the answer is a supply upgrade, which is expensive and slow, or nobody else gets a charger.

Ad hoc installs are the problem, not the chargers

Individual cables run one at a time create three issues.

Cable routes chosen for convenience rather than as part of a planned path, so the car park ends up with a mess of separate runs on the ceiling and nowhere sensible left for the next one.

No coordination of load, because each install is assessed on its own and nobody is tracking the total.

Common property penetrated repeatedly by different trades to different standards.

The building ends up with a car park full of cables, no spare capacity, and no ability to say yes to the next owner.

What a plan changes

An assessment of the actual spare capacity in the building, measured rather than calculated from nameplate ratings, tells you how many chargers the supply can support.

A designed cable path, installed once, that later chargers connect into rather than each one running its own.

Load management, which is the piece that changes the number completely. A system that shares available capacity between the connected cars, slowing them when several are charging at once, lets a building support far more chargers than its raw capacity would allow. Cars sit there overnight, so slower is rarely a problem.

And a metering arrangement so each owner pays for their own consumption rather than it landing on common property.

What has to be agreed before anything is installed

The owners corporation needs to approve the use of common property, and most schemes now handle this with a by-law that sets out the standard, who pays, who maintains it and what happens when the apartment is sold.

Getting that by-law in place before the first charger goes in is the difference between a building that can accommodate everyone and one that can accommodate whoever asked first.

The practical sequence

Assess the supply and the spare capacity. Agree the by-law and the standard. Design the shared infrastructure. Then install, with each subsequent charger connecting to what is already there.

That order costs more for the first owner and far less for everyone after them.

The safety items that get skipped

Chargers in a car park need protection from vehicle impact, which means bollards or a mounting position that is not in the path of a reversing car.

Cable management matters, because a charging lead across a walkway is a hazard and it is also how leads get damaged.

And the installation has to be done by an electrician who works to the current requirements for this equipment, which are specific and not the same as a general outlet.

We handle the assessment, the shared infrastructure and the installs across electrical work for managed buildings. If your building is getting these requests one at a time, let us assess the supply first so the answer is planned rather than reactive.