We’ve long said that running an electric vehicle without a dedicated home electric car charger would be an uphill battle. The combination of topping up at the burgeoning outlay of DC fast charge stations and plugging into a home wall outlet is doable, but it’s not a long-term solution.

RELATED: How much does it cost to install an EV charger at home?

Especially when it comes to electric cars with gigantic batteries – such as the Kia EV9’s mega 100kWh capacity – these kinds of cars can be tricky to replenish.

So when it came time to move the Drive Melbourne office six months ago, electric car chargers were a must – particularly since we’ve never had so many electric cars on loan for review purposes.

Early on, we made the decision to future-proof ourselves, opting for two separate chargers that can work simultaneously. It’s often the case that we’ll have two electric cars on test at the same time, whether by design or good fortune.

For that reason, a relatively high charging capacity was also desirable, and considering our new office was now serviced by three-phase power, this capability allows for up to 22kW AC charging speeds.

We approached a few companies to perform the installation, including Wallbox (who put us in touch with Electric Future), EVSE, and JET Charge. One of these companies was proactive in helping us out, which was encouraging, another helped out with scoping the works required but couldn’t perform the installation, and the other one was too slow to communicate.

In the end, the prevailing supplier was Electric Future. We went with two Wallbox Pulsar MAX chargers, and the installers were local technicians with electric vehicle charging experience.

How much does it cost to install an EV charger at home?

The cost of the two chargers alone was $3181.82 plus GST, and the total install cost was just over $11,000.

That’s substantially higher than it would cost to install a single charger at home, due to the nature of the existing office infrastructure, but it gives you an idea of what a total package could cost.

Therein lies one of the first hurdles to overcome – if the property is not your own, then it’s likely you’ll need landlord approval before even attempting an installation.

In most circumstances, this should simply be a box tick, but keep in mind that it could impact the power supply and physical appearance of the building. Thankfully, the Drive Melbourne office landlord had no issues with our installation plan, but we were asked to share certificates for the job.

After the chargers were shipped to the electricians, the installation day finally arrived and we were on. We had the team arrive early on a weekday morning to begin the process, on a carefully selected day when minimal Drive staff were in the office because the power had to be off for an hour right at the start.

It did take an entire day to complete, but the work was solid. There were no messy cabling solutions, the chargers were placed correctly, and they managed to work around a lack of available breaker switches – an issue frustratingly unique to our office.

Murphy’s Law, we didn’t actually have an electric vehicle available in the office to test the charger’s operation.

There were problems even before that, whereby the chargers weren’t connecting to the Drive office Wi-Fi network. This meant the chargers couldn’t download and install the latest firmware and subsequently weren’t talking to each other.

At this point, only one of the chargers was working at a time – they were unable to distribute the electrical load effectively between one another.

This was a relatively simple fix, but one that required the electrician to come back another day to complete the installation process and have both chargers working simultaneously at 11kW each, thereby achieving our 22kW AC output goal.

Now, it’s a totally integrated charging solution that caters for two electric vehicles simultaneously. We have access to the Wallbox smartphone application that can monitor real-time energy use, schedule charging sessions for off-peak periods, vary power limits between chargers, and calculate how much energy we’ve been using over the set periods.

It’s super handy to have that information available at a glance, ready to share data with readers as part of our electric car reviews.

From the planning phase to execution it took a few months in back-and-forth emails waiting for approvals and sign-offs, but offices (or homes) with fewer layers of bureaucracy shouldn’t encounter such long wait times.

The post How hard is it to install a home electric car charger? We found out appeared first on Drive.

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