EV charging at home: the basics.

The first thing new EV owners learn is that public fast chargers are for road trips. Day to day, the car charges where it sleeps. That makes your home setup the most important charging decision you'll make — and it's simpler than the internet makes it sound.

There are three realistic ways to charge at home, and they differ by an order of magnitude in speed.

Option 1: the power point you already have

Every EV sold in Australia comes with (or can use) a portable charger that plugs into an ordinary 10-amp power point. That gives you about 2.3kW — roughly 10 to 15 kilometres of range per hour on the plug.

For a lot of people, that's genuinely enough. If you drive 40km a day, an overnight plug-in replaces it with hours to spare. It costs nothing to set up, assuming you have a power point in reasonable reach of the car.

The catches:

• It's slow for a full charge. A near-empty 60kWh battery takes the best part of a day and a night.
• The power point and its circuit need to be in good condition. Ten amps continuously for twelve hours is a heavy ask of an old circuit — this is sustained load, not a kettle's two-minute boil. If the GPO is warm, discoloured, or on a circuit shared with the rest of the garage, have it checked before you make it a nightly habit.
• Outdoor sockets need weather protection and safety switch coverage.

Option 2: a dedicated wallbox (the sweet spot)

A wall-mounted charger on its own dedicated circuit is what most homes end up with. On a normal single-phase supply — which is what the vast majority of eastern suburbs homes have — that's typically a 7.2kW unit on a 32-amp circuit. Call it 35–40km of range per hour, or a full overnight charge for almost any battery on the market from empty.

This is the setup that makes an EV feel effortless: you get home, plug in, and the car is full by morning regardless of what you did the day before. Smart wallboxes can also schedule charging into off-peak tariff windows and limit their draw so they don't clash with the rest of the house.

Option 3: three-phase charging

If your home has three-phase power — some larger homes and newer builds do — a three-phase charger delivers 11kW or, where the car supports it, up to 22kW. That halves or thirds the charging time again.

It's nice to have, not need to have. If you don't already have three-phase, upgrading the supply purely for faster home charging is rarely worth the cost unless you're also planning a big solar array, a pool, or a workshop that wants it anyway. For nearly everyone, a 7.2kW single-phase wallbox is the right answer.

The real question: can your switchboard carry it?

A 7.2kW charger is the biggest single load in most homes — more than the oven, more than the hot water service. Whether your switchboard can take it depends on three things:

Your supply capacity. Most eastern suburbs homes have a 63-amp single-phase supply, some older ones less. If the house is already running ducted air conditioning, an induction cooktop and a pool pump, there may not be 32 amps to spare at dinner time.

The condition of the board. A 1970s board with ceramic fuses was never designed for this. Adding an EV circuit to a tired board is the wrong order of operations — the switchboard upgrade comes first, and the EV circuit goes into the new board.

Load management. Modern chargers can watch the house's total draw and throttle themselves back when the oven and the air con are running, then ramp up overnight. This often lets a charger live happily on a supply that couldn't otherwise take it at full tilt.

This assessment is the first thing we do on an EV quote — five minutes at your board tells us which of these situations you're in. Anything involving the supply itself or metering goes through AusNet Services, the distributor for Melbourne's east, and we handle that coordination as part of the job.

Solar, batteries and tariffs

If you have solar — or you're thinking about it — EV charging changes the maths in a good way. A car is a giant battery on wheels, and charging it from daytime solar is the cheapest electricity you'll ever use. Smart chargers can be set to follow your solar output, soaking up surplus generation instead of exporting it for a few cents.

If you're charging from the grid, a time-of-use tariff with an off-peak overnight rate is where the savings are. Scheduling the car to charge after midnight usually costs a fraction of peak rates. Homes with a home battery can do both — but note that car batteries are so large that draining your home battery into the car overnight usually isn't the smart play; off-peak grid power is often cheaper than cycling the home battery.

What an installation actually involves

A standard wallbox install in a Glen Waverley or Blackburn home runs like this:

1. Assessment. We check the switchboard, the earthing, the supply capacity and the cable route from the board to where the car parks.
2. The dedicated circuit. The charger gets its own circuit from the board, protected by an RCBO, with cable sized for continuous full-load running. No shared circuits, no shortcuts — EV charging is prescribed work under the Wiring Rules and it's done by the book.
3. Mounting and commissioning. The unit goes on the wall, we set up the scheduling and any load management, and test everything under load.
4. The paperwork. You get a Certificate of Electrical Safety lodged with Energy Safe Victoria, and the new circuit is labelled at the board.

Most installs are a single day. The exceptions are long cable runs (a detached garage at the back of a deep block) or homes that need the board upgraded first.

Apartments and townhouses

If you're in an apartment or a townhouse with shared infrastructure — increasingly common around Box Hill and Doncaster — the conversation starts with the owners corporation, not the charger. Power for the car has to come from your meter, cable routes through common property need approval, and the building's supply may need load management. It's all very doable, but do it in that order: owners corporation approval first, then the electrical design. We can help with the technical side of that conversation, including load management options that keep the building's supply happy.

The short of it

If you drive normal distances, start with the power point you have and see how it goes — just have the circuit checked if the house is old. If you want the car to be full every morning no matter what, a 7.2kW wallbox on a dedicated circuit is the answer for almost every home in the east. Three-phase is a bonus if you've got it, not something to chase.

Thinking about a charger? Send us an enquiry and we'll assess your switchboard and quote the install — or read more about our EV charger installation work.