One of the biggest perks of owning an EV is waking up to a fully charged car every morning and never having to go to a gas station — that is, if you have at-home charging.
Before Lucian Oboroceanu got EV chargers installed in his Toronto condo building, keeping his car charged was a pain.
“I had to go around the city to find [a] charger and it was very difficult,” he recalled.
In a recent survey of 16,000 Canadian EV drivers by CAA and PlugShare, 85 per cent of respondents in single-family homes had access to home charging, compared to 62 per cent of those in multi-family buildings. In that survey, only 20 per cent of EV owners lived in a multi-family building, even though about a third of Canadians live in this kind of housing.
Oboroceanu soon learned he wasn’t the only person in his 350-unit building who was concerned about the lack of charging — several neighbours brought it up at the board’s general meeting. One was trying to sell his unit and kept getting questions about the availability of EV charging from prospective buyers.
As board treasurer, Oboroceanu decided to address the problem. Two years later, EV chargers are installed in the personal parking spots of anyone in the building who wants one, including his own.
Retrofitting condo buildings with EV chargers can pose a challenge, as Oboroceanu learned. CBC News spoke with him and several other condo owners who succeeded, and learned what they did to make it work.
Joanna Kyriazis, public affairs director for the think-tank Clean Energy Canada, said it typically costs about $1,500 to install a Level 2 charger in a single-family home, but it can be far more to retrofit a multi-family building. (It’s much cheaper in a new building.) That’s because installation can be complex and involve expensive drilling and long-distance wiring through multiple levels of parking.
When Oboroceanu first looked into what it would take to get charging for 10 cars in his condo building, he was shocked to learn it would cost $50,000 — a no-go.
Some buildings also have limited electrical capacity.
Peter Luff of Kanata, Ont., a suburb of Ottawa, calculated that to have charging capacity for all eight condo units, his building could only install Level 1 charging rather than the faster Level 2 charging that can fill an empty battery overnight. The good news is that Level 1 is often fast enough for many drivers, including Luff.
Kyriazis said electrical capacity is often not an issue, thanks to technology that can monitor and optimize charging, but people may not know about those solutions.
One final issue: How will EV owners pay for charging and the electricity they use?
“There’s not a standard way of doing this yet,” said Kyriazis.
Systems that manage charging and payment often require network connectivity, which can also add to infrastructure costs.
While all these can be challenging, Oboroceanu, Luff and Kyriazis have some advice for success.
Surveying one’s building, residents and government subsidies are good places to start.
Luff contacted the local electrical utility and nearby buildings that already had charging to get information.
So did Dave Wong of Vancouver, B.C., who lives in a 36-storey highrise with 132 units. He learned from neighbours about federal and provincial programs that when stacked together with a subsidy from B.C. Hydro could defer almost all costs. He also got the names of four local vendors and quotes for different possible configurations.
Finally, he hand-delivered surveys to every unit in his building to find out how many people had EVs, and how many planned to buy one in the next five years.
Cara Clairman, president and CEO of Plug’n Drive, an EV advocacy group, said getting neighbours on board is important, as a condo board will need to approve EV charging first.
Wong and Luff both provided information about EVs and EV uptake to their neighbours. For example, Wong noted in his survey that B.C. will require 100 per cent of new vehicle sales to be zero emissions by 2035, increasing the future demand for EV charging.
They argued that potential buyers will want EV charging in their building — something Oroboceanu’s neighbours were already finding in 2023.
Wong also argued that it would be cheaper to retrofit the whole building at once, especially since subsidies were available at the time.
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Through his survey, Wong learned there were only five EV owners in his building. (He didn’t even have one himself.) So instead of installing a charger in every spot, the building just wired every spot to be EV-ready at a cost of $1,000 per unit (with subsidies), with the option to add a Level 2 charger for $3,500. To Wong’s surprise, 20 people did that.
Luff went with Level 1 charging. His board learned that Ontario would allow the project to be paid for from the condo’s reserve fund “so there was no problem in coming up with the money.”
He also kept payments simple, buying $40 electricity meters for all the new outlets. Residents pay bills based on the reading each month. The one disadvantage, he said, is that the system is “totally reliant on you being honest.”
That likely wouldn’t work for a large building like Oboroceanu’s. His research on local vendors in Toronto eventually brought him to Smart EV Systems, which offered a package with no upfront cost to install an electrical panel serving up to 10 EV chargers. He rents his charger and pays for the electricity monthly.
Kyriazis said hiring companies like that can be a good solution, as they take care of many of the complexities. But she said she has heard mixed reviews on the payment schemes, which can cost more in the long run.
So far, though, Oboroceanu is pleased with the result — so pleased that he’s recommending the service to some of the 150 buildings he manages through Newton-Trelawney Property Management.
For those looking to get EV charging in their own buildings, Plug’n Drive and Clean Energy Canada are working on a new guide that they hope to release in the fall.
