Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: EV charging stations

[Scott Drennan (scottd]

Hi Katie,

At Treehouse Village (also under construction), we have put conduit in the
ground for outdoor EV chargers in 19 of 30 outdoor parking spaces and
connections for all 11 indoor parking spaces.  We won't be installing
chargers until needed by members, and may not pull wire in all of the
conduit now either - it depends on remaining budget when we get close to
completion.

I agree that a Level 3 charging station is not a substitute for L2 - it's
harder on the batteries and many/most of these chargers can't charge the
vehicle to higher than 80%.  (I'm actually not sure if that's a charger
limitation or a vehicle limitation - haven't looked into it)

I'd encourage you to move quickly from "vague plans" to something more
concrete - addition of EV charging often requires changes to electrical
infrastructure, and the sooner that gets sorted out, the cheaper the
changes will be.

If your garages and carports are attached to your homes, and your homes
have outlets for clothes dryers, you could look at one of the splitter
options e.g.
https://insideevs.com/news/481938/splitvolt-circuit-splitter-review/

For your outdoor parking spaces, if you don't have available electrical
capacity I'd suggest you look at something like
https://www.variablegrid.net/ - there was a discussion about it last year
on the mailing list
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg47072.html

cheers,
Scott
https://treehousevillage.ca

On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 9:46 AM Judith Lienhard/US/OR/CC via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> Katie:
> I have a Nissan Leaf and my understanding from Nissan is that it is
> preferable to only occasionally use Level 3 charging stations-better for
> the battery. In our community of 26 households, we put in  2 level charging
> stations about 5 years ago when 2 of us had an EV. Now we are up to 9 EV's.
> we don't have garages and have 2 parking lots. one row of 5 parking spots
> is dedicated to EV's. we track our usage and pay for the electricity
> used. one community in Portland, Kailash Ecovillage, put in a public level
> 2 charging station so neighbors can come and charge there as well as the
> community members.Definitely putting  in the infrastructure for level 2
> stations in your guest parking would make sense. Wishing you all the best.
> Judith Lienhard, Cascadia Commons
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2022 04:45:36 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Katie Henry <katie-henry [at] att.net>
> To: Cohousing-L Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: [C-L]_ Electrical vehicle charging stations
> Message-ID: <944194896.862095.1641271536736 [at] mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Our community is under construction, about six months away from move-in,
> and we're thinking about EV charging stations.
>
> We will have 36 homes and a mix of garages, carports, and surface parking.
> We currently have a vague plan to install some extra 240-volt circuits
> during construction and run underground conduit to various locations to
> support the addition of charging stations as residents acquire EVs. This
> raises lots of follow-up questions about equipment standardization, Level 1
> vs. Level 2, adequate electrical capacity, networked vs. not-networked,
> metering/billing, etc. Also, I have concerns about cars being charged
> catching on fire.
>
> Should we consider installing a single Level 3 charging station shared by
> all owners? Instead of each EV owner installing their own Level 1/2
> charging station and leaving their cars trickling overnight, everyone would
> use the Level 3 station since a car will fully charge in 15 or 20 minutes.?
>
> No question a Level 3 is more expensive. I've reached out to some vendors
> for estimates but don't have any solid numbers yet. The electrical
> infrastructure is a big part of the expense. Our electrical work to the
> site hasn't started yet, so now is the time if we're going to do it. Even
> if it's more expensive, it seems like a better long-term solution than the
> patchwork system we're currently envisioning that may run out of capacity
> in ten years and will always have maintenance and administrative overhead.
>
> Anybody have any opinions? Good idea? Terrible idea?
>
> Plan B (semi-seriously) is to approach the service station on the corner
> about splitting the cost of a Level 3 charging station so members can go
> there and we don't have to have any of the charging infrastructure on the
> site. That would be my preference.
>
> Katie Henry
> Heartwood Commons - Tulsa
>
> ************
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