Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: question re maintenance costs of a pedestal for an EV charging station that would charge 2 cars

[Philip Semanchuk (philip]

> On Jul 25, 2025, at 12:39 PM, Joan Huntley <joan.huntley [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Quick question for communities that have installed EV charging stations for
> community access:
> 
>   - are there ongoing maintenance costs?
>   - if so, what are they related to and how much has it cost?
> 
> Here at Casa Verde Co-housing in Colorado Springs, some homeowners are
> proposing  personally funding infrastructure and connectivity to charge EVs
> in their garages and carports. We have an opportunity to add a pedestal to
> that installation that would be available to the larger community in a
> co-housing parking location near our common house. However, there is
> concern about ongoing costs.


It's good to think about this! As usual, the answer is "it depends". I can tell 
you about our experience and some of the things we considered in early 2022 
when we were making decisions about our system.

To compare systems, we considered both up front costs and TCO (total cost of 
ownership) over five years. I wrote a document outlining the costs for four 
different vendors that you might find interesting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12L4qYXsKQ-Wpq-LH9WAue6PPWp4rjy62WixsOKnYrPA/edit?tab=t.0

One really important thing to keep in mind is that we placed a requirement on 
ourselves for a smart charger (as defined in the document). That means the 
charger communicates with a server somewhere on the Internet, and paying a 
vendor to manage that server is what makes TCO much larger than initial costs. 
ChargePoint was the most expensive at a little over $2k annually just for the 
data management subscription. That's more than we paid for our entire charging 
station!

If you don't need a smart charger, you can buy a basic "dumb" charger for less 
than $500. A "dumb" charger will charge vehicles just fine, but it can't do 
things like authentication (i.e. identify which person/household is charging). 
The five year TCO of a dumb charger is about the same as the setup cost. Once 
it's installed, it doesn't cost you anything extra until something breaks.

"Until something breaks" is something else to consider. We decided somewhat 
arbitrarily to estimate our charger's life span at seven years, so if I'd done 
a ten year TCO instead of a five year, I would have had to consider charger 
replacement cost. For our installation, there's not many other ongoing costs to 
consider. Eventually the wooden post that it's on will rot and need to be 
replaced, but that should last 15-20 years and isn't a major expense.

We decided on the OpenEVSE charger for two (related) reasons. First, we didn't 
like the TCO of the alternatives. Second, we were allergic to being locked in 
to a particular vendor. Most smart charger vendors (OpenEVSE being the 
exception) are also selling a management service, and the charger is locked to 
the service. If we decided we didn't like the service (or the vendor decided to 
jack up the price), we'd be stuck with them unless we wanted to replace all of 
our charging stations at once.

Our suspicion of vendor lockin was rewarded when Enel left the North American 
market, which bricked their commercial chargers 
(https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/10/the-juicebox-and-enel-x-shutdown-what-comes-next/).
 Enel was a vendor we strongly considered and may have even bought if I could 
have gotten any of their sales reps to return my calls. We dodged a bullet.

So far, our single 40A OpenEVSE charger has met the needs of our 46 household 
community. The experience has not been perfect, though. Although OpenEVSE is a 
smart charger, it doesn't come with authentication hardware. A couple of years 
ago they promised authentication hardware "soon", but they haven't made it 
available yet. As a result, all of our charging is on the honor system. 
Residents charge, and are expected to self-report their consumption. Naturally 
people forget, so about 10-12% of the kWh delivered aren't paid for. We set the 
EVSE price per kWh at 25% above what the HOA pays, so overall the station is 
profitable. (Revenue from use of the station exceeds the cost of delivered 
electricity.) But we haven't made as much as we'd like. We'd like the station 
to pay for itself, meaning that in seven-ish years when we it dies and we have 
to replace it, we can pay for it from the "profit" we've made on it over the 
years. That's not strictly necessary, but it makes it an easier sell to 
residents who don't see the merits of having an EV charging station on site and 
don't want to pay for it.

Hope this helps
Philip
Pacifica Cohousing
Carrboro NC