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 5:41 PM, Joan Huntley <joan.huntley [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Philip,
> 
> Thank you, thank you for a timely and thorough description of the
> decisions, issues and opportunities (e.g. billing sufficiently to cover
> TCO).
> 
> I wasn't aware of the following fee (which may be higher or lower
> these days) "$2k annually just for the data management subscription."

Sorry, that was a mistake on my part. That price was Chargepoint's annual fee 
for renting hardware plus account management all together. Chargepoint never 
made clear to me what they charged for account management if we bought their 
chargers outright. I got an initial non-specific quote from their sales rep, 
but they were so expensive that I didn't pursue the conversation further. Their 
web site's page about their software 
(https://www.chargepoint.com/businesses/software) just says "contact sales". 
The monthly cost is not zero, but it's not the very high number I cited either.


> 
> This is impressive: "So far, our single 40A OpenEVSE charger has met the
> needs of our 46 household community."
> How do you manage access?  Or is the number of current EVs small enough
> that access is self-regulated?

The latter. Our shared laundry has a reservation system, and once the EV 
charging station gets busy enough, we'll probably copy that since it works well 
and people are familiar with it. For now, on the infrequent occasions when 
someone has needed the charger at a specific time (e.g. to charge overnight 
before a big trip), sending an email to our EV-specific mailing list has been 
sufficient. I guess that counts as a very informal reservation system. Also, we 
all know one another, so if I want to use the charger and I see someone else is 
using it, I can just text them and ask them to let me know when they’re done. 
That has not been a point of stress at all for us. Once we add a second 
charging station, I think we’ll have one charging station on a reservation 
system and the other as first come first serve, but we’ll cross that bridge 
when we come to it.


> A final question I forgot to ask: We have limited parking and there is
> concern that an EV charger would take one of the limited open parking
> spaces. Was this a concern?


Yep! Parking is tight here too, and dedicating one to EVs while charging means 
it's not available as a standard parking space.


> 
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 1:55 PM Philip Semanchuk <philip [at] semanchuk.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 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
>> 
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
>> http://L.cohousing.org/info
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://L.cohousing.org/info
> 
> 
>