[chiph]

I think the straw that broke the camel's back was the city's demand that they relocate the electrical panels. This means that all the interior wiring in the house now has to run to the new panel location - a huge expense. I'm not sure why they couldn't just move only the meters to be more accessible to the power company & firefighters[1] and then run a longer service cable from there to the original panels. That would be much cheaper.

I plan to add a charger to my rental property, either when my current tenant buys an EV or when they move out (to avoid disrupting them). The home is fairly new and was built with 200 amp service so I don't anticipate any permit problems. The idea is to differentiate my property in the marketplace and justify a higher rent.

What I don't want is a tenant running a homemade 240v cable to the outlet for the electric clothes dryer and manually plugging/unplugging back & forth. That's unsafe.

[1] The fire department will pull the meter when they arrive and start fighting a fire, so they aren't spraying water on live circuits.

[quickthrowman]

> I think the straw that broke the camel's back was the city's demand that they relocate the electrical panels. This means that all the interior wiring in the house now has to run to the new panel location - a huge expense. I'm not sure why they couldn't just move only the meters to be more accessible to the power company & firefighters[1] and then run a longer service cable from there to the original panels. That would be much cheaper.

You’re correct, you don’t need to move the panels, but you do need to provide a emergency service disconnect on the exterior of the house. You could leave all the existing branch wiring in place, assuming it is up to code, and refeed the existing panels from the new service entrance location. The relevant code section in the NEC is 230.85, added in 2020.

A large portion of the cost is new panels with AFCI and GFCI breakers, they’re $50-100 each for a 15A 1p breaker, probably $1500-2500 for each panel.

[mindslight]

From the article:

> We recently decided to update our duplex’s electric system.

I'm left wondering what exactly they meant by "update our duplex's electric system" if they did not mean put in a new service, new main panel, and bring the branch circuits up to current code? Like what were they actually envisioning doing, that did not include redoing the branch circuits?

If this story were written with the electric vehicle precipitating the chain of events, I can see how that would be frustrating. But it seems they set out to do the updates, and are now complaining about doing the updates?

The utility's position seems wholly unreasonable though. If this weren't a rental property, the right answer would be to DIY the install and make the utility deal with the additional load on the distribution infrastructure.

[bdcravens]

> a tenant running a homemade 240v cable to the outlet for the electric clothes dryer and manually plugging/unplugging back & forth

Most level 2 chargers have a 20+ foot cord. I did the plug/unplug thing while I waited to install the plug in my garage, but my dryer is just inside of the door to the garage. Perhaps you're talking about a much longer run, but even with a proper extension cord (often less than $100), it should be fine.