What You Need to Know About EV Charging at Home (2024)

One of the best parts of owning an EV is that you can have a fueling station in the convenience of your home. If you have access to home charging, that also means you can sidestep a lot of the commotion and confusion over the availability, quality, and creativity of public charging options.

Your decision points are pretty straightforward. Home charging is a choice between Level 1 and Level 2. L1 is simple. It doesn't require special setup or come with a lot of frills. But if you decide charging at a rate of a few miles per hour just isn’t enough for you, the whole discussion shifts over to L2. At that point, you have a number of choices to make about the kind of charger you want and whether and how much to invest in electrical upgrades.

Everything You Need to Know About Level 1 Chargers at Home

L1 charging is straightforward and easy, if slow, and can be done at pretty much any home because you just plug into a regular outlet. In technical terms, it utilizes a normal household 120-volt, 15-amp receptacle, known as the NEMA 5-15. The “charger” is really just an extension cord that connects the actual charger, which is inside your car, to the wall. You can buy an L1 charger, but this is generally not necessary because most EVs come with the required cable and adapters (typically called travel chargers as they are intended to remain in the vehicle for trips). These ~1.5kW chargers are the slowest way to charge, taking at least a couple of days to get a complete charge, but may cover your daily commute overnight depending on what car you own and how far you drive. Note that L1 chargers also tend not to have any of the convenience features common in L2 chargers. The main advantage is that Level 1 charging is simple and accessible to all.

There are some for whom this slow rate of charge is more than sufficient. If you work from home and only really use your car on the weekends or for errands, you may not need to be able to fully charge your car overnight. If you intend to use your EV primarily as a commuter with a known short route, like a 5-mile drive to the train station and back during the week, but have an ICE minivan as a family hauler on the weekend, your L1 charger could certainly keep your ‘train car’ topped up. If your employer provides EV charging as a benefit and you just need a charger at home as a backup, you may rarely charge at home at all.

But if you do have a significant commute that you expect to power at home, your best option is likely to invest in an L2 charger.

Everything You Need to Know About Level 2 Chargers at Home

An L2 charger offers the speed and convenience most homeowners are looking for. For a relatively low upfront cost, L2 charging allows you the flexibility that comes with completely charging your car overnight and can offer a number of time- and cost-saving features. Not all Level 2 chargers are created equal, however, and to figure out what kind of setup makes sense for you, you’ll have to first take stock of the basic wiring in your home.

That’s because the key distinction between L1 and L2 charging is the input voltage your EV receives from your home, stepping up from 110-120 volts to 208-240 volts. In other words, instead of plugging into the same kind of outlet you use for your tea kettle or laptop–and which you almost certainly already have in your garage–for L2 charging, you need some variation of the weird outlet that you use for your washer/dryer hookup. This allows the charger power to jump from around 1.5 kW for L1 to typically between 5.8 kW and 19.2 kW. Exactly how much power you will actually be able to tap within that range depends on a combination of factors determined by your home, your car, and your charger.

If You Have a 240-volt Outlet

If you are lucky enough to have a 240-volt outlet in your garage (often for a dryer), most of the work required for L2 charging is already done. These outlets come in different styles, each with different amperage ratings to support a variety of appliances, but the most common is the NEMA 14-30, which supports a 30-amp circuit. This allows you to install a 24 amp, 5.8-kW charger (inclusive of a 20 percent safety margin) able to fully charge most midsize EVs in 13 hours, which is faster than most people need. If you are very lucky, you might find a NEMA 14-50 outlet rated at 50 amps, making it possible to fully charge in eight hours. And if your outlet is already in use for a dryer, an automatic switch would allow you to connect your EV charger and dryer, or two EV chargers, without worrying about overloading the circuit.

Finding out how much power your outlet delivers is straightforward and can be done in two steps. The first is to look at the outlet itself and match it with the appropriate NEMA outlet type to determine your amperage. See the handy chart below.

Once you know what outlet you have, confirm that you have a matched breaker in your panel. Generally speaking, if the outlet exists in your home then your main service should be able to support it with no issue. However, particularly if you are aware of any major electrical additions to your home, like a hot tub or central air conditioning, it may be wise to evaluate your total electrical use. Read on for more details on why.

If You Don’t Have a 240-volt Outlet

The reality is most homes do not have such a powerful outlet sitting idle in the garage. If that is the case, you will have to hire an electrician to handle the installation and make a few decisions about what exactly you need.

Hardwired vs. Plug-In

When taking the installation plunge, the first decision you face is whether you want to hardwire your charger or just install an outlet and plug your charger in. There is essentially no difference between the two in how the charger functions, but a hardwired charger may be marginally safer, with fewer points of failure (the outlet and plug), and also may be more aesthetically pleasing if you prefer a clean look in the garage. Installing a hardwired charger is actually also a bit cheaper, as the plug-in receptacle requires a more expensive GFCI (ground force circuit interrupter) circuit breaker and the purchase of the receptacle itself. On the flip side, it is easier to swap out or move your charger if you use the plug-in style.

How Much Power Does My Electric Car Need to Charge?

The next issue is how much power you want to dedicate to charging. Power is a function of not just the voltage of a circuit but also the current flowing through it. Current is measured in amperage, and your home gets only so many amps of electricity at any given time. While some very old homes may have less, most modern homes have either a 100- or 200-amp main service from the grid. As you can imagine, if you only have 100 amps of total service, dedicating 50 of that to continuous vehicle charging might be excessive. As explained in more detail here, unless you have a very large EV, a 30-amp charger is likely enough power to cover your needs. Stepping up from 30 to 50 amps also typically means a small increase in the cost of installation, mostly due to the larger wires required both in your home and in the charger itself. That said, there may be benefits to having a larger circuit to support a larger car (or multiple EVs) down the road, or to support later enhancements like wireless charging that may require the additional power.

How Much Does it Cost to Install an Electric Car Charger at Home?

The cost of installing a charger at home using a licensed electrician can vary substantially, but for most, it should fall between $500 and $1200. The main factors determining exactly where you end up in that range are where you live and how far your garage is from your electrical panel. If you have a large home with a garage very far away from the panel, you may find your electrician’s quotes come in a bit higher than that.

Your costs may also rise if your electrician determines your existing circuits can’t handle the additional load, such that you need a service panel upgrade. If you’re trying to make a preliminary assessment, worksheets online can help you understand your existing loads to determine how much electrical headroom you may have. For a panel upgrade, you can expect to pay between $1000 and $3000 on top of the baseline installation costs described above. If you find you have to go this route, note that the Inflation Reduction Act does allow 30 percent of the installation cost of a home EV charger to be deducted from your taxes, up to $1000.

Before you assume you need to upgrade your panel, read on to determine if dynamic load balancing, a feature of some higher-end L2 chargers, could address your circuit capacity issues.

Level 2 At-Home Charger Features

L2 chargers offer a variety of features, from the merely convenient to the potentially essential. On the convenience side, many chargers come with apps that let you control when and how fast your car charges. Most EVs already have this functionality, but it can be nice to have that control at the home level as well, in case you have multiple EVs or visitors using your charger. Many EV chargers also have dashboards that allow you to track your EV’s electrical use, and tie that use to your electrical bill to understand what percentage of your bill is coming from charging versus the rest of your home.

Of particular value for those who have 100 amp service is the addition of dynamic load balancing. In all homes, you are actually able to have more amperage worth of circuits in your breaker box than your total service can handle. This is acceptable because of ‘load diversity’ or the fact that it is unlikely that you use all of the electrical devices in the home at the same time, so 150 amps of connected load is highly unlikely to reach even 80 amps in practice. Dynamic load balancing takes maximum advantage of this, allowing your EV charger to monitor your whole home’s electricity use and ramp its own use up and down to ensure that your home stays under its allotted maximum load. This means that you can potentially connect a more powerful charger to your home without worrying that you will trip your main breaker. These chargers typically cost a bit more, but can save you the cost of needing to upgrade your main electrical service to get high power levels. In general, chargers tend to cost between $300 and $1000 depending on these features.

Lastly, you’ll want to put some thought into the cable and connector that work best for your physical setup. The travel charger included with most EVs can be used for L1 or L2 charging; it’s just a matter of switching out the adapter. But these included cables lack the features mentioned above and often have lower amperage ratings than dedicated home L2 chargers so you may not be able to take full advantage of your available power.

When shopping for chargers, keep in mind that the type and length of the charging cable matter more than you might think, especially if you have two EVs and plan to use one charger to keep both topped up. If you have a one-car garage or only one EV, a shorter cable can save you some money and simply be easier to keep neat and managed.

Just like car manufacturers, you also have a choice to make about what type of connector you want on your charger. There are two options, J1772 and NACS. J1772 is by far the most common type of charger and it is half of the CCS1 connector that was, until recently, the de-facto public charging standard. NACS (North American Charging Standard) is the name of the rebranded, and slightly modified, Tesla charging connector. Because nearly all manufacturers have announced plans to move away from J1772/CCS1 and produce cars with the NACS connector within the next couple of years, it is no surprise that popular Level 2 charger manufacturers like Wallbox are announcing that they to will soon be producing NACS native chargers. No matter which you choose, adapters are available to connect any car with any charger, so there is no wrong choice, even if you end up buying a new car later that uses a different standard.

What Do I Do if I Live in an Apartment?

What if your home is not a detached house but an apartment or townhouse? Installing charging can certainly be a bit more complicated in that case. Even if your apartment comes with a dedicated parking space, homeowners and renters do not necessarily have the right or ability to route electrical conduit there or have it connected to their personal electrical meter. The good news is cities and states have started passing laws mandating that new developments install EV charging or at least make the parking spaces ‘EV ready,’ by allocating adequate electrical power and running conduit to make the future addition of chargers a quick and easy proposition. Unfortunately, this doesn’t create immediate optionality for existing apartment buildings, but some progressive cities are putting in long-sighted retrofit mandates as well.

New York City, for example, recently proposed legislation requiring 40 percent of parking spaces in existing garages and lots to be capable of supporting chargers by 2030 (or the next time the facility is modified), and requiring 60 percent of new spaces to be EV-ready. Even without government goading, property managers are responding to tenants’ demand for charging with options chargers that include a pay-per-use protocol similar to public EV chargers.

The Future

The EV revolution is just getting underway, so part of the challenge when installing a home charger and making electrical upgrades is taking into account how your preferences may shift given rapid changes in the EV landscape. The main change that may affect what you install at home is the seemingly ever-increasing size of EVs and their batteries. As more models come out with 130-kW, 150-kW, and 200-kW+ batteries, manufacturers recognize that they need high-powered onboard chargers to be able to charge them overnight. The current power maximum is 19.2 kW, found in the GMC Hummer EV and other large EV SUVs and trucks, and an option on the Porsche Taycan. Interestingly, in the early years of the Model S, Tesla offered dual 9.6-kW onboard chargers as an option, but that was eventually phased out due to a low take rate and the increasingly important role the Supercharger network played in fast charging. As these larger vehicles with more powerful onboard chargers become more popular, more vehicle owners are going to want to be able to charge them in a comparable amount of time as more modestly sized cars.

Another very-near future factor to consider is bidirectionality. Currently, there is only one EV on the market that officially supports bidirectionality, allowing you to power your home with your EV battery, the Ford F150 Lightning, but it certainly won't be the last. Right now it is only possible by using Ford’s first-party L2 charger, imaginatively called the Ford Charger Station Pro. At $1300, it is certainly more expensive than a typical L2 home charger, but it supports 80 amps on a 100-amp circuit, providing 19.2 kW of power to the vehicle. More interestingly, it allows the vehicle to connect with another Ford-branded product, the Home Integration System, which consists of an inverter, a transfer switch, and a small battery and can integrate with your solar system if necessary. This unit costs a further $3895 but, once installed (at a non-trivial cost), should allow you to tap into the energy of your vehicle for days in a completely seamless way, and without the hassle of dealing with ICE generators.

One of the more exciting developments in home charging is the potential wider availability of wireless inductive charging. The idea here is to install a pad in or on your garage floor to send power wirelessly to an inductive charging loop in the vehicle, making it unnecessary to plug in your car at all. Third-party retrofit kits for installing this loop yourself have existed for some years without really catching on, likely for cost reasons, but the appeal of going plugless is clear and OEMs have started to show interest. BMW offered a wireless charging pilot on leased 530e models in California and Tesla recently purchased the German company Wiferion and has teased wireless home charging in investor day presentations. While this is still a developing technology, it’s a good example of a potentially popular home feature that could push consumers to higher amperage at home, in this case, because the convenience comes with a loss in charging efficiency.

The bottom line is that for the majority of owners, an L2 charger on a 30- or 50-amp circuit is going to be more than enough for daily use, and represents a happy medium between charging quickly and not overinvesting in home electrical infrastructure that will potentially go unused. That power may prove insufficient when EV trucks and SUVs become popular for people who drive for a living rather than as a commute, and with the eventual paradigm shift ushered in by bidirectional charging, but that’s the answer for those interested in basing their electrical upgrades on the available options here and now.