Getting an EV charger installed in a strata or condo

Installing a charger in a detached house is mostly an electrical question. Installing one in a strata is an electrical question wrapped in a governance question, and the governance part is usually what takes the time.

We do a fair number of these across the Lower Mainland, and the buildings that go smoothly all get the same few things right early. Here’s the shape of it.

Why your parking stall isn’t simply yours to wire

In most BC buildings your stall is limited common property, not part of your strata lot. You have exclusive use of it, but the strata corporation still owns it. More to the point, any route from a panel to that stall crosses common property, and the electrical capacity you’d be drawing on is the building’s, not yours.

That’s why this needs strata approval even when you’re paying for the whole thing. It isn’t the council being difficult. They’re being asked to let you attach a new load to shared infrastructure and run cable through shared space.

The rules changed in your favour

This used to be a much harder ask. BC amended the Strata Property Act specifically to make EV charging easier, and the practical effect is that a strata now has to deal with a written request properly rather than let it die on an agenda. They must respond within a set timeframe, and a refusal has to be reasonable and grounded in something real, like genuine electrical capacity limits, rather than a general preference not to have chargers in the building.

BC has also brought in a requirement for many stratas to commission an electrical planning report, which maps out how much EV charging the building’s electrical system can actually support and what it would take to expand. There’s a compliance deadline attached to it. If you’re on a council, confirm where your building sits with your strata manager or the corporation’s lawyer, because the details depend on the size and type of your strata and the rules have moved around.

The practical takeaway for an owner: put your request in writing, address it to the council, and be specific about what you’re proposing. A vague “can I get a charger” is easy to defer. A written proposal with an electrical plan attached is much harder to.

The actual constraint is capacity, not permission

Here’s the part that surprises people. Once you have approval, the limiting factor usually isn’t the wire to your stall. It’s how much spare capacity the building has, and how many neighbours are going to ask for the same thing over the next five years.

A 1990s tower was designed with parkade lighting and a few outlets in mind. It was not designed for forty cars drawing power overnight. The first owner to ask can usually be accommodated easily. The tenth cannot, if nobody planned.

This is why load management matters so much in buildings. An energy management system lets multiple chargers share a circuit intelligently, throttling each one so the total never exceeds what the building can supply. Cars sit parked for ten or twelve hours and only need a few of those to charge, so sharing works well in practice. It’s the same logic that decides charger sizing in a house, which we went through in what a Level 2 EV charger install costs. A building that installs load management up front can support far more chargers on the same electrical service than one that wires each stall at full draw.

The other piece is metering. Your charging shouldn’t land on the building’s common electricity bill. Most setups either sub-meter the charger and bill the owner, or run it off your own suite meter if the geometry allows. Sort out which before the install, not after the first bill.

The two paths a building can take

One owner at a time. You pay for your run, your charger, and your share of any infrastructure. It’s the fastest way to get charging for you specifically. The risk is that a building doing this without a plan ends up with a tangle of one-off installs and a capacity wall a few owners in.

An EV-ready plan for the whole building. The strata puts in the backbone, the panel capacity, and the load management, then owners connect to it as they need it. It costs more up front and it’s a much better outcome, because the tenth owner pays about what the first one did. Incentive programs have supported this kind of building-wide work in BC, though the programs and amounts change, so check what’s current before budgeting around it.

If you’re on a council and reading this before anyone has asked, the second path is the one to look at. Once the requests start coming they don’t stop.

What we do on a strata job

We work with the council or the property manager, not around them. Typically that means assessing the available capacity at the building’s electrical, proposing a route and a mounting location, specifying the charger and any load management, providing the drawings the council needs to make a decision, and pulling the permit for the work.

The install itself is normal EV charger work, and the charger side generally runs $500 to $1,500 when the supply is already in place. The building-capacity question is the strata version of the one detached homeowners face, which we covered in do I need a panel upgrade to install an EV charger. Parkade runs are often longer than a house run, and building-side capacity work is its own line, so we quote after seeing the parkade and the electrical room rather than over the phone.

Denser buildings are where this comes up most. We do a lot of it around Burnaby, where the Metrotown and Brentwood towers are exactly the vintage that needs a capacity conversation first.

If you’re the owner asking

Ask the council three questions. Has the building had an electrical planning report done, and can you see it. Is there a policy for EV charger requests already. And is anyone looking at load management, or is each install being treated as a one-off.

Those three answers tell you whether you’re looking at a few weeks or a few months. Either way, get the request in writing early, since the electrical work is usually the short part. When you’re ready for the electrical side, get in touch and we’ll work with your council on what the building can actually support.