Not sure why people in this forum keep comparing swiss prices with the ones of countries with a forth of the salary they get here... that's a hypocritical.
Despite of that, considering that most recent EVs on the market are burning around 16/18 kW / 100 km and batteries are > 50 kW the idea will be to have at home a charging station of minimum 11 kWh, this mean you will need a cable of around 50A @ 220V. Also, the recommendation is no never charge the battery fully, ideally keep it around 85% and never under 15%. This mean that you should charge a maximum of 70% of your battery only.
For a battery of 72 kW this is just around 40 kW.
Won't spend more for a 22 kW charger box. I will also avoid Chinese battery charger, they are more likely to be 3.7 kWh and will charge forever and potentially don't provide any safety or warranty for the car. More expensive chargers are actually insured against any damage to the car.
The current price per kWh in Zurich from ETZ is 0.14 CHF on reduced rate, 0.19 CHF during the day. Ideally to fill 10 kW will cost you 1.40 CHF over night, thus 11 kW are more than enough to charge the battery eventually starting from 10 PM onwards.
I keep hearing stories that filling stations here are having to buy diesel generators to provide enough power for their new electric car charging points.
Well... it seems that a solution, if one can call it that, has been reached.
There will be four chargers installed. That maxes out current electrical capacity in our ca. 50 car garage. These will be private, not communal, as the association could not agree to general cost sharing.
If additional owners wish to switch to electric, power to run another eight or so chargers could theoretically be brought in. Again, the group cannot agree on a cost sharing or even on the project itself, so expansion will depend on the next tier of owners interested in going to electric cars to organize and fund that themselves. Those chargers will also be private.
No more electricity, and thus no more chargers, can be brought in beyond that unless there is a substantial change to neighborhood/village infrastructure or change in technology.
Not a great outcome, but on the bright side at least with this discussion behind us (for now) the annual bun fight owner's meeting should hopefully be a bit less fraught next session.
Also from legal perspective it is an interesting question what will happen when the next owner decides to buy an electric car and wants to install a charger?
How can you forbid him/her to o install a charger when others were allowed the same thing? On the other hand, if you allow an additional charger be installed, you run the risk of overloading the system and tripping the main fuse > loss of electricity to the whole building...
Chapter 347 in the interminable saga of trying to bring charging capability for electric cars in our 80s garage...
(Last year's solution never happened...)
After the last owner's meeting I am left, as usual, needing a reality check. I sorely lack understanding of the whole subject, so please forgive me if I am not describing the situation clearly.
1 - The leading proposal at this point, using the max electricity deliverable even after upgrading the whole electric infrastructure to our garage, will allow for 10 cars to (slow?) charge at at one time. (Garage is 40 some cars.) More is not possible according to the area electrity supplier. A load balancing/management thingamajig will be used.
Q: Do any of you have a similar limit in your multi-car garages? Have you found that with the load management system you are able to keep your car charged as needed?
2 - The price of electricty will be Hochtariff plus a 0.05 surcharge, regardless of when your car is charged.
Q: Is this reasonable? If not, how is your electrical charging prices?
3 - The discussion got lost in the weeds over the subject of fire liability and insurance. (Concerns over a recent event where an EV blew up in a garage somewhere in ZG sparked this tangent.)
Q: Is this really more of a worry with electric cars than ICE?
Q. One owner thought that additional fire liability insurance might be required for EVs. Have any of you who own EVs and park in communal spaces come across this?
We have same electricity supplier as you, and did an installation via EW Höfe in our 80 cars garage. They installed cables and have outlets so individual owners can open it up when they buy an EV.
1. Smart Load balancing is reality and would be an overkill to put down infra so all cars could charge simultaneously. In real world not all cars need current at same time and are at different needs of charging. It MAY affect, but is unlikely to be a constraint. You anyway dont have a choice! (it seems)
2. I don't think this is the case for us. We pay whats used at the then previaling tariff. But I have not really looked too closely.
3. We did not have anything like this. I am pretty sure your current insurance policy does not forbid electric cars, so people could park EV there today. Also its not like everyone is going to get one next year.
The fire instances on EVs is a religious topic, always causes debates. Statistically, they are much less but catch the news everytime it happens.
I’d be more worried about cheap e-bike batteries with questionable provenance catching fire than a recent EV battery (ex some Konas and Chevy Bolts, which were AFAIK never sold here).
It’s BS and even without a single EV, Hybrids will soon bring enough fire load into your 80 car garage to burn down the building twice.
And Hybrids are far more susceptible to catch fire than EVs due to their batteries going through more full cycles in a much shorter time.
A lot of recent (underground garage and other car-related) fires were actually hybrids. It just never gets reported because newspapers rely on ad money from Big Auto...
Tesla doesn’t advertise, so nobody has a problem accusing them (and harvesting the clicks)..
One thing this endless process with our owner's association has shown me is that some of the positives that one keeps hearing around e-autos, such as that charging is relatively simple and inexpensive, may only be true for those who are lucky to live in stand-alone houses with private garages.
It becomes far more complicated, and expensive, for the way the average Swiss lives - in older buildings and/or with shared infrastructure.
Retrofitting old infrastructure to new energy tech/needs on a large scale can prove to be a challenge - and the cost a barrier to entry. I'm seeing this with solar electric, heat pumps to replace an oil furnace as well as e-autos.
Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of switching. I don't think we as a society have any other real alternatives. I am just shocked at how very expensive less-than-optimal solutions are going to be.
(Solar is not possible for our communal garage, due to placement and general lack of sun. Not to mention that asking owners to shell out thousands more on top of the thousands we are each already paying for the garage infrastructure retrofit is an obvious non-starter.)
An electrician should check out the outlet if it can sustain the maximum load (~3kW) for hours without melting up the sockets and plugs.
These outlets were installed to power a vacuum for fifteen minutes a time or trickle-charge the starter battery of a 911 during Winter, not charge an EV for 12-24h at 3kW....
My neighbor upstairs had a 11kW charger installed for his XC90 PHEV. A motion to install a garage-wide charging system was shut down last Spring. Another neighbor installed another 11kW charger for his (classic) Ioniq and his electric motor-bike. I will be sharing this charger with him, as our parking sports are next to each other and I don't anticipate much problems.
Whoever buys the next EV and wants to charge must convince the other owners to fund the garage-wide charging system. The two houses (with six apartments) share a 64kW main line. So 2*11kW is the max...
That’s what we use. Programmed to charge from 23h-6h (cheap rate). It wouldn’t charge from near zero to 100% in that time, but in the 1 1/2 years we have had it we have never needed to do that.
As back up there is a borne in our village, 150m away, which is almost always available.
If you are the only user, if you alone are paying for the costs of intallation and use - and most importantly if you have no shared infrastructure with limited electricity - then sure.
The expense and complication comes in when infrastructure is shared; your use could prevent others from doing the same.
As in our shared 80s garage, the solution to give everyone access is very expensive. But since we all own shares in the garage and act as a collective sharing costs, use, and liability, a solution giving everyone some kind of accesss - or at least not giving undue advantage to an early adapter which precludes others' access, is the only possible approach.
Individual solutions seem easy. Collective, not so much.
Teslas, in Switzerland at least, come supplied with these “mobile connectors”.
I don’t use it often, but with multiple plugs available it has proved useful. I have a plug for France/Germany, UK and CH. I have come across a number of hotels who offer “free charging” which is nothing more than a 16A socket. But still helps topping up overnight.
Costs less than one one from Digital and is compatible with other EVs...
We just had this done in our shared underground parking garage. The cabling was about CHF 1500.- per parking space (36 spaces), then it was another CHF 3000.- per charging station. I have two parking spaces but only installed one charger - so total cost for me was about CHF 6000.-
Each charger has a "key" and your energy consumption is charged directly to your account. The solution is called "readyhome".