Your new EV is in the driveway and the wall socket it is trickling off is already the slow way to do this. A proper home setup is a dedicated circuit and a wall charger, not an extension lead, and getting one fitted safely is electrical work first and a gadget second. Martin Turnbull has run Smartlec, an A-Grade licensed and insured electrical contractor, out of Prahran since 2017, and EV charger installation is one of the jobs he is asked for most. Tell us the car, the parking spot and roughly where your switchboard sits, and you get a firm quote before anything is mounted on the wall.
This is the home base for our EV charger work across Melbourne. The short version: home and business charging, and one licensed trade for the lot.
EV charger installation for Melbourne homes and businesses
A house charging one car overnight and a workplace running a bank of bays for staff and fleet are different jobs, and we take on both. For homes that usually means a single 7kW wall unit on its own circuit, sited where the cable reaches the car without crossing a doorway or a path. For businesses it can run to several units, a shared supply that has to be split sensibly, and load management so the building does not trip when three cars plug in at five o'clock.
Either way it is the same standard and the same licensed hands: the load calculation a multi-bay workplace needs, or a home circuit done properly so the rest of the house keeps working while the car charges. As an EV charger installer we fit the common home and commercial wall chargers rather than tying you to one brand, and we will talk through which unit suits your car before you buy anything.
What it costs: the $99 inspection, waived if you go ahead
Almost no installer publishes a real EV charging price, because almost no two installs are the same. What decides yours is the run from the board to the charger, whether the switchboard has room, and whether your supply is single or three phase. So rather than quote a number that means nothing, we come and look.
We charge a $99 inspection fee to assess the job in person and give you a firm, itemised quote, and that $99 is waived in full the moment you go ahead. A straightforward home job we can often scope from a few photos of your switchboard and meter. Either way the price is fixed before any work starts, so there is no open-ended hourly meter and no surprise on the invoice.
Most quotes skip: does your switchboard have the capacity?
Here is the catch the cheap quotes leave out. A 7kW charger is a serious continuous load, and plenty of Melbourne homes, especially older ones with ageing wiring, run a switchboard that has no spare capacity or still leans on old fuse-style protection. Bolting a charger onto a board like that is how you get nuisance tripping, or worse. The honest answer on a fair number of homes is that the board, or the mains supply feeding it, needs upgrading before the charger goes in.
This is exactly where doing it all under one A-Grade licence matters. We carry out the complete switchboard and mains upgrades ourselves, so if your board needs work it is the same trade, the same quote and the same warranty as the charger, not a second contractor you have to find and coordinate. If a safety check is the sensible first step, we will say so plainly, and we will tell you when the existing board is perfectly fine and no upgrade is needed. No upsell to a new switchboard when the one you have can carry the charger.
