So you’re living at, or thinking of living at Brittan Heights, and want to purchase an electric car. How are you going to charge it?

California has passed a few laws to prevent HOAs from flat out denying the addition of charging stations to a parking spot. However, it can still be costly to a homeowner. Typically the owner must pay for its installation plus the costs to maintain it, the liability insurance, and for the electricity used.

This can be a challenge at Brittan Heights. Some carports are close to the buildings, so bringing electricity from the house to these areas might be less challenging. However, other carports are on the other side of the road and quite a distance from the buildings, this distance could make it nearly economically impossible to want to install a charging station. In these impossible cases, the law states that installation of a charging station for the exclusive use of an owner in a common area shall be authorized by the association “only if installation in the owner’s designated parking space is impossible or unreasonably expensive….” “Impossible” means incapable of happening.

So, in theory it should be possible to have a charging station at Brittan Heights. I’m only aware of one homeowner so far that has done it. He had a mid-level unit next to his carport. He chose to install a 110v outlet for his charging station. It cost him approximately $1,300 to pay a professional electrician to do the job. It would have cost about $2,500 to bring 240v from the circuit breaker area in the laundry room out to the carport and he would have had some holes in the wall to repair.

Basically they just ran metal conduit outside the building to the carport. They put the electronics in the locker above the carport and have the charger cable coming out there. The homeowner did need to purchase a liability insurance policy in excess of $1M. This was HOA approved.