Alric wrote:Local electrician did install of a Leviton for $395 as opposed to the $1600 labor quoted by AV. To be fair the Leviton install was for a 16A line while the AV EVSE requires 40A (I believe).
Would this affect labor costs much? Thanks.
No, not at all. Assuming that you have space for the breakers and enough capacity in your electrical panel (if not that's a separate problem), then the process is identical for a 40A circuit vs anything lower... the only difference is that for a higher amp circuit they have to use a thicker wire. I'm guessing here, but the wire for the circuit itself is MAYBE 80 cents or a dollar more per foot.. so if you have an 80 foot run from the panel to the outlet or EVSE, you're talking about an incremental difference of something like $75 in materials.
The installation at the panel is identical... a 40A 240v two-pole circuit breaker isn't significantly more expensive than a 15A or 20A breaker... I think a 40A 2-pole breaker is like 20 bucks.
(note, one suggestion that I have for everyone is if you're going to get a circuit run anywhere in your house for something like this, get the wire itself run at a high current capacity. The labor to run and terminate the circuit is much higher than what you save by getting a smaller/cheaper wire). I think it's quite reasonable to assume that in the future we could see 40A or even 70A charging stations becoming pretty common... although if you're going to start talking about 70A, there are a lot of houses that will need to have their utility service upgraded, or they'll need to have some intelligence added so that the 70A charger in the garage isn't being used at the same time as other high-power devices in the home (dryers, water heaters, heat/AC units, etc)