LEVEL 2 AT HOME. WHAT IT TAKES.

Every EV comes with a cord that plugs into a regular wall outlet. Plenty of owners use it for a week, do the math on how long a full charge takes, and start shopping for a real charger. Here's what the real charger actually requires — because it's a bigger electrical job than most people expect, and a smaller one than most people fear.

Level 1 is that included cord on a standard 120-volt outlet. It adds roughly 3 to 5 miles of range per hour of charging. If you drive 30 miles a day and plug in every night, it can honestly be enough.

Level 2 runs on 240 volts — the same class of power as your electric dryer or range — and adds roughly 25 to 45 miles of range per hour depending on the charger and the car. A drained battery goes to full overnight, every night, without thinking about it. That overnight-full difference is why almost everybody ends up here.

This is the step that decides the whole job, and it comes first. A Level 2 charger is one of the biggest continuous loads in your house — it pulls hard for hours at a time. Before anything gets quoted, the panel gets a load calculation: what your service size is, what your existing loads add up to, and whether there's honest room for a 40- or 50-amp circuit on top.

Homes with 200-amp service usually have room. Homes with 100-amp service are a maybe — sometimes the math works, sometimes a load-management device makes it work safely, and sometimes the right answer is a panel upgrade first. Anybody who quotes you a charger install without looking at your panel is guessing with your house. If the panel can't take it, I'll tell you that straight and quote the real fix in writing. Here are the signs your panel is already at its limit.

A Level 2 charger gets its own dedicated 240-volt circuit — nothing else on it, sized to the charger. Most home installs land on a 50-amp breaker feeding a 40-amp charger, or a 60-amp breaker for a 48-amp hardwired unit. Two ways to connect:

Distance matters to cost. A panel in the garage with the charger going on the next wall is a short, simple run. A panel on the far side of the house, a detached garage, or a run through a finished attic or under the house is more wire, more labor, and sometimes trenching. That's why real quotes start with somebody looking at your actual house instead of a flat price on the internet.

Reality, plainly: in most cities around here, adding a circuit like this requires an electrical permit, and the finished work gets inspected. That's not red tape for its own sake — it's a high-draw circuit that will run unattended for thousands of hours in your garage, and the permit is also your paper trail. If there's ever an insurance question or you sell the house, "permitted and inspected" is the answer you want to have. Work done without it can come back on you at exactly the wrong moment. I handle the job to code; the permit process is part of doing it right, not an optional extra.

What I need from you: what you drive, which charger you're looking at (or ask — I'll tell you what I'd buy), and where the car actually parks at night. That's enough to get you a real number. See the EV charger install service page or call and we'll walk it.