Case Study: How a 120-Unit Townhome Community Brought EV Charging to Individual Garages

Maple Ridge is an illustrative 120-unit townhome community spread across 15 buildings, built in the early 2000s. Like many townhome associations, each home has its own attached one-car garage, and each garage is fed from the individual unit's electric panel and meter. That single detail ended up shaping every decision the board made, because it meant electricity for an electric-vehicle (EV) charger would flow through the owner's own meter rather than a shared common-area meter.

The board's challenge was familiar. Roughly a dozen owners, about 10 percent of the community, already drove plug-in vehicles, and several were charging by running extension cords from inside their homes, which is both a fire risk and a violation of the National Electrical Code. Requests to the architectural review committee were piling up, and the board had no consistent policy for approving or denying them.

What made Maple Ridge different from a community with a shared parking lot is that the hardest problem in multifamily EV charging, fairly billing each driver for the electricity they use, was already solved. Each owner pays their own utility bill. The board could therefore focus on safety standards, electrical capacity, and incentives instead of submetering hardware and cost-allocation formulas.

The board hired a licensed electrician to survey a representative sample of garages before setting any policy. Most unit panels were rated at 100 or 125 amps. A typical Level 2 home charger draws 40 amps (32 amps of continuous load) and needs its own dedicated 240-volt, 50-amp circuit, sized according to the load calculations in NEC Article 220 and the EV-specific rules in NEC Article 625.

The key finding was encouraging: about 80 percent of the units had enough spare panel capacity to add one dedicated charger circuit with no upgrade. The remaining 20 percent were close to their calculated load limit, where adding a 50-amp circuit could exceed the panel's rating. For those homes, a load-management device, sometimes called a circuit-sharing or splitter device, could let the charger and the rest of the home share capacity safely, avoiding a costly panel replacement.

Costs came in within a predictable range. A hardwired, UL-listed Level 2 charger with a short conduit run inside an attached garage typically ran $1,200 to $2,000 installed. Homes needing a load-management device added roughly $400 to $700. A full 200-amp panel upgrade, which only a handful of units would ever need, runs $2,500 to $4,500, so avoiding it mattered.

Because each garage is a limited common element assigned to a single unit and is already individually metered, the board adopted an owner-owns, owner-pays model. An owner who wants a charger applies through the architectural review committee using a standardized one-page form, hires a licensed installer, and pays for the equipment and the electricity it uses. The HOA owns and maintains nothing inside the garage.

To keep installations safe and consistent, the board amended its rules to set clear minimum standards rather than leaving each install to chance. This approach also kept the community aligned with the spirit of state right-to-charge laws, which in states like California, Colorado, Florida, and New York limit an association's ability to prohibit an owner from installing a charger at their own assigned parking. Maple Ridge's state had no such mandate, but the board chose to act as if it did.

Even though owners paid for their own installs, the board added value by compiling the incentives into a single information sheet so no one left money on the table. The largest was the federal 30C Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit, which gives individuals a tax credit of 30 percent of hardware and installation costs, up to $1,000, but only for homes located in eligible low-income or non-urban census tracts. The board mapped which buildings qualified using the IRS and Department of Energy eligibility tools.

The board also identified the local electric utility's residential charger rebate, commonly in the $250 to $500 range, and flagged the utility's optional time-of-use rate that lets owners charge overnight at a lower cost per kilowatt-hour. Together with any state-level rebate, a typical owner's net out-of-pocket cost dropped to roughly $800 to $1,200 after incentives.

Rather than wait for demand to arrive piecemeal, the board pre-qualified two local installers and negotiated group pricing of about 15 percent off for owners who used them. In the first phase, the dozen current EV owners completed their installations within three months, all without a single panel upgrade because the assessment had already flagged which homes needed a load-management device.

The board also addressed the small gap in its plan: a few residents and visitors without a usable garage circuit. It installed two shared, networked Level 2 chargers in the visitor lot on the HOA's common meter, using a pay-per-use app with RFID activation so the association fully recovers the electricity cost and a small maintenance reserve. This kept the project from quietly subsidizing a few drivers at everyone else's expense.

Within twelve months, 22 of the 120 units, about 18 percent, had a working charger. No panel upgrades were required, no special assessment was levied because owners funded their own installs, and the two shared chargers covered their own operating costs. Just as importantly, the extension cords disappeared and the architectural committee finally had a clear, repeatable approval process.

Townhome and detached-garage communities have a structural advantage that larger buildings and shared lots do not, and boards in that position should lean into it. The lessons below translate to most associations where parking is individually assigned and metered.