The straight-talk guide to home EV charging in Melbourne's west

EVs are landing fastest exactly where Flowsmart works — Point Cook, Tarneit, Truganina, Melton. New estates, long commutes, driveways with off-street parking: the western suburbs are built for home charging. Here’s what matters before you spend a dollar.

Start at the switchboard, not the charger

A 7kW charger is the largest continuous load most homes will ever run — bigger than your oven, longer than your air con. Whether your board can take it depends on your supply capacity and what else runs at night. That assessment comes first; it’s free as part of a Flowsmart quote, and it occasionally saves people from buying a charger their board can’t support yet.

Charger sizing, honestly

A standard powerpoint adds roughly 10–15km of range per hour — fine for a plug-in hybrid, painful for a full EV. A 7kW single-phase charger adds 40–50km per hour: empty-to-full overnight for nearly every EV sold in Australia. Three-phase 11–22kW units are quicker again, but for most households they’re speed you’ll never use — the car sits there all night anyway.

The solar angle

If you have panels, a solar-aware charger can throttle itself to match what your roof is exporting, charging the car on power that would otherwise earn you a few cents of feed-in tariff. Over a year that’s the difference between charging at roughly free and charging at grid rates.

What installation involves

A dedicated circuit from the board to where the car parks, proper RCD protection, a wall-mounted unit fixed and sealed for weather, commissioning under load, and a Certificate of Electrical Safety. Straightforward installs take half a day. The EV charger service page has photos and FAQs.