Well, yeah. I suppose it would be. I'm a bit surprised this is a surprise to the landlord. Also, many of the costs here are looming anyways. It's a matter of when, not if, the electrical needs updating to meet code.
I see this all the time. “Investors” buy real estate by assuming repairs and maintenance to be minimal and then pocketing every dime of excess cash created by the property. Then, over time when the windows need to be replaced or the roof or the electrical system upgraded or the HVAC improved, they don’t have any budget for it because they’ve become used to living off all of the income (despite the fact that over their 10-20 years of ownership they’ve seen rents increase dramatically). So what do they do? They list it for sale at high current market rents as if all of this deferred maintenance / Capex has been completed. This puts buyers in a position of paying a massive purchase price and having massive costs to renovate / upgrade.
I hate landlords like this. Fortunately you can spot them a mile away. If the paint is peeling, then the electrical isn’t to code.
You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner. It is easily the number one consumer of energy. Older neighborhoods utilities where never designed to do that.
That is definitely not true. An 80 year old house might not even have grounded outlets, let alone GFCI or AFCI protected outlets.
> You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner
Nobody worries about how many electric ovens, clothes dryers, or air conditioners are in an older neighborhood. 240V at 30A is a trivial load addition, and even if it were to become a concern, there are existing mechanisms to shed load during peak usage. Even a crude cut-off switch, like many air conditioners have, would be sufficient.
240v at 30A is most definitely not a trivial load. Most homes have 100 amp service. That would be 30% of your homes total power capacity just for changing EV. You wouldn't be able to run AC and the dryer and charge an EV at the same time at that rate. But more importantly there is only so much power at the pole.
> That would be 30% of your homes total power capacity just for changing EV
That's the thing - most people have a 8 to 12 hour window to fully charge their car(s) overnight and when you and your neighbors are using practically no energy. Worst case is there is no active management and there is just a new peak at midnight. Best case is that the electric company incentivizes you to not only charge at non-peak times, but also pays you to allow them to manage the charging times.
This technology is not science fiction - it already exists. I got a $250 rebate from my electric company to install a connected level 2 charger. It is not currently managed, but if there is some dystopian future where all of my neighbors aren't burning hydrocarbons, all have EVs, and somehow the infrastructure hasn't kept up, as long as my car is fully charged in the morning, I don't care if it happened from midnight to 2 AM or 4 AM to 6 AM.
But also...
> Most homes have 100 amp service
Most homes built decades ago, maybe. And to be clear, we're talking about US 120V system. I would be very surprised if any house built since...lets be generous...the 1980s doesn't have a 200A supply or couldn't easily be updated.
As it stands today, an EV charger (or an outlet designated for EV charging) is considered to be 'in use' 100% of the time from a loading perspective (i.e., when counting how big of a main breaker you need to handle). Which, honestly, makes sense. You can't predict when other loads are being used reliably, and you can use an EV charger for many hours. For, say, during the middle of the night.. there's a high heating load so that loading will happen simultaneously.
There are more intelligent ways to handle this (and, the products exist today!), however they're quite expensive. Maybe less expensive than a full new overhaul of your house's electrical... but eventually electrical needs to be updated to code.
Also, regarding 100A vs 200A main panels: it heavily depends on the size of the house. I know in my neighborhood, which the oldest house was built in 2008, they only gave 100A panels to houses that were ~1700sqft or smaller. For larger houses, those got 200A panels.
As in no, it does not heavily depend on size in general in the way you describe. It may do so where you are but that's about it. My house is smaller than 1700sqft, was built quite some years before 2008 and we have a 200A panel and I don't know what I would do with 100A service. It would be impossible actually. But that might be because we use electric baseboard heating and thus lots of heating circuits with quite a bunch of amps in use by that.
In general, electric heat is a bit of a menace in terms of electrical consumption... especially given electric prices lately.
I live way too far out to have natural gas service and because I have such a small house it has baseboard heating. Most larger houses here have electric furnaces instead. But having 200A service meant I was easily able to add a mini split heat pump taking care of heating most of the time but we have no space to put a furnace instead. We do have propane to heat when power is out (or just if I want the nicety of a roaring fire heating up the room on -40 evenings). The oven is electric too. I was looking at getting a tankless water heater but would need to upgrade the electric service for that apparently because my 200A are not enough in case "everything else is on at the same time" (I personally wouldn't mind the heaters shutting off for 3 minutes while I take a shower but I guess that's against code).
Also electricity prices do not generalize well. Way too much variance across an entire continent or two. What you say is expensive for you actually isn't that expensive here. Now ask someone in Europe this winter what they think about your electricity prices in comparison.
Putting in a 200 amp panel ran me about $1,000. Power company checked off on it and upgraded my meter in the process. I also added a 240v 30amp socket in the garage for things like an EV, and put a whole house surge protector on in the process.
My house has rock solid power at every socket and plenty of capacity for the future as well, definitely worth the investment.
True, but not what you said. You said the changes are not safety related, but these are safety related.
Having had a 100 amp service, it was really not a big deal. Sure I'd normally charge at 11pm, when the AC wasn't running. But the home is using WAY less electricity than when I bought in 1994 when TVs consumed a ton of power, single paned windows insulated poorly, a fair number of 300 watt halogen bulbs, and tons of the 100 watt incandescents. Between LED lighting, a more efficient refrigerator, and a MUCH lower power flat panel TV our power use per day is less than it was in 1994, even with a EV.
100 amps @ 240v is a ton of power, and if you need to peak shave there's quite a bit of room between 240v@30 amps and 240v@10 amps which is plenty for most normal driving patterns.
Also a device is available that shares the EV circuit with a dryer circuit; set your car to start charging very late at night when laundry is not running. Zero additional max load for the house.
It's always painful trying to have discussions related to any kind of physical infrastructure on HN because it's absolutely full of people that assume that physical design and maintenance is somehow the trivial, easy part.
The exterior service disconnect rule added in 2020 is safety related, it’s so firefighters can kill electrical power to a home from the outside to make it safe to enter. It has nothing to do with the utility.
33 miles a day of electricity is not that much, something like 7.6 KwH per day. For perspective AC units use from 0.5 to 5 KwH per hour.
Is it a difference, yes. However most EVs charge off peak, and would go even more off peak with a financial incentive. I set mine to start charging at 11pm when it's the cheapest rate, which nicely offsets AC use which is heaviest in the afternoon.
Mandating ripping out immediately everything dangerous or carcinogenic, would be even bigger issue. And these things don't cause actually so many issues to be very life threatening. They have been around for decades after all.
For an existing structure, the result of all these improvements, even considering rising energy costs, would never pay back over the expected life of the house. Code tries to strike a balance here by enforcing that when it's reasonable to do so (e.g. you tore down to the studs for a remodel anyway), you need to bring the areas modified up to modern-ish standards.
But old homes are expensive to rewire. And often, the safety benefits are very small. Current code requires a lot more outlets than older code, in part because many people overuse extension cords and tiny/cheap power taps when there aren't sufficient outlets, which is a safety issue, but is it worth spending thousands of dollars to pull new wire through existing walls, and then repairing the walls afterwards?
Some issues, are worth retrofitting for, and hopefully a pre-sales inspection by the buyer or insurance inspection will catch those. It would be reasonable to have a transfer inspection for those too.
Lots of paths to success here.
The egregious safety problems (eg knob and tube, fuses, Federal Pacific breakers) are taken care of by insurance companies. Or state laws that address the specific problem (eg septic, smoke detectors, etc). One can certainly have an opinion that something specific should be added to the regulations that apply when selling, but the out of touch comments here are far from informed.
Also some of the recent changes in the NEC are actually not beneficial to many people - eg the plastic gates in TR receptacles that tend to bind up and bend plug prongs, and shoddy overaggressive AFCIs running proprietary software. That you're generally left alone in the privacy of your own home without an inspector coming around every year and making you remodel is a feature, not a bug.
My old neighborhood has a bunch of 80 year olds with houses worth a million easy without any mortgages. You would think the banks would give them loans to fix things up. Nope, not a chance. The banks are waiting for them to die and make money off the next mortgage.
Sure you can - and you damn well should, especially for outright safety issues. What's the point of a building code if it ain't gonna be enforced?
> You know what people will do? Pass the buck to the buyer (Sold As Is).
Then give the buyer a grace period to bring the building up to code.
Reality simply doesn’t work this way. Just like we allow people to drive old ass cars that aren’t safe for the passengers but will pass emission inspections.
It's funny though, all of this is just for tax revenue. They don't care about electrical wiring, plumbing, etc... I am told that when a house is first built they will inspect the electrical but I do not believe them. I've had to fix dozens of incorrectly wired sockets and really janky wiring in the circuit breaker panel and missing grounding connections.
municipalities lack consensus for any other outcome to occur, they are all land fiefdoms.
My mother in law told me yesterday that my sister in law's mother in law's house burned down while they slept (they're safe) this week due to brand new electrics in a brand new house extension, carried out by a licensed (is that the correct word for an electrician?) professional.
This is in England
Our circuits are "properly fused" though with RCDs/circuit breakers, but they're high current because we can have so many large current drawing devices on a single circuit (such as in the kitchen) which is always given its own circuit.
The final ring circuit is an idiosyncracy of British wiring practice, where the cable goes out in a loop from the distribution board to sockets etc and then connects back to the board again. It allows smaller gauge wires to be run for a given current rating, and was introduced after WWII to reduce copper use during reconstruction. This does have some unusual failure modes, but the code is absolutely fine for this system as long as it's followed (including the testing regime after new installations, which will catch, for example, a ring circuit with the neutral conductor disconnected only on one side of the ring). Obviously bad work can happen anywhere.
I meant to say my wife's sister's partner's mother.