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Comment by roflchoppa | Hacker News Reader

So one of the two phases of power that comes into my house went out. I was chatting with the lad that came to fix it from PGE. I wanted to know how much it cost to update my 125amp main panel to 200 amp. He responded , 30-50k after all the trenching work.

At home charging is gonna be a pickle for older homes… esp if you have powerlines that are trenched.

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You don't need 200A to charge at home. I've got 150A service and have no problems charging at 32A.

Even at 12A charging at home is still pretty viable. 12A * 240V = 2.88kW. I'll round down to like 2.5kW for some charging losses, average at least 3.5mi/kWh, and that's 8.75mi of range an hour. 8 hours of scheduled charging and that's 70mi of charge.

Are you pulling over 100A of power at midnight normally?

It is the aggregation of all utilities in the house that might become a pain (heat pumps + electric ranges + electric washer drier), but you have a good point, the stuff like car-charging can be done on off-peak times when you only have that one service running.

Maybe I don't need the 200 AMP main, lets see what they install tomorrow.

I had a 30amp circuit for my EV run on my 100 amp panel, older house (1928). Granted we had the space for it, we're just not using that much electricity. The install was around $500 and I could write it off on my MA taxes.

If I upgrade to 200amp, which I might if we migrate off of steam boiler to heat pump, it's about $5000. We have overhead power lines though.

While overhead lines are ugly, they make upgrades like this easy.

I was talking to the repair-man who came in, apparently they could run 200amp on the lines that are currently in place, had they been overhead. Running the wire straight in the ground (no conduit in my case) makes for poor heat dissipation, which limits to the 100/125 main.

I wonder if this changes if they have the 3inch conduit.

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