Two New Guides: Charging in a Condo, and Charging at the Cottage
EVD2 reads Reddit, not to post in it, but to find out what Canadians actually ask when they are thinking about an EV. That page has listed the same five questions for months. Four of them had an answer somewhere on this site. One did not.
"Can you own an EV in a condo with no charger?" had nothing. The word condo appeared on this site exactly once: on the page listing the question.
That is now fixed, along with a second gap nobody had written down but every Ontario and Quebec owner runs into by July.
Charging in a condo or apartment
The thing that struck me writing it is that the usual advice is not wrong so much as badly ordered. Every thread answers this question with "ask your board," which is the slowest, most expensive and least certain of the four available routes. It is what you do when the other three have failed, not what you do first.
Start with the arithmetic instead. The average Canadian drives about 15,000 km a year, roughly 290 km a week, or 55 to 65 kWh. That is the entire decision, and it changes what you need:
- Sixty kWh a week is about five nights on an ordinary 120V outlet. Not a 48 A wall unit, not your own stall. An outlet.
- It is also a single fast-charging session while you do something else, which is why drivers with a charger on their commute often never solve the home problem at all, and never need to.
Three things in the guide are worth knowing even if you never read the rest:
Your application has a clock on it. In Ontario, an owner applies under section 24.5 of O. Reg. 48/01. The corporation has 60 days to respond, extendable only if you agree, and if it says nothing it is deemed to have not rejected the application. It can refuse on three grounds only, each requiring a qualified professional's report. British Columbia gives a strata council three months under section 90.1 and forbids unreasonable refusal.
"We do not have the electrical capacity" is usually a design answer, not a fact. Rule 8-500 of the Canadian Electrical Code lets an energy management system monitor the service and throttle chargers so the total never exceeds it, and where it does, those chargers need not be counted in the building's calculated load at all. Ten cars sharing one feeder overnight is a normal design.
Billing residents by the kilowatt-hour is legal. Boards often assume it is not, because most chargers are not approved measuring devices. Measurement Canada runs temporary dispensation programs covering exactly this, including a non-commercial stream for a building billing its own residents, and they run to the end of 2029.
Taking an EV to the cottage
This one was not on the Reddit list, which in hindsight is an oversight on my part rather than on the internet's. Cottage country is where Canada's charging map is thinnest, and it is where a lot of people form their opinion of whether an EV works for them.
The drive up is rarely the problem. A 400 km car reaches Muskoka or the Laurentians without drama. The problem is arriving at half a battery, 40 minutes past the last fast charger, at a place with one outdoor outlet on a 60 A service shared with a well pump, and needing to be home Sunday.
The guide's argument is that you should plan the trip home before you leave, and that the last fast charger before your highway turnoff matters more than any other. After that:
- A single 120V outlet is worth more than people think. Friday evening to Sunday afternoon is about 44 hours, which is 200 km or more on most cars, provided it is on its own circuit and you dial the current down to 8 A. Sharing that circuit with a well pump is how you wake up to a car that charged for forty minutes.
- Get a load calculation before anyone quotes you a service upgrade. Rural services are often 60 A or 100 A, and the same Rule 8-500 that solves condo garages solves cottages, usually for a fraction of the cost of new service.
- The RV outlet is not what it looks like. A TT-30 socket is 120V despite the 240V-style plug, and an adapter does not change that.
- Expect about 70% of rated range at -7C, and Level 1 charging roughly 30% slower in the cold, because some of the power goes to keeping the battery warm.
What the two have in common
Both guides end up arguing the same thing from opposite directions: you probably need less hardware than you have been told, and the binding constraint is rarely the car.
Both also lean on data this site already publishes rather than general advice. The overnight Level 1 figures come from the per-model estimates on the vehicle pages. The corridor gaps and the plugs-per-vehicle ratios come from the public charging tool: Ontario has the most Trans-Canada mileage and the thinnest coverage, while Quebec has about a third of the country's fast ports and the worst crowding at 98 plug-in vehicles per port. The rebate eligibility comes from the charger rebates ranking, which is also where you will find that several home-charger programs exclude multi-unit buildings outright.
What is still missing
Two honest gaps, since it is better to name them than have you find them.
The condo guide covers Ontario and British Columbia in detail because those are the provinces with an explicit statutory process and real deadlines. Quebec, Alberta and the rest run through the declaration, the bylaws and negotiation, with no clock behind you. If you have been through that in one of those provinces, I would like to hear how it went.
And neither guide is a tool yet. Knowing that Rule 8-500 exists is useful. Being able to type in your building's service size and see what it supports would be better. That is the kind of thing this site is for, and it is on the list.
If you are sitting in a condo parking garage wondering whether any of this applies to you, start with the week-of-driving number. It answers more of the question than the hardware does.