What EV charger installation involves

Charging at home only works if the panel behind it can carry the circuit. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With EV charger installation, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

Where repair makes more sense than replacement, we repair. Swapping out equipment that still has years left in it is good business for a contractor and a bad deal for you.

Where this comes up

Level 2 at home, DC fast and fleet charging for business and municipal sites. Most of these calls come from Des Plaines and the surrounding suburbs, but we take them anywhere in our service area.

It comes up most during a remodel. The walls are open, the old wiring is right there, and it is the cheapest moment the building will ever give you to fix what is behind them. Once the drywall is back, the same repair costs more.

How we do it

Quik Wire Electric has 3 years in business and 10 years of electrical experience behind it. The work goes in to code, gets tested and comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

What we see go wrong

Most of the bad work we find was not done by an electrician. It was a handyman, a previous owner or somebody who watched a video. Backstabbed outlets, undersized conductors, missing grounds, neutrals and grounds bonded in a subpanel, junctions buried inside a wall with no box.

None of that is visible from the living room. It surfaces during a remodel, a home inspection, or the day a breaker stops holding.

What happens when we are done

Before we leave, everything we installed or repaired gets tested under load. Then we walk you through what we did, show you the panel, and point out anything we noticed that you should keep an eye on. You know what was done and why.

Where a permit was pulled you get the closed inspection. Where documentation exists, you get it.

Code, permits and inspection

Generators and transfer switches draw extra attention from inspectors, because a bad install can push power back into the utility lines. Expect a permit and an inspection on those even in places that are relaxed about smaller work, and expect us to handle both.

We deal with whichever jurisdiction the job sits in. We pull the permit, we schedule the inspection, and we are there when the inspector walks it. You get the paperwork at the end, which matters when you sell the building or when an insurer asks.

Copper, aluminum and what is in your walls

Aluminum branch wiring went into a lot of houses in the late sixties and early seventies. It is not automatically dangerous, but it expands and contracts more than copper, which loosens terminations over time, and it needs devices and connectors rated for it.

The repair is usually not a full rewire. Proper connectors at every termination, done thoroughly, solves most of it. Anybody quoting you a whole-house rewire on sight has not looked.

What to do before we arrive

If water is anywhere near the panel or an outlet, do not touch either one. Stay out of the wet area, keep everyone back, and call us. A flooded basement with live circuits is a job for us, not for a pair of rubber boots.

Tell us what was plugged in when it happened and roughly what time it was. The more specific you are, the faster we find it.

Load calculation comes first

An EV charger is a continuous load, which means the code requires the circuit to be sized at 125 percent of its rating. A 48-amp charger therefore needs a 60-amp circuit, and that has to fit inside what the service can already carry alongside the furnace, range, dryer and air conditioning.

We run the calculation before anything gets ordered. Sometimes the answer is that the panel takes it as-is, sometimes it needs a load management device, and sometimes the service genuinely needs upgrading first. You get the real answer rather than the convenient one.