How EV Charging Actually Works (Without the Jargon)

There’s a lot of noise out there about electric vehicle charging and not much plain-English explanation. So here’s the way we actually walk clients through it — the same method we use before we quote anyone a charger.

It comes down to four questions: What car? What’s your power supply? Who’s your network? And what’s your energy plan?

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Step 1: What car are you getting?

This is always our first question, and people are often surprised by it. But the car determines everything downstream — the charger size that makes sense, how long a charge takes, and how you should be buying your electricity.

A while back a client we’d installed solar for a couple of years earlier called us up. He was buying a BYD Sealion and wanted a proper EV charger instead of trickling away on a standard 240V wall socket. That car has an 82.5 kWh battery with a range of roughly 482 km.

From those two numbers you get the single most useful figure in EV charging:

That’s your conversion rate. Once you know how many kilometres one kilowatt-hour buys you, everything else is simple arithmetic.

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Step 2: Single phase or three phase?

This is where a lot of people get caught out.

Under the Australian Standards, a single-phase property is capped at 7.2 kW of EV charging capacity. That’s the ceiling, regardless of what charger the salesperson wants to sell you. A three-phase property can go significantly higher — typically 22 kW.

So before anyone talks brands or price, we confirm what supply you’ve actually got at the switchboard.

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Step 3: Know your network (this one’s a real misconception)

Australia doesn’t have one set of rules for EV chargers. Every DNSP — Distributed Network Service Provider — sets its own

regulations on top of the Australian Standards. Depending on where you live, you’re dealing with:

• Energex — South East Queensland
• Ergon — regional Queensland
• Ausgrid, Endeavour, Essential Energy — New South Wales 
• Jemena, CitiPower, Powercor, AusNet, United Energy — Victoria 
• SA Power Networks — South Australia

Each one has different approval requirements, different limits, and different rules about load control and demand management. An installer who knows Energex inside out may have never lodged a connection in Ausgrid territory.

That’s why it matters that you work with a company that knows exactly what it’s doing — not just to the Australian Standards, but to your network’s standards as well. Getting this wrong means delays, failed approvals, or a system that gets restricted after installation.

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Step 4: Do the maths on charging time

Back to our client. He’s single phase, so 7 kW is his maximum anyway. But here’s the contrast so you can see both:

	Single phase (7 kW)	Three phase (22 kW)
Range added per hour	7 × 5.8 = ~40.6 km	22 × 5.8 = ~127.6 km
To add 400 km	~10 hours	~3 hours

Now work backwards from your own driving. If you do 300–400 km a week: 

• Three phase: roughly 3 hours of charging per week
• Single phase: roughly 6–10 hours per week

That’s it. That’s how you know whether a charger suits your life before you buy it — not after.

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Step 5: Now get the energy plan right

Here’s the part almost nobody talks about. The charger is only half the job. The tariff you charge on is the other half.

Charging an EV on a standard 30–35c/kWh residential rate is the expensive way to do it. There are far better options, and which one suits you depends on whether you have solar and battery.

If you have limited (or no) solar and battery

Look at a dedicated EV tariff. Some retailers offer an off-peak overnight window — typically somewhere in the midnight- to-6am range — on a separate tariff at a fraction of the standard rate. We’ve seen offers as low as around 4c/kWh in that window.

Do the comparison: 4c versus 30–35c. On a 7 kW charger running 6 hours, that’s the difference between a few dollars and something much closer to fifteen. Across a year of driving, it’s serious money.

If your solar system is sized properly

This is why we deliberately go bigger on the systems we design — so they can absorb an EV later without a redesign. If your solar production covers the charging load, a solar-sharing or daytime-window plan usually beats the overnight tariff outright, because you’re charging on your own generation rather than buying it.

We’ll tell you which window to charge in, and at what rate, based on the plan you’re on.

One important caveat

Energy plans change constantly. A plan that’s excellent today might be mediocre in six months. That’s the value of dealing with a provider who keeps watching — we’ll call you and say “it’s time to switch, and here’s why” rather than leaving you on a deal that’s quietly gone stale.

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The commercial side: charging as revenue

Everything above is residential. On the commercial side, EV charging stops being a cost and starts being a revenue line.

Picture a gym, an office, a café, a retail centre. A customer arrives, plugs in for an hour while they train or work, and drives out with range they’ve paid you for.

If the site has solar and battery sized to cover the charging load, the electricity is effectively free to you. You then on- charge at, say, 25–30c/kWh. On a 22 kW charger:

That’s per charger, per hour, on power your system generated. Multiply that by three chargers across a business day and it adds up quickly.

And that’s before the softer benefits: it attracts customers, it keeps them on site longer, it’s a genuine staff perk, and it adds real value to the property. We’re seeing more and more businesses put chargers in for exactly these reasons.

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Putting it together

A homeowner spending $5,000 a year on fuel who moves to an EV charged off a properly sized solar system isn’t just cutting that bill down — they’re redirecting it. The system pays for itself out of money that was already leaving their pocket every week.

The point is that none of this works by accident. The right outcome comes from getting the sequence right:

Get those five right and you’ve got a charging setup that genuinely saves you money instead of just moving the bill from the servo to the retailer.