Tesla Wall Connector installation, from the electrician who fits them

The charger is the easy part

Mounting the unit and terminating it takes a fraction of the day. What takes the time is the circuit that feeds it: a dedicated run from your switchboard to wherever the charger is going, sized for the load, with its own protection at the board.

That is not an upsell and it is not optional. A home charger is one of the heaviest continuous loads a house will ever carry, running for hours at a time rather than in short bursts like a kettle or an oven. Sharing it with an existing circuit is how you get warm cables inside walls and breakers tripping at midnight.

So when two quotes for the same charger come back hundreds of dollars apart, the difference is almost never the charger. It is the cable run, the board work, and whether the quote included the things that make it compliant.

What actually decides the price

Four things, roughly in order of how much they move the number.

Distance from the switchboard to the charger. This is the single biggest factor. A garage on the other side of the meter box is a short run. A detached garage at the back of the block, or a charger on the far side of a double storey home, means a long cable in a heavy size, and that cable is not cheap.

How hard that run is. A clean path through a roof space is straightforward. Going under a slab, through a rendered cavity wall, across a courtyard or down the outside of a rendered wall is a different job, and it is the thing that most often makes an install cost more than the customer expected.

What your switchboard is like. If there is a spare way and the board is in good order, we fit the protection and move on. If the board is full, or it is one of the older boards that cannot safely take another circuit, that work comes first and it is priced separately so you can see it.

Single or three phase supply. Three phase opens up faster charging on chargers that support it. Most Queensland homes are single phase, and for the overwhelming majority of drivers single phase is genuinely enough, which I will come back to.

The supply question almost nobody asks about

Here is the part that gets missed, and it is the one worth understanding before you spend anything.

Your house has a finite amount of supply coming into it. Adding a charger that can pull a serious continuous load does not just need a spare way in the board, it needs headroom in that supply, on top of the air conditioning, the oven, the hot water and everything else that might be running on a January evening.

On plenty of homes there is ample headroom and this is a nonissue. On some, particularly older properties and some units and townhouses, there is not, and that is where the conversation changes.

The good news is that it is usually solvable rather than fatal. Most modern chargers, including the Wall Connector, support some form of load management: the charger watches what the rest of the house is doing and backs itself off when things get busy, then speeds back up later. Your car still charges overnight, you just do not trip the main.

It is worth saying plainly that this is the thing that makes a charger possible on a supply constrained home. If a quote does not mention supply capacity at all, it has not been assessed.

Where it goes on the wall is a parking decision

The cable is attached to the Wall Connector, so where the unit goes decides whether the cable comfortably reaches your car's charge port. That sounds obvious and it is the thing most often got wrong.

Think about which way you actually park, where the charge port is on your car, and whether you will ever park a second car in that space or reverse in rather than drive in. A charger mounted for the way you park today can be awkward for the car you buy in four years.

We work this out on site before anything is drilled, standing where the car goes. It costs nothing to get right at that point and it is irritating to live with if it is wrong.

What we need to know before quoting

You can get most of the way to an accurate price without anybody visiting, and the more of this you can tell us the tighter the number is.

A photo of your switchboard with the cover on, showing the whole board. Where the board is, and where you want the charger. Roughly how far apart those two are, and what is between them. Whether you have single or three phase supply, which the board photo usually answers. And whether the charger came with the car or you are buying it separately.

From that we can usually quote properly, and say honestly when something needs to be looked at on site before we commit to a number. We would rather tell you that up front than discover it on the day.

What you should get at the end

A dedicated circuit, correctly sized, with its own protection at the board. The charger commissioned and tested, and set up with your account and the app so it actually works before we leave.

A Certificate of Testing and Compliance for the electrical work, which is your evidence the job was done by a licensed contractor to the wiring rules. Keep it with your house papers. It matters at sale time and it matters to your insurer.

Our workmanship carries a lifetime warranty (conditions apply). The charger itself carries the manufacturer's warranty, which is Tesla's, not ours.

If you want the version priced for your actual house, our EV charger installation page explains the process, and what an EV charger costs to install sets out the general market ranges for the work.

Common questions