Shared supply, metering, and the committee approval — the technical problem is solvable, the process is the work.
Why this is a different problem
In a house, you own the supply, the switchboard and the parking space, and one electrician can settle the whole job.
In strata, the car park is usually common property, the building has a shared supply with finite capacity, the energy has to be billed to the right resident, and none of it proceeds without owners corporation approval.
The hardware side of this is well understood and not especially difficult. The process side is where these projects stall for months — so it is worth running them in the right order.
Capacity is the first question
A building has a fixed main supply sized for lifts, lighting, pumps and apartments, usually with modest headroom. Ten residents each adding a 7 kW charger at full rate can exceed what the building can deliver.
The answer is load management: chargers that share a defined capacity budget rather than each drawing full rate. Overnight, when the building's other loads are low, there is generally plenty of energy to go around — it just cannot all be delivered at once.
This is what turns 'the building can support two chargers' into 'the building can support twenty, charging sequentially overnight'. It is almost always cheaper than upgrading the building's supply, and it is the argument that wins committee votes.
Three ways to wire it
From the resident's own meter. The charger is fed from that apartment's supply, so the energy appears on their bill automatically. Cleanest billing, but often a long and expensive cable run from their meter to their bay.
From common property with per-charger metering. Fed from the building supply, with each charger metering its own consumption and residents billed from those records. Shorter cable runs, and it scales, but it needs a billing process the committee agrees to.
A shared managed hub. A bank of chargers serving multiple bays with driver authentication and per-user records. Best where bays are not fixed, or where the building wants to start small and grow.
Which one is right depends on the building's layout and the distance between meters and bays. Have an electrician price the cable runs before the committee debates the philosophy.
Metering and billing
Somebody has to pay for the electricity, and it must not be the building's general fund by accident.
Per-charger metering with RFID or app authentication gives you a per-driver, per-session kWh record. From there the committee can pass through actual cost, apply a flat rate per kWh, or bill periodically from exported statements.
Whatever is chosen, get it written into the approval. 'We'll sort out the billing later' is how these arrangements end up in dispute at the next AGM.
Getting it approved
Rules differ by state and by scheme, and several states have introduced provisions that make it harder for an owners corporation to unreasonably refuse EV charging. Check your own jurisdiction and your scheme's by-laws.
A proposal that tends to succeed includes: the technical design, evidence the building's supply can carry it with load management, product certification documents, who pays for installation and who pays for energy, who maintains the equipment, what happens if the owner sells, and insurance implications.
Committees reject vague requests and approve specific ones. The single most effective thing you can bring is a plan that already answers the objections — particularly the one about the building's capacity.
We can supply the technical documentation pack for that submission: specifications, certification, load management design and the numbers on shared capacity.
Start with the wiring path, not the charger
The most common expensive mistake is choosing hardware before anybody has looked at how the cable physically gets from the switchboard to the bay.
In a concrete building, cable routes are constrained, fire separation matters, and the difference between an easy run and a hard one can be several thousand dollars.
Get an electrician to walk the path first. If one bay is straightforward and another is not, that often reshapes the whole proposal — and it is much better known before the committee has voted.
Key takeaways
- Strata is mostly a process problem: shared supply, billing and owners corporation approval
- Load management lets many chargers share finite building capacity instead of forcing a supply upgrade
- Wire from the resident's meter, from common property with metering, or as a shared managed hub
- Agree the billing method in writing as part of the approval, not afterwards
- Walk the cable route before selecting hardware — it often reshapes the proposal