If there’s one thing that’s most likely to cause a hiccup in a typical charger installation, it’s your home’s electrical system.
One national contractor told me that about 20% of their installations run into electrical complications. Will Shippee, a director at Schneider Electric, said that homes built before the 1970s are the most likely candidates. (Disclosure: The author was previously employed by a subsidiary of Schneider Electric and worked with Shippee on one project.)
Here’s the issue: Your home gets a limited amount of power from the grid, measured in amperes (amps for short). Older homes, especially if they heat with fossil fuel, may have only 100 amps coming in from the street, and maybe less.
That’s plenty of capacity for lights, gadgets, and a typical suite of major appliances. But things start getting tight once you add modern, high-draw items. A typical Level 2 charger needs 50 or 60 amps alone. Draw too much at once, and you’ll trip the entire box. It’s an inconvenience at best, but over time, it also becomes a fire-safety issue because breakers are only meant to trip a certain number of times before they lose their ability to trip as needed.
The National Electrical Code has a formula to figure out when you’re at risk of overloading your panel. Not all electricians pay attention to it, but they’re supposed to, and your charger installer might tell you that you need to do something to meet the code.
The traditional fix: Here, you’ll upgrade your service connection to the grid. About two-thirds of the experts I’ve spoken with think this is usually the right path for homes with under 150 amps of service. Haas told me that most of his customers who need a workaround for an EV charger end up going this route, because it gives them freedom to add more high-draw appliances in the future.
Service upgrades are never cheap. You’ll need to hire an electrician to upgrade your entire panel, and then you need to pay the utility company to run the new connection. It’ll likely cost at least a few thousand dollars. I paid $4,500 for this upgrade a few years ago, which is typical for my part of the country. But the costs can go much higher.
If you’d need to excavate the service line, especially from under a public sidewalk, the cost can rise well into five figures, according to Shippee and other experts and homeowners I’ve heard from. “It depends on your lovely utility,” Shippee said.
Your entire neighborhood could also be running short on electrical service and may need broader service upgrades to the wiring and transformers. Stephanie Groll, from the City of Cambridge Department of Transportation in Massachusetts, said she’s heard from multiple constituents who have run into this problem when they’ve tried to apply for a service upgrade.
The modern workaround: The other option is a load controller. Broadly, this is a system that monitors your home’s energy use and then selectively cuts the power to one or more circuits if you’re about to overload the breaker.
There are at least a dozen of these that I know of, and each one handles the problem a little differently. Several of them cost less than even a straightforward service upgrade; others save money only if you’re facing a seriously pricey service upgrade but offer other advantages.
The right choice for your home depends on how crowded your service already is, whether you’re willing to have some items turned off at certain times, and how much future-proofing you want.
I won’t get into all of the nuances, but here are some leads to start to look into:
- EV chargers with load control: Wallbox, Tesla, and Emporia are popular brands that offer a load controller in their EV chargers, though you might also need to buy a separate power meter to make it work. Still, this is often the most cost-effective option. (The Emporia model we’ve linked here is more expensive than the model we recommend in our EV charger guide, which does not have a load-control feature. The Tesla model linked here is the same one that we recommend in the guide.)
- A standalone load-shedding device: I saw one made by Siemens at the International Builders’ Show in 2025, though I’ve spoken to pros who have used similar products made by DCC and other brands. These work like a kill switch for a single circuit — in this case, your EV charger, but it could be anything. An electrician mounts the box next to your main panel, typically for around $1,000 all-in, according to experts I’ve talked to.
- Smart breakers: These circuit breakers can slot right into an existing electrical panel, and they’re often smarter than standalone load-shedding boxes. Eaton makes one that’s purpose-built for EV chargers. Savant has a modular system that can work with most existing panels and offers extra flexibility.
- Smart panels: These are the most expensive kind of load-control systems, typically coming in at around a few thousand dollars after installation. But they offer a measure of elegance and futureproofing that’s hard to get with other load controllers because you can control several circuits, not just the EV charger, through an app.
A smart panel could be especially useful if you plan to add battery backup to your home, maybe through one of the bidirectional EV charging systems finally making their way into the real world. Lumin makes a sub-panel that lets you manage up to 12 circuits. Schneider Electric’s Square D QO Smart Panel works with modules (sourced from Savant) for whichever circuits you’d like to control. On the Span Smart Panel, every circuit is smart by default. None of these are inexpensive, but they might beat the cost of a difficult service upgrade.
A hacky alternative: Maybe you don’t have the capacity to add a 50- or 60-amp circuit to your home for a typical Level 2 charger, but you could, for example, fit another 30 amps. A slower Level 2 charger is still quick enough to completely recharge almost any EV overnight, and this could be a good way to balance cost savings and charging speed.
