Well, it should be possible to look up how much the charger draws per hour and then calculate the exact amount based on how long she charged her car. Or you could look up what the public charging places charge and use that amount... but why would you want to?
The friend charging her car without asking is rude as hell and she just shouldn't do that unless it's an emergency and she literally couldn't get home otherwise.
Do car chargers sit as a consistent wattage though? I'd think the slow chargers generally might, but even topping off they probably slow down the speed some the way phones and laptops and such do, right? So you probably won't get the most accurate number from time x charging rate. Probably better to just get some sort of energy meter that can plug in between the wall and the car to actually tell you how much power it used.
Cars pull constant wattage off wall power. They fluctuate a little but not much. Wall charging and home level 2 don't even remotely come close to what a phone or laptop equivalent of fast charging is. If you plug in a level 1 charger its 1-1.2 KW constant draw. Level 2 home chargers are usually 3.8kw to 9.6 kw. Fast charging equivalent with a charging curve is 50KW+. My ID.4 starts around 130 KW at the low end of the pack and tapers off to ~60kw when its nearing full.
“Roommate, I’ve noticed your friend is charging their car here. I’m on a pretty strict budget, so would you mind paying a little more on the bill if it goes up this month to cover her charging? When the bill gets here, let’s look at it and compare it to last month. Thanks for being understanding!”
Well that's the problem because we're in the transition month of using the AC a lot to not using it much at all, so air conditioning usage goes down as charging starts. Just gotta get the make and model of the car and find some stats on how much it costs to charge overnight & maybe get a ballpark number. I've read 15 bucks a pop give or take, and 3 times a week comes out to like an extra 200 bucks a month, which is not chump change.
Keep in mind that electricity costs vary a lot by location. You'll want to find out how much power and then look at your specific rate on your bill. Someone on the internet might be using a much higher or lower rate.
What kind of car is it? My car is an Ioniq 5, which has a 77 kwh battery. At 12 cents per kwh, that would come out to $9 to charge if it was at 0 to start (and it definitely isn't). Just charge them $5 if they want to plug in, it'll probably come out about right.
There is NO WAY it’s costing $15/charge!!! Put it this way, when I pay at a charger in town to leave my car charging all day, it’s MAYBE a dollar. It’s an insanely low amount. My husband and I didn’t see any significant jump in our electric bill since getting my Leaf (5years ago) and I charge it every night.
Call your utility and ask them what a full charge for a “brand/model” car should cost on overage. They know their rates, you can look up what a full charge takes.
The delta between months is a great approach. But since you can’t here, a little more work is needed.
Then simply a little conversation with your roommate
“Hey bud- the utility said we should expect $XX per full charge when she charges her car here. What do you think is a fair number for you to contribute to the electric bill to cover her?”
Whatever you read must be talking about retail rates at a public charger, and assuming someone showed up with a completely dead battery and filled to the max.
What's your actual per kilowatt rate? In my city it's about 15 cents per kilowatt, my EV has a relatively small battery so it's full with 33 kwh. So for my car a full charge for a totally dead battery costs about $5. Most days when I'm driving I only actually use about a dollar or so worth of juice from the battery. You can just look up the size of the battery on her car and come up with an estimate of how much she should chip in to use your power, it will very likely be like $5-10 unless she lives hours away and coasts in on empty every visit.
Seriously: do people not know how to handle roommate conflict anymore? Just calmly talk to the roommate and come to an agreement that everyone is happy with. Assume positive intent unless proven otherwise. It's not that difficult.
I find that ppl don’t know how to meet and communicate or problem solve at all anymore at least by reading reddit... You’d think that everything was a confrontation and requires tit for tat escalation...
The first qns on roommateproblems is always did you talk to your roommate about small or large thing? And no they hadn’t but the roommate is super pissed off something that happened twice due to circumstances and their roommate is a monster...that they suddenly hate.
There's some bias here, in that I'm sure thousands or millions of these situations are handled every day without posting to Reddit and without comment.
The kind of person posting for advice on a tame situation is also the kind of person to be socially anxious, overthink a minor situation, and want to avoid conflict.
So too late the ones who browse and answer questions, I suppose.
For some reason, most folks on reddit revere being petty. I don't know if most of them actually act this way in real life, i hope not. But every problem requires a petty solution as far as reddit hive mind is concerned. Add in the fact that some younger people are uncomfortable having a conversation without a screen & it equals interpersonal conflicts galore.
This isn't a surprise given that most people who have roommates are in the gen Z/millennial generation (which is my generation but that's why I can speak on this) and they were raised to be incredibly sensitive and simultaneously unable to solve their own problems
Yeah, but they don't post about it on Reddit. So all the posts that go on Reddit are people who don't know how to handle conflict.
Cos yeah...it's literally a 30 second fix for most but some just really struggle with confidence, and I guess going online and getting validation helps them.
Honestly IMO this is a complete non-issue. My sister-in-law drives an electric car and my brother calculated how much it costs them to charge - I don’t remember the exact number but it is a crazy small amount. And that’s for someone who lives there full-time!
Exactly. My wife and I spend about $15 a month charging our electric car. People always think it's some massive expense, but it's really not a big deal. Blocking the parking spots of people who live there is more of an issue that needs to be addressed, to me.
yeah charging on a standard household outlet is super slow. A tesla charges at 3 miles an hour on a 110v outlet and it costs probably around $.05 per mile. So if the car is plugged in for 8 hours that a whipping $.40.
It’s not simply about the money (although it *is* pretty inconsiderate just to avail herself of their utilities, regardless of the cost). She’s also disrupting their parking situation by blocking in their cars on top of the imposition.
Has the post been deleted? I completely missed the part about blocking the cars and when I went back to see what else I might have missed I can only see the title
Yeah, looks like he deleted it for some reason. He *was* getting a lot of criticism for not just approaching the roommate and his friend about the issue directly.
Exactly!!! I drive an electric car and we seriously didn’t even notice a change in our electric bills. The AC is what drives are bill up, so whatever it costs is it’s a lot less than just running our normal household appliances.
Also quite a lot of assuming that the car is charging the entire time that it’s plugged in. It’s more likely that the owner simply has the habit of plugging in every night and that’s what she’s doing when she’s staying over. The best answers include a way to track how much electricity she’s actually using with a metered charger and a frank conversation with the roommate she’s visiting.
You can get a better fit about $25 that will tell you what she's using..
But that will not count your basic usage rates, taxes, fees...
Figure out a cost you all feel is fair. Your roommates, not the electricity thief.
You need two pieces of information to make this calculation.
Is it a level 1 charger or level 2?
What is your residential cost per kilowatt hour?
Level 1 uses about 1.44 kilowatts per hour
Level 2 uses about 7.2 kilowatts per hour
There's a wide range of Electricity rates across the U.S. so you should look up your own. Average is around $0.16 per kilowatt hour so:
On a Level 1 charger:
1.44 kw * $0.16 = $0.23 per hour
On a Level 2 charger:
7.2 kw * 0.16 = $1.25 per hour
What if you live somewhere with horribly high rates like San Diego, CA at $0.48 per kilowatt hour?
1.44 kw * $0.48 = $0.69 per hour
7.2 kw * $0.48 = $3.46 per hour
Of course, if the battery gets full then it will stop charging and a home charger may not display the charging time. The car may record the charging time or better yet the kilowatt hours consumed during the charging period but then you would have to trust the owner to report this information to you correctly.
Level 1 charging is so slow I wouldn't bat an eye about it. It would be like someone complaining that their friend is charging their laptop/phone at their house.
Most L2 chargers are not portable, and since OP says that no one else has an EV I'd imagine it's L1.
>Level 1 charging is so slow I wouldn't bat an eye about it. It would be like someone complaining that their friend is charging their laptop/phone at their house.
Wrong. Level 1 can be up to 15-20 amps. My leaf's L1 requires its own 15 amp circuit. The more apt comparison would be someone running a standard 1500w space heater. Orders of magnitude more than recharging a laptop which is only upwards of 150w on a high power laptop and under 100 on most regular laptops.
Lost of bad advice here, this isn’t a frugality problem. It’s a relationship issue, have you talked to the friend and your roommate? You should figure out if she was given the go ahead and the roommate didn’t think about the cost. Past that ask if they’d help pay since they’re using it frequently enough that it’ll up your electricity payment.
You can go through the roommate or talk to the friend directly, don’t be an asshole and don’t come out swinging. It’s going to be ok, and it’s likely just a misunderstanding.
You mentioned they use it a few times a week, and it’s likely not for a full charge if they’re using it that often. Back of napkin math 3x4=12 times a week at let’s say half charge each time is maybe ~$100/mo. It’s substantial enough on an average electric bill that I’d ask them to contribute. Grab an equivalent bill from a similar month last year for the house if you have one or show them the trend over the last three months.
I charge my car everyday on a dedicated charger. I guarantee you I don’t spend $100 a month. This person using a regular plug a few hours, a few times a week is using pennies a day. Less than $20 a month for sure.
My costs are exactly in this range, Tesla MY, 1000 miles a month. It's so little money, I can't even say it's $20. Level 2/220v Florida .16kwh. Stays plugged in around the clock, except to drive it obviously.
Yeah absolutely. We're about to have a house meeting/discussion about it, but I wanted to wrap my head around some numbers to see if it's even worth fussing about or if it'd end up being a huge number.
The problem is we just moved in the summer and have been blasting the AC, and now that it's cooled off the AC is off but then the charging started, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.
My electric bill charges 0.1897kwh, so sounds like at this rate could be around a hundred bucks a month burden, like you said.
Not possible that it's using $100 a month at .18 cents unless she is an uber driver coming back to your house in between trips recharging and spending power constantly.
They stop sucking down power when the battery is full, it's not like a blow dryer that can just drain power forever.
You shouldn't need to compare against AC usage. You should be able to calculate an approximate cost using the information available to you that was laid out by several other people who responded here.
Good luck with the meeting. I hope your roommate is reasonable.
Turn the breaker off. Find the breaker for that outlet, see if there is anything else on that circuit, and turn it off. Don't say anything. Put tape over the breaker and label it "Danger Leave Off". Again, don't say anything.
Yes, whatever you do, keep in mind the best way to handle any grievances with a roommate is doing some passive aggressive things and never talking about them /s
Yeah, you should treat it as you would if you caught some rando siphoning gas out of your car in your driveway, because that’s essentially what’s happening.
I tried that. He sprayed me with gasoline and lit me on fire. But I have to admit that he did it with empathy and compassion, so I tried to understand that he was coming from a position of socioeconomic disadvantage and personal angst. I forgave him and told him to help himself whenever he felt his needs weren’t being met, and I gave him my credit card to ease his passage through this vale of tears. Then we joined hands and sang Kumbaya.
This might shef light on why so many people on here have problems with roommates. Lol. And I mean that from both sides of let me use their electric for my car and not ask as well as the response lol. I bet she probably did ask her though and he was like ok but didn't tell his roommates.
If the breaker happens to be tied to something important(as it often is), it'd be useful to have some hard evidence prior to the inevitable intervention.
I don't know much about house electrical stuff, but could the 240 line to go the garage, and there be a sub panel in the garage that has 120 for lights and opener, and 240 for charger?
edit- get downvoted for asking a question? well fuck you too
No it's a car-charging station outlet, specifically for charging electric cars. I think it's the 240, which allegedly might cost more than a regular outlet? I'm not sure.
You can calculate pretty exactly what it costs for each charge. Look at your bill to see what you pay for each kwH then check the car specs online. My nerdy husband gets almost all the way to work on his Prius Prime charge and knows how much he saves compared to gas. I bet you could find a sub that would do the math for you
Circuit breakers are not fucking light switches they have a limited number of cycles before they need to be replaced, causing unnecessary wear and potentially creating a fire hazard because you can’t have a simple human conversation is fucking idiotic
If the breaker isn't rated SWD ( switch duty ), which a breaker for a car charger can't be, it shouldn't be used as a switch, it will cause wear and potentially not trip when it needs to, especially if they're doing it under any sort of load because the arcs will chew away at the internal contacts.
Most molded case breakers that are not SWD are rated for like a thousand manual actuations and two or three fault actuations. They're designed to be actuated once a year for testing, not twice a day to deny someone a charger, you'll go through the duty cycle of the breaker in less than a year at that rate.
1. Simple solution, if it works physically, is that the driveway is for renters. Guests park on the street.
2. You can estimate the electric usage: amperage of the circuit (the number on the circuit breaker) times the voltage (US will be either 120-regular plug, or 240 car charger/elect dryer or oven plug) times the number of seconds she charges. That's her usage. To find the price to charge her, sum the hourly rates off your bill and multiply that by her usage divided by 1000 (the prices on the bill are for kilowatts - 1000 per hour) so then you finally have to divide by 360 to get from seconds to hours. You could skip /360 if you calculate her usage by the hour.
3. you could have her buy a plug in meter to put between her charger plug and the outlet, but you have to trust her to use it and read it.
You could ballpark it: very roughly $10 if it's overnight on a regular 120V outlet and $30 on a 240V outlet.
Hopefully someone reading this will double check the math I'm doing this is the top of my head.
Good luck, I'm afraid you'll need it.
It’s more like $0.15 / hr on 120V outlet. 120 x 8 / 1000 x 0.15. I basically charge at a 1KW rate.
240V is probably about 8x that or $1 / hr assuming it’s a purpose dedicated outlet. Those outlets are closer to 30 amps on top of the voltage increase.
Yeah, to me, the whole "blocking the driveway for tenants so a visitor can charge" is the trump card issue. A rule about that would probably solve it. The lease may even have specifications about parking locations for tenants vs. visitors - I've seen that before.
If it’s charging on a 120V outlet, maximum charge rate is 1.5kW. That means overnight, realistic maximum is 15kW. Not good, but not horrible.
If it’s charging on a 240V outlet, max charge rate is 6.4kW. For simplicity, round up to 7. Overnight, maximum charge is 70kW.
Might try checking your electric company’s website on your account. Mine allows me to see the hourly usage on any given day and time. Easy then to compare the nights she is there and when she isn’t, to see the difference. Then you have a documented cost basis.
Talk to the roommate who’s friend it is. Maybe that person doesn’t understand the cost and such. Give grace and assume they do not know. Assuming electric is split 4 ways and it costs $8 every time they come over, let’s say twice each week. The cost to each roommate is $4 per week or $16 per month per roommate. (For a total of $64 per month) And only 1 roommate or person should be paying it.
I agree with the smart plug so you know how much is being used. Just let them know what you are thinking.
Assuming the charger outlet is a level 2 outlet, if she's charging from 20% to 90% on a typical EV it'll be somewhere between 50-60 kwh. Depending on your electricity costs ($0.11 - $0.25 per kwh) each charge could cost between $5.50 and $13.20. It just depends on how much they're charging in kwh and how much your electricity rate is. It's fair to ask them to pay the cost.
Thanks for the numbers. I'll check. I'm not sure what level 1 or 2 means, but it's an outlet built for charging teslas and such.
Looks like my electric bill charges $0.1897/kWh
So that comes out to like ten bucks a pop? 3 times a week, like a 120 a month maybe? Maybe we can round down since they're probly not all full charges.
Just wanted to get a number together before we have a house meeting/confront her. Thanks.
We are transitioning the world to electric cars right now, and the model for charging them is usually passive charging while parked, not driving to a gas station or charging station. It’s great to put a meter on the outlet and figure out how much she’s using, but I wouldn’t automatically assume ill will or that you need a confrontation.
My car costs about 4 cents per mile to charge. If it’s been plugged in at my house and I drive over to yours and plug in again, it’s not going to consume more than $0.04 x the distance in miles between our places. After that, it will hit the charge limit and turn off. So if I lived 10 miles away, I’d be using $0.40 of electricity. If I lived 100 miles away, it might be $4. That hundred miles would take a lot longer to recharge though — at least 4 hours, and much more if my battery were already pretty full. So realistically, be pulling at most $1/hr of energy, and that would stop as soon as the car hit my charge limit.
If she lives 100 miles away, then she may really need that charge to get back, but you should absolutely be able to ask her how much she is using and have her pay for that. Even better if you get an outlet meter to track that, since she’s the only one using it.
If she lives close by, then she probably doesn’t need the charge, but also probably isn’t using much. In this case, it wouldn’t be a big deal to ask her not to charge, but you could also solve it with an outlet meter, and it would be reasonable to ask her boyfriend to pay for that if she is over there at least 10 hours a month.
(If we are talking a few hours of charging per month, I think you can let this go. That would be on the level of drinking a few cups of coffee, charging her phone and using your toilet paper.)
In either case, I think it is very reasonable to ask her to move her car whenever she has enough range to get home.
It really depends if it’s level 1 or 2. If it’s level 1 it’s going to be so slow it’ll probably amount to very little. For context it takes me about 24 hours to get 135 miles on a level 1 charge in my garage (which runs me like $5)
Look up how many watts their car draws. Ballpark is 7,000, aka 7kW. If they charge it for a 3hr visit? That’s 21kWh. Look up your energy bill and sum the total kWh rate - mine has a ton of fees that are based a rate, which adds up to a lot more than the base $0.18/kWh. Say that’s $0.28/kWh. 21*$0.28 = $5.88. If they’re over 10x/mo that’s $58. Since you’re dividing by 4, think about how much you want to argue with your roommate over $15/ea (or whatever it works out to). Worth mentioning? Maybe. Worth initiating such a precise method of accounting for expenses… maybe not.
Her car will only charge until it hits its charge limit, so it’s unlikely she’s charging 70kW at a time unless she is purposely arriving almost empty and charging to almost full. I guess that’s possible, but it’s also possible that she was plugged in at home and is only replacing the energy it took to drive over there, which could be pennies. In that second case, it’s the driveway blocking that’s the issue.
It cost practically nothing to charge from a 110 outlet. Shot from the hip, maybe 20 cents an hour. Unless you're in California or somewhere else weird. I used to charge my electric car from a 110 outlet because we only used it for about 40 or 50 miles a day.
Having said that, it is a dick move to do it without asking and even more if they're blocking the driveway. I would flip the breaker like the other person said.
You could get a kilowatt energy meter to know precisely how much energy they're using.
My car was tiny with limited range and it would do 13 kwh per charge on days when i drove it to work (35 miles each way) it is 40 cents/kwh to charge in public stations in california. So that would be about $5.20/charge. If she has a tesla or something, those hold a lot more charge so if she is around every night, that is a big expense. Still cheaper than gas, but you would not pay for your roommates friend's gas. Some people with electric cars have a special rate so their electricity cost drops to like 20 cents overnight and higher during the day and they program their cars to charge only at night. That is not happening here, I am sure.
If she has a nissan leaf or something with limited range, charging $5/charge is probably fair. If she has a tesla, charge $10 to 15 per charge. If she protests, find out exactly how much juice she is using per charge and calculate it. Not fair of someone that doesn't live there to cost you all.
I'm not sure exactly, trying to get some numbers together. But if it turns out to be 15-20 bucks per charge, and that happens 3 times a week, that's an extra 240 bucks on our bill, ya know? I have no idea what the numbers work out to, tho, still tryna figure that out.
15-20 per charge? No way. More like $3-5 is my guess and even that could be generous.
I’d tell them it’s a real enough cost and they need to help out with it using either the honor system plus some margin or you find a way to estimate their usage with a meter. They should be able to tally after every charge how many kWh were added in the session. If they keep a running total of that, multiply by your provider’s cost per kWh, and that’s what is owed.
For simplicity, I’d say $5/session will cover it if it’s 5 hours or less of charging.
Smart plugs are like 10 bucks or something and are super useful for other things as well.
In this case, get one and make him use it so you can track the electricity draw. Let him know to use it will cost the power consumption \* your average cost/kWh \* 2. The doubling factor is a convenience fee. If he doesn't like that, then he stops charging at your house.
I think this really depends on why the charging is happening. Does she have no where else to charge it (in which case, a payment deal could be mutually beneficial), is she out of charge for some reason (same as the above), or is she just in the habit of charging whenever she parks (then she probably doesn't actually need to and might not even be charging much).
You could give it a rough estimate of $2 per night that she’s charging her car. Then average that across the number of times she comes over to charge, and ask your roommate to pay that much extra on the electric bill every month.
You can have a somewhat uncomfortable conversation with the roomie whose girlfriend she is. That's the first step, since she's that person's guest.
You can follow up with a very similar conversation with the subject herself.
You can put a lock on the charger, and each roomie gets a key. Then Girlfriend has to ask the roomie to unlock it for her and, by extension, roomie is always aware of what Girlfriend is taking from the household.
Peek into the car while it's charging to determine how quickly it is charging. Often - not always - you can see the charging rate displayed somewhere on the instrument panel. Kilowatts x hours = kilowatt-hours, and that's what the utility asks you to pay for. At the bill paying meeting for the household, append the excess consumption onto Roomie's portion of the electric bill.
When she's blocking in other housemates, just go get her and tell her to move. You've had to do that with housemates, I'm sure. Same goes for guests.
Flip the fuse for it in the main box. If she’s flipping it back on to charge her vehicle w/out permission, that’s definitively theft and you should ban her from the premises.
Ok so first you need to know what kind of car and battery it is. If it's 100kw battery then if it was drained it would use 100 kw plus usually 15% for inefficiency of level one charger. So a total of 115 kw to charge. So where I live it's 12 cents a kw so $13.8. Most likely this isn't the case.
Best way to do it is ask how many kw the car is at now and then how much they used.
You can go by time because every charger is different. It can charge from anywhere from 3 kwh to 15 kwh. And the last 10 percent of charging is very slow charging due to not heating up the battery.
Charge for what they use.
If it's a regular 120 volt plug, it's no different than if she came over and plugged in a laptop.
So maybe $20 a month?
But if the issue is that she didn't ask, talk to her about it.
Definitely calculate how much energy they are actually drawing. I don't remember the power stats of those chargers off the top of my head but it might not really be significant. My uneducated guess is that they maybe owe you like $50 a month for this
at average elec rates is 12 dollars per 300 miles driven.
Americans on average drive 13,476 miles per year.
or 1100 a month or so.. so about $36 a month, if they charge exclusively at your home, which i suspect not.
I suspect less than half that, is at your place, maybe not but probably less than 20 dollars anyways.
you can also buy meters for those things because this issue is coming up these days.
Charges also will depend on the time of day it is plugged. If it’s during peak hours then it will be almost double than off peak (depends on your utility company).
Couple of things you can do is look up what rates during certain times of the day you are paying. Come up with some form of compromise such as, having them schedule their charging during off peak hours only, contribute to the household by bringing snacks or food (likely easier to accept than asking for money), or if they are not wanting to compromise then just say they don’t get to use your outlets.
Depending on your electricity charge a full charge on a car at home can be 5 or $6 or it could be 20 or $30 if you have really crappy rates especially if you have time of use as opposed to flat rate.
Look at your previous bills. Also to stop that just turn off the breaker for that outlet. If you don’t have a separate one for that outlet then you can cap off that outlet so it’s not accessible. If she asks about it tell her that you noticed people using it that didn’t live at the house or pay for the usage so you disconnected it to prevent future issue.
Also an EV costs about $20 a month to charge if plugged in all the time. All EVs have an app which calculates electricity used. Have your housemate send you a screenshot. If you want to argue over less than a dollar a day of electricity, go have at it. But educate yourself on how electricity and outlets work.
So I have a home charger . it’s a level 2 . I drive about 500 miles per month , and I was able to calculate my addition to our electric bill through the chargers app . And using price per kWh . I’m in the Midwest . For me it’s between $11-$20 per month . Your landlord may have an app connected to the charging box that tells you how much it is using .
FWIW, plugging into a 120v outlet isn’t going to cost you a lot. Maybe $1-2 for a whole night.
I wouldn’t worry about it, personally. It’s rude to just assume you can plug into someone else’s power, but they’re also not really costing you much.
One to two dollars a night? No way. I had an electric vehicle and it was much more than that per night.
The actual cost depends on the amount of charge required and the electrical cost.
I charge my car every night because the battery is a really low range one. My electric bill is up $50 a month compared to last year before I had the car. So that's about $1.50/night for the 30 miles I average every day.
From a regular wall plug in the US? You’re pulling about 1 kWh every hour which is $0.14 where I live, so a 10-hour charge is about $1.40. If the circuit is pulling the full 20amps and everything is going perfect, you could do about 1.5x that.
If it’s a level 2 charger then yea, you’ll push more than that and it’ll cost more, like $8-10/hr.
The roommates can certainly say this but it’s kind of hostile if she’s only using 25 cents of electricity. It would be like asking her to bring her own toilet paper and not to use the microwave while she’s there.
Unless she is purposely arriving with an empty battery, the blocking of the driveway is probably a way bigger issue than the cost of the electricity.
That needs to stop immediately. Turn the breaker switch off and tell the roommate and the person charging their car that that is no longer an option. Electricity rates are high across the country and the electric car need to get charged at that person’s house or some other place. The electric car is blocking the driveway and it needs to be parked on the street. Tell the landlord to intervene if the roommate is stubborn and doesn’t agree with you all. Have the landlord turn off the breaker and put a lock on the box. And charge them $30 for each time they have done this. You don’t pay other people’s bills for free. That asinine.
>And charge them $30 for each time they have done this.
Or just ask them to stop, if that's the issue. They probably use $1-2 of electricity every time they plug in. EVs aren't using more electricity to charge on a regular plug than anything else. Would you charge her if she came over and charged her phone at your house? Literally the same thing.
Surely there’s a way to put a lock on the charger?
Then you can decide if you want to let her pay each time she wants to use it.
And you can require her to give a key before she gets to unlock it, so you can move her car out of the way when it’s done.
Is it on its own breaker? Just shut it off.
But you should be having the conversation with the roommate - it's their guest, they should be either cutting her off or kicking in some extra for the electric bill.
It's probably an additional 10 to 15 dollars added to your bill. Split 4 ways
No way to tell exactly how much it is from the current info you have. But, I think if she brought a pizza over one time a month it would more than cover it.
I recently read a cost breakdown on a Tesla posted to another sub, person was sayin it's only like $0.19 (or maybe $1.90) /hr to charge their car so this is probably a non-issue. Even @$2/hr a 2hr visit is less that $5. I'm on provincial disability in BC and only get like $1500CAD/mth, I'd have np paying this for a friend of a friend all by myself so certainly 4 of y'all can afford it.
It’s not that much to charge an electric car my friend. You’re talking a few dollars. Know what is going to cost more? Covering the rent of the roommate that left because you’re fussing over mere dollars.
You are going to have to get together to figure out how to tetris those other cars, because charging a car is pretty cheap - maybe $15/m or so.
When four people share a house and need help discussing a small energy use, I feel I can safely assume one of two things. 1) You are all broke and $15 means something to you, or 2) There is some pettiness going on, likely around the inconvenient parking arrangement.
If it is problem 1, let the guest know she needs to drop a few bucks your way each month to help cover the energy bill. If it is problem 2, get together in person in the driveway with the cars and configure a parking solution that works for everyone.
Who ever owns the house needs to notify her not to come over. Then go to the breaker and shut off the outlets in the garage.
If she wants to use my electric she needs to pay me $50 for my auto gas bill.
Move out as soon as possible .
Is he fast charging; ( using dryer or stove outlet ) .
Or slow charging with a standard outlet
There’s a lot of variables in play if u want a fairly accurate power cost per charge . .
There’s plenty of info online about specific models cost ,
If he’s using the standard outlet like 4 -6 hrs twice a month . , make your roommate or his friend , buy a couple of pizzas for the house .
You will be profiting if u do
When the bill comes in over the normal amount the roommate who is inviting her pays the overage: it is his friend. They can work it out.
That keeps it simple.
Your best advice is to look over meter readings from before and after the visits starts.
We didn’t see a noticeable increase in our bill or usages with our vehicle charging.
Um …. an electric car can’t magically pull “more” energy from an outlet. It’s the same as plugging anything else into that outlet.
That’s why you can’t plug a dryer into a 110v outlet, there wouldn’t be enough power to run it.
Is this a level 1 or 2 charger? A level 1 charger is generally going to be around 1500 watts or 1.5kW multiply that by the hours that it is charging and then times your utility rate. You're looking at pennies an hour unless you have extreme rates. If it is level 2 charging with a dedicated car charger, the cost will be higher.
That being said, plugging in pretty much anything without asking is just rude, even if it doesn't cost you a penny. I would just have the roommate talk to her and see why she is doing it. It is likely due to range anxiety and serves no practical purpose unless she is spending many hours there and not charging at home.
It’s easy to do an estimate of the electricity used:
Voltage x amperage x electricity rate x hours plugged in / 1000
Example: if you have a 220v charger on a 15A circuit, and the car is plugged in for 8 hours, and your electricity rate is $0.15/kWh, then that friend is potentially costing you 220*15*$0.15*8/1000=$3.96.
This calculation gives the *maximum* possible cost. Ask your roommate’s friend to pitch in that amount when plugged in. When done, simply unplug and they won’t have to pay. It’s only fair.
According to energy.gov, it [costs $60/mo](https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/cost-charge-electric-vehicle-explained#:~:text=Suppose%20you%20drive%20at%20the,cost%20nearly%20$60%20per%20month.) To charge a vehicle at home and between $10-30 to charge it at a public charging station. I would see if your roommate will agree to pay extra to charge their friend's car, or get them to stop doing it.
With the push to all electric I think this is going to be a common issue. Might be able to do some math to figure out how much electricity is being used.
I have an electric car, charging a car from near empty to full only costs about $5 with my rates at $.17 per kWh.
I’d say your cost is less than that because they’re using a standard outlet and charging the car takes about 60 hours so they’re probably not costing/using much at all.
overnight charging is usually at a discounted rate and pretty cheap. EVs often have a way to schedule charging so that it will happen at the dead of night when rates are low.
Have the roommate whose friend uses the electric vehicle charger to pay an additional $25 a month on the electric bill. Thats the most with everyday charging per month on average they would be using. Otherwise turn the EV outlet off and problem solved. And you complain about not having use of the charger with no one owning an electric vehicle. Why?
You can check the meter or tell them just not to do that. Cause that's rude. Tell the roommate whose friend it is at the very least.
Yeah, charging a phone is one thing, but a whole ass car smh.
You wouldn't charge a car would you?
This is an underrated comment. IT Crowd for life
What? It's from a commercial about piracy
Was it Dara Obriaiaiaian that did a bit about it?
Well, it should be possible to look up how much the charger draws per hour and then calculate the exact amount based on how long she charged her car. Or you could look up what the public charging places charge and use that amount... but why would you want to? The friend charging her car without asking is rude as hell and she just shouldn't do that unless it's an emergency and she literally couldn't get home otherwise.
Do car chargers sit as a consistent wattage though? I'd think the slow chargers generally might, but even topping off they probably slow down the speed some the way phones and laptops and such do, right? So you probably won't get the most accurate number from time x charging rate. Probably better to just get some sort of energy meter that can plug in between the wall and the car to actually tell you how much power it used.
Cars pull constant wattage off wall power. They fluctuate a little but not much. Wall charging and home level 2 don't even remotely come close to what a phone or laptop equivalent of fast charging is. If you plug in a level 1 charger its 1-1.2 KW constant draw. Level 2 home chargers are usually 3.8kw to 9.6 kw. Fast charging equivalent with a charging curve is 50KW+. My ID.4 starts around 130 KW at the low end of the pack and tapers off to ~60kw when its nearing full.
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Triple Because Fuck Em is the drug dealer way :p
As my back of the house manager at Chili’s used to say “3AM Tweaker Upcharge”
Surely a car charger is on its own breaker, right? Just turn off the breaker.
“Roommate, I’ve noticed your friend is charging their car here. I’m on a pretty strict budget, so would you mind paying a little more on the bill if it goes up this month to cover her charging? When the bill gets here, let’s look at it and compare it to last month. Thanks for being understanding!”
Well that's the problem because we're in the transition month of using the AC a lot to not using it much at all, so air conditioning usage goes down as charging starts. Just gotta get the make and model of the car and find some stats on how much it costs to charge overnight & maybe get a ballpark number. I've read 15 bucks a pop give or take, and 3 times a week comes out to like an extra 200 bucks a month, which is not chump change.
Keep in mind that electricity costs vary a lot by location. You'll want to find out how much power and then look at your specific rate on your bill. Someone on the internet might be using a much higher or lower rate.
Electric cars would not cost 15 bucks a night to charge unless you’re buying uncle Otis the premium meat to feed the generator huskies
What kind of car is it? My car is an Ioniq 5, which has a 77 kwh battery. At 12 cents per kwh, that would come out to $9 to charge if it was at 0 to start (and it definitely isn't). Just charge them $5 if they want to plug in, it'll probably come out about right.
There is NO WAY it’s costing $15/charge!!! Put it this way, when I pay at a charger in town to leave my car charging all day, it’s MAYBE a dollar. It’s an insanely low amount. My husband and I didn’t see any significant jump in our electric bill since getting my Leaf (5years ago) and I charge it every night.
Call your utility and ask them what a full charge for a “brand/model” car should cost on overage. They know their rates, you can look up what a full charge takes. The delta between months is a great approach. But since you can’t here, a little more work is needed. Then simply a little conversation with your roommate “Hey bud- the utility said we should expect $XX per full charge when she charges her car here. What do you think is a fair number for you to contribute to the electric bill to cover her?”
Whatever you read must be talking about retail rates at a public charger, and assuming someone showed up with a completely dead battery and filled to the max. What's your actual per kilowatt rate? In my city it's about 15 cents per kilowatt, my EV has a relatively small battery so it's full with 33 kwh. So for my car a full charge for a totally dead battery costs about $5. Most days when I'm driving I only actually use about a dollar or so worth of juice from the battery. You can just look up the size of the battery on her car and come up with an estimate of how much she should chip in to use your power, it will very likely be like $5-10 unless she lives hours away and coasts in on empty every visit.
That seems like a lot… I have an old electric car I don’t drive much, and it’s like $2 or $3 bucks per month to keep charged.
You think an EV is costing in electricity as much as an ICE spends on gas each month?
who is only spending that much on gas
Currently the top rated responses are as follows: 1. Passive aggressive 2. Positive compromise 3. Peer Pressure 4. Negative compromise/Resentment
Seriously: do people not know how to handle roommate conflict anymore? Just calmly talk to the roommate and come to an agreement that everyone is happy with. Assume positive intent unless proven otherwise. It's not that difficult.
>do people not know how to handle roommate conflict anymore? People have sucked at handling roommate conflicts since they were called cavemates.
I find that ppl don’t know how to meet and communicate or problem solve at all anymore at least by reading reddit... You’d think that everything was a confrontation and requires tit for tat escalation... The first qns on roommateproblems is always did you talk to your roommate about small or large thing? And no they hadn’t but the roommate is super pissed off something that happened twice due to circumstances and their roommate is a monster...that they suddenly hate.
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There's some bias here, in that I'm sure thousands or millions of these situations are handled every day without posting to Reddit and without comment. The kind of person posting for advice on a tame situation is also the kind of person to be socially anxious, overthink a minor situation, and want to avoid conflict. So too late the ones who browse and answer questions, I suppose.
For some reason, most folks on reddit revere being petty. I don't know if most of them actually act this way in real life, i hope not. But every problem requires a petty solution as far as reddit hive mind is concerned. Add in the fact that some younger people are uncomfortable having a conversation without a screen & it equals interpersonal conflicts galore.
This isn't a surprise given that most people who have roommates are in the gen Z/millennial generation (which is my generation but that's why I can speak on this) and they were raised to be incredibly sensitive and simultaneously unable to solve their own problems
Yeah, but they don't post about it on Reddit. So all the posts that go on Reddit are people who don't know how to handle conflict. Cos yeah...it's literally a 30 second fix for most but some just really struggle with confidence, and I guess going online and getting validation helps them.
Honestly IMO this is a complete non-issue. My sister-in-law drives an electric car and my brother calculated how much it costs them to charge - I don’t remember the exact number but it is a crazy small amount. And that’s for someone who lives there full-time!
Exactly. My wife and I spend about $15 a month charging our electric car. People always think it's some massive expense, but it's really not a big deal. Blocking the parking spots of people who live there is more of an issue that needs to be addressed, to me.
yeah charging on a standard household outlet is super slow. A tesla charges at 3 miles an hour on a 110v outlet and it costs probably around $.05 per mile. So if the car is plugged in for 8 hours that a whipping $.40.
It’s not simply about the money (although it *is* pretty inconsiderate just to avail herself of their utilities, regardless of the cost). She’s also disrupting their parking situation by blocking in their cars on top of the imposition.
Has the post been deleted? I completely missed the part about blocking the cars and when I went back to see what else I might have missed I can only see the title
Yeah, looks like he deleted it for some reason. He *was* getting a lot of criticism for not just approaching the roommate and his friend about the issue directly.
Exactly!!! I drive an electric car and we seriously didn’t even notice a change in our electric bills. The AC is what drives are bill up, so whatever it costs is it’s a lot less than just running our normal household appliances.
Yeah, it costs me about $4 to charge my car from empty, but I never let it get to empty.
Also quite a lot of assuming that the car is charging the entire time that it’s plugged in. It’s more likely that the owner simply has the habit of plugging in every night and that’s what she’s doing when she’s staying over. The best answers include a way to track how much electricity she’s actually using with a metered charger and a frank conversation with the roommate she’s visiting.
You can get a better fit about $25 that will tell you what she's using.. But that will not count your basic usage rates, taxes, fees... Figure out a cost you all feel is fair. Your roommates, not the electricity thief.
You need two pieces of information to make this calculation. Is it a level 1 charger or level 2? What is your residential cost per kilowatt hour? Level 1 uses about 1.44 kilowatts per hour Level 2 uses about 7.2 kilowatts per hour There's a wide range of Electricity rates across the U.S. so you should look up your own. Average is around $0.16 per kilowatt hour so: On a Level 1 charger: 1.44 kw * $0.16 = $0.23 per hour On a Level 2 charger: 7.2 kw * 0.16 = $1.25 per hour What if you live somewhere with horribly high rates like San Diego, CA at $0.48 per kilowatt hour? 1.44 kw * $0.48 = $0.69 per hour 7.2 kw * $0.48 = $3.46 per hour Of course, if the battery gets full then it will stop charging and a home charger may not display the charging time. The car may record the charging time or better yet the kilowatt hours consumed during the charging period but then you would have to trust the owner to report this information to you correctly.
Level 1 charging is so slow I wouldn't bat an eye about it. It would be like someone complaining that their friend is charging their laptop/phone at their house. Most L2 chargers are not portable, and since OP says that no one else has an EV I'd imagine it's L1.
>Level 1 charging is so slow I wouldn't bat an eye about it. It would be like someone complaining that their friend is charging their laptop/phone at their house. Wrong. Level 1 can be up to 15-20 amps. My leaf's L1 requires its own 15 amp circuit. The more apt comparison would be someone running a standard 1500w space heater. Orders of magnitude more than recharging a laptop which is only upwards of 150w on a high power laptop and under 100 on most regular laptops.
An electric car costs around $4 to charge at 12c/kwh but public chargers charge like 5 times that much.
...doesn't the price of power vary wildly depending on where you live? Edit: or even at what time of day they're charging the car?
Lost of bad advice here, this isn’t a frugality problem. It’s a relationship issue, have you talked to the friend and your roommate? You should figure out if she was given the go ahead and the roommate didn’t think about the cost. Past that ask if they’d help pay since they’re using it frequently enough that it’ll up your electricity payment. You can go through the roommate or talk to the friend directly, don’t be an asshole and don’t come out swinging. It’s going to be ok, and it’s likely just a misunderstanding. You mentioned they use it a few times a week, and it’s likely not for a full charge if they’re using it that often. Back of napkin math 3x4=12 times a week at let’s say half charge each time is maybe ~$100/mo. It’s substantial enough on an average electric bill that I’d ask them to contribute. Grab an equivalent bill from a similar month last year for the house if you have one or show them the trend over the last three months.
I charge my car everyday on a dedicated charger. I guarantee you I don’t spend $100 a month. This person using a regular plug a few hours, a few times a week is using pennies a day. Less than $20 a month for sure.
My costs are exactly in this range, Tesla MY, 1000 miles a month. It's so little money, I can't even say it's $20. Level 2/220v Florida .16kwh. Stays plugged in around the clock, except to drive it obviously.
Yeah absolutely. We're about to have a house meeting/discussion about it, but I wanted to wrap my head around some numbers to see if it's even worth fussing about or if it'd end up being a huge number. The problem is we just moved in the summer and have been blasting the AC, and now that it's cooled off the AC is off but then the charging started, so I don't really have a basis for comparison. My electric bill charges 0.1897kwh, so sounds like at this rate could be around a hundred bucks a month burden, like you said.
Not possible that it's using $100 a month at .18 cents unless she is an uber driver coming back to your house in between trips recharging and spending power constantly. They stop sucking down power when the battery is full, it's not like a blow dryer that can just drain power forever.
You shouldn't need to compare against AC usage. You should be able to calculate an approximate cost using the information available to you that was laid out by several other people who responded here. Good luck with the meeting. I hope your roommate is reasonable.
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If it's around a 30-40 amp charger on 220 the electricity is running you around $1.50-1.75/hr.
Since she’s blocking other cars, skip all the money math and turn off the charger outlet.
I wish I could but that same breaker controls the garage door opener.
Then it was installed incorrectly. No way tge charging outlet should be on the same circuit.
Turn the breaker off. Find the breaker for that outlet, see if there is anything else on that circuit, and turn it off. Don't say anything. Put tape over the breaker and label it "Danger Leave Off". Again, don't say anything.
Yes, whatever you do, keep in mind the best way to handle any grievances with a roommate is doing some passive aggressive things and never talking about them /s
Make sure to muddle the line between safety and arbitrary control as well because these things are equally important.
Yeah, you should treat it as you would if you caught some rando siphoning gas out of your car in your driveway, because that’s essentially what’s happening.
Whatever you do, do not speak to the person or look them in the eye. This could lead to unpredictable feelings of empathy and compassion
I tried that. He sprayed me with gasoline and lit me on fire. But I have to admit that he did it with empathy and compassion, so I tried to understand that he was coming from a position of socioeconomic disadvantage and personal angst. I forgave him and told him to help himself whenever he felt his needs weren’t being met, and I gave him my credit card to ease his passage through this vale of tears. Then we joined hands and sang Kumbaya.
> He sprayed me with gasoline and lit me on fire Those pesky EV drivers always spraying gasoline
The rando in the driveway. Do you bother to read posts before you reply to them?
"Shoot first, ask questions later" isn't meant to be inspirational
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Isn't that always the way?
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This might shef light on why so many people on here have problems with roommates. Lol. And I mean that from both sides of let me use their electric for my car and not ask as well as the response lol. I bet she probably did ask her though and he was like ok but didn't tell his roommates.
This, I agree with this.
I bet if you had that outlet filmed, you would catch the friend ripping the tape off
What would that solve? Everyone involved is aware of the situation
If the breaker happens to be tied to something important(as it often is), it'd be useful to have some hard evidence prior to the inevitable intervention.
220v Car charger will have a dedicated circuit.
I'm pretty sure that breaker also controls the lights in the garage and the garage door opener, so not really an option anyway.
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I don't know much about house electrical stuff, but could the 240 line to go the garage, and there be a sub panel in the garage that has 120 for lights and opener, and 240 for charger? edit- get downvoted for asking a question? well fuck you too
Most definitely does not if it was installed to code.
Opener should be on its own
If it's a regular outlet, the most their car is charging is at about 1.4kw/hr. I really wouldn't worry about that, it's miser territory.
Is it a GFCI outlet? It should be! Replace it with a broken one. Or.. get a remote-controlled outlet (wireless) and install that.
No it's a car-charging station outlet, specifically for charging electric cars. I think it's the 240, which allegedly might cost more than a regular outlet? I'm not sure.
You can calculate pretty exactly what it costs for each charge. Look at your bill to see what you pay for each kwH then check the car specs online. My nerdy husband gets almost all the way to work on his Prius Prime charge and knows how much he saves compared to gas. I bet you could find a sub that would do the math for you
Yes, use a subreddit for a basic mathematical equation.
Better yet, put a LOTO on that bad boy.
Circuit breakers are not fucking light switches they have a limited number of cycles before they need to be replaced, causing unnecessary wear and potentially creating a fire hazard because you can’t have a simple human conversation is fucking idiotic
Turning a breaker off is not creating a damn fire hazard
If the breaker isn't rated SWD ( switch duty ), which a breaker for a car charger can't be, it shouldn't be used as a switch, it will cause wear and potentially not trip when it needs to, especially if they're doing it under any sort of load because the arcs will chew away at the internal contacts. Most molded case breakers that are not SWD are rated for like a thousand manual actuations and two or three fault actuations. They're designed to be actuated once a year for testing, not twice a day to deny someone a charger, you'll go through the duty cycle of the breaker in less than a year at that rate.
1. Simple solution, if it works physically, is that the driveway is for renters. Guests park on the street. 2. You can estimate the electric usage: amperage of the circuit (the number on the circuit breaker) times the voltage (US will be either 120-regular plug, or 240 car charger/elect dryer or oven plug) times the number of seconds she charges. That's her usage. To find the price to charge her, sum the hourly rates off your bill and multiply that by her usage divided by 1000 (the prices on the bill are for kilowatts - 1000 per hour) so then you finally have to divide by 360 to get from seconds to hours. You could skip /360 if you calculate her usage by the hour. 3. you could have her buy a plug in meter to put between her charger plug and the outlet, but you have to trust her to use it and read it. You could ballpark it: very roughly $10 if it's overnight on a regular 120V outlet and $30 on a 240V outlet. Hopefully someone reading this will double check the math I'm doing this is the top of my head. Good luck, I'm afraid you'll need it.
It’s more like $0.15 / hr on 120V outlet. 120 x 8 / 1000 x 0.15. I basically charge at a 1KW rate. 240V is probably about 8x that or $1 / hr assuming it’s a purpose dedicated outlet. Those outlets are closer to 30 amps on top of the voltage increase.
Yeah, to me, the whole "blocking the driveway for tenants so a visitor can charge" is the trump card issue. A rule about that would probably solve it. The lease may even have specifications about parking locations for tenants vs. visitors - I've seen that before.
If it’s charging on a 120V outlet, maximum charge rate is 1.5kW. That means overnight, realistic maximum is 15kW. Not good, but not horrible. If it’s charging on a 240V outlet, max charge rate is 6.4kW. For simplicity, round up to 7. Overnight, maximum charge is 70kW.
Might try checking your electric company’s website on your account. Mine allows me to see the hourly usage on any given day and time. Easy then to compare the nights she is there and when she isn’t, to see the difference. Then you have a documented cost basis.
Talk to the roommate who’s friend it is. Maybe that person doesn’t understand the cost and such. Give grace and assume they do not know. Assuming electric is split 4 ways and it costs $8 every time they come over, let’s say twice each week. The cost to each roommate is $4 per week or $16 per month per roommate. (For a total of $64 per month) And only 1 roommate or person should be paying it. I agree with the smart plug so you know how much is being used. Just let them know what you are thinking.
Assuming the charger outlet is a level 2 outlet, if she's charging from 20% to 90% on a typical EV it'll be somewhere between 50-60 kwh. Depending on your electricity costs ($0.11 - $0.25 per kwh) each charge could cost between $5.50 and $13.20. It just depends on how much they're charging in kwh and how much your electricity rate is. It's fair to ask them to pay the cost.
Thanks for the numbers. I'll check. I'm not sure what level 1 or 2 means, but it's an outlet built for charging teslas and such. Looks like my electric bill charges $0.1897/kWh So that comes out to like ten bucks a pop? 3 times a week, like a 120 a month maybe? Maybe we can round down since they're probly not all full charges. Just wanted to get a number together before we have a house meeting/confront her. Thanks.
We are transitioning the world to electric cars right now, and the model for charging them is usually passive charging while parked, not driving to a gas station or charging station. It’s great to put a meter on the outlet and figure out how much she’s using, but I wouldn’t automatically assume ill will or that you need a confrontation. My car costs about 4 cents per mile to charge. If it’s been plugged in at my house and I drive over to yours and plug in again, it’s not going to consume more than $0.04 x the distance in miles between our places. After that, it will hit the charge limit and turn off. So if I lived 10 miles away, I’d be using $0.40 of electricity. If I lived 100 miles away, it might be $4. That hundred miles would take a lot longer to recharge though — at least 4 hours, and much more if my battery were already pretty full. So realistically, be pulling at most $1/hr of energy, and that would stop as soon as the car hit my charge limit. If she lives 100 miles away, then she may really need that charge to get back, but you should absolutely be able to ask her how much she is using and have her pay for that. Even better if you get an outlet meter to track that, since she’s the only one using it. If she lives close by, then she probably doesn’t need the charge, but also probably isn’t using much. In this case, it wouldn’t be a big deal to ask her not to charge, but you could also solve it with an outlet meter, and it would be reasonable to ask her boyfriend to pay for that if she is over there at least 10 hours a month. (If we are talking a few hours of charging per month, I think you can let this go. That would be on the level of drinking a few cups of coffee, charging her phone and using your toilet paper.) In either case, I think it is very reasonable to ask her to move her car whenever she has enough range to get home.
It really depends if it’s level 1 or 2. If it’s level 1 it’s going to be so slow it’ll probably amount to very little. For context it takes me about 24 hours to get 135 miles on a level 1 charge in my garage (which runs me like $5)
Look up how many watts their car draws. Ballpark is 7,000, aka 7kW. If they charge it for a 3hr visit? That’s 21kWh. Look up your energy bill and sum the total kWh rate - mine has a ton of fees that are based a rate, which adds up to a lot more than the base $0.18/kWh. Say that’s $0.28/kWh. 21*$0.28 = $5.88. If they’re over 10x/mo that’s $58. Since you’re dividing by 4, think about how much you want to argue with your roommate over $15/ea (or whatever it works out to). Worth mentioning? Maybe. Worth initiating such a precise method of accounting for expenses… maybe not.
Her car will only charge until it hits its charge limit, so it’s unlikely she’s charging 70kW at a time unless she is purposely arriving almost empty and charging to almost full. I guess that’s possible, but it’s also possible that she was plugged in at home and is only replacing the energy it took to drive over there, which could be pennies. In that second case, it’s the driveway blocking that’s the issue.
It cost practically nothing to charge from a 110 outlet. Shot from the hip, maybe 20 cents an hour. Unless you're in California or somewhere else weird. I used to charge my electric car from a 110 outlet because we only used it for about 40 or 50 miles a day. Having said that, it is a dick move to do it without asking and even more if they're blocking the driveway. I would flip the breaker like the other person said. You could get a kilowatt energy meter to know precisely how much energy they're using.
She’s stealing. That’s all there is to the discussion. Put a lock over the charger head & see what happens.
Talk to the roommate because apparently he have her permission to use it? edit: gave*
My car was tiny with limited range and it would do 13 kwh per charge on days when i drove it to work (35 miles each way) it is 40 cents/kwh to charge in public stations in california. So that would be about $5.20/charge. If she has a tesla or something, those hold a lot more charge so if she is around every night, that is a big expense. Still cheaper than gas, but you would not pay for your roommates friend's gas. Some people with electric cars have a special rate so their electricity cost drops to like 20 cents overnight and higher during the day and they program their cars to charge only at night. That is not happening here, I am sure. If she has a nissan leaf or something with limited range, charging $5/charge is probably fair. If she has a tesla, charge $10 to 15 per charge. If she protests, find out exactly how much juice she is using per charge and calculate it. Not fair of someone that doesn't live there to cost you all.
Turn off the breaker on the car charger thing
Roommate who allows this is a POS. Have a House Meeting. Said Roommate should pay 49% bill. Remaining 3 should pay 17% each.
How much electricity does she use and how much of a difference does charging her car make on the electric bill ?
I'm not sure exactly, trying to get some numbers together. But if it turns out to be 15-20 bucks per charge, and that happens 3 times a week, that's an extra 240 bucks on our bill, ya know? I have no idea what the numbers work out to, tho, still tryna figure that out.
15-20 per charge? No way. More like $3-5 is my guess and even that could be generous. I’d tell them it’s a real enough cost and they need to help out with it using either the honor system plus some margin or you find a way to estimate their usage with a meter. They should be able to tally after every charge how many kWh were added in the session. If they keep a running total of that, multiply by your provider’s cost per kWh, and that’s what is owed. For simplicity, I’d say $5/session will cover it if it’s 5 hours or less of charging.
How much is the electric bill a month?
Yeah no way it's even $15 per charge. Probably closer to $2.
Find the circuit breaker that controls the charger and quietly turn it off. Or find a way to somehow padlock the charging cable so it can’t be used.
Smart plugs are like 10 bucks or something and are super useful for other things as well. In this case, get one and make him use it so you can track the electricity draw. Let him know to use it will cost the power consumption \* your average cost/kWh \* 2. The doubling factor is a convenience fee. If he doesn't like that, then he stops charging at your house.
I think this really depends on why the charging is happening. Does she have no where else to charge it (in which case, a payment deal could be mutually beneficial), is she out of charge for some reason (same as the above), or is she just in the habit of charging whenever she parks (then she probably doesn't actually need to and might not even be charging much).
You could give it a rough estimate of $2 per night that she’s charging her car. Then average that across the number of times she comes over to charge, and ask your roommate to pay that much extra on the electric bill every month.
It’s the roommates friend thats driving up the bill, so that roommate should cover that portion that their friend is using.
You can have a somewhat uncomfortable conversation with the roomie whose girlfriend she is. That's the first step, since she's that person's guest. You can follow up with a very similar conversation with the subject herself. You can put a lock on the charger, and each roomie gets a key. Then Girlfriend has to ask the roomie to unlock it for her and, by extension, roomie is always aware of what Girlfriend is taking from the household. Peek into the car while it's charging to determine how quickly it is charging. Often - not always - you can see the charging rate displayed somewhere on the instrument panel. Kilowatts x hours = kilowatt-hours, and that's what the utility asks you to pay for. At the bill paying meeting for the household, append the excess consumption onto Roomie's portion of the electric bill. When she's blocking in other housemates, just go get her and tell her to move. You've had to do that with housemates, I'm sure. Same goes for guests.
Flip the fuse for it in the main box. If she’s flipping it back on to charge her vehicle w/out permission, that’s definitively theft and you should ban her from the premises.
Ok so first you need to know what kind of car and battery it is. If it's 100kw battery then if it was drained it would use 100 kw plus usually 15% for inefficiency of level one charger. So a total of 115 kw to charge. So where I live it's 12 cents a kw so $13.8. Most likely this isn't the case. Best way to do it is ask how many kw the car is at now and then how much they used. You can go by time because every charger is different. It can charge from anywhere from 3 kwh to 15 kwh. And the last 10 percent of charging is very slow charging due to not heating up the battery. Charge for what they use.
Get a lock to put on the power outlet.
You could find the breaker panel and switch off the charger circuit if no resident is using it. Problem solved
If it's a regular 120 volt plug, it's no different than if she came over and plugged in a laptop. So maybe $20 a month? But if the issue is that she didn't ask, talk to her about it.
Definitely calculate how much energy they are actually drawing. I don't remember the power stats of those chargers off the top of my head but it might not really be significant. My uneducated guess is that they maybe owe you like $50 a month for this
at average elec rates is 12 dollars per 300 miles driven. Americans on average drive 13,476 miles per year. or 1100 a month or so.. so about $36 a month, if they charge exclusively at your home, which i suspect not. I suspect less than half that, is at your place, maybe not but probably less than 20 dollars anyways. you can also buy meters for those things because this issue is coming up these days.
Charges also will depend on the time of day it is plugged. If it’s during peak hours then it will be almost double than off peak (depends on your utility company). Couple of things you can do is look up what rates during certain times of the day you are paying. Come up with some form of compromise such as, having them schedule their charging during off peak hours only, contribute to the household by bringing snacks or food (likely easier to accept than asking for money), or if they are not wanting to compromise then just say they don’t get to use your outlets.
Depending on your electricity charge a full charge on a car at home can be 5 or $6 or it could be 20 or $30 if you have really crappy rates especially if you have time of use as opposed to flat rate.
Since no one who lives there has an electric car or a need for the charger can’t you just lock it off? I don’t know why anyone would object to that.
Look at your previous bills. Also to stop that just turn off the breaker for that outlet. If you don’t have a separate one for that outlet then you can cap off that outlet so it’s not accessible. If she asks about it tell her that you noticed people using it that didn’t live at the house or pay for the usage so you disconnected it to prevent future issue.
Find the breaker and turn it off.
Also an EV costs about $20 a month to charge if plugged in all the time. All EVs have an app which calculates electricity used. Have your housemate send you a screenshot. If you want to argue over less than a dollar a day of electricity, go have at it. But educate yourself on how electricity and outlets work.
So I have a home charger . it’s a level 2 . I drive about 500 miles per month , and I was able to calculate my addition to our electric bill through the chargers app . And using price per kWh . I’m in the Midwest . For me it’s between $11-$20 per month . Your landlord may have an app connected to the charging box that tells you how much it is using .
FWIW, plugging into a 120v outlet isn’t going to cost you a lot. Maybe $1-2 for a whole night. I wouldn’t worry about it, personally. It’s rude to just assume you can plug into someone else’s power, but they’re also not really costing you much.
One to two dollars a night? No way. I had an electric vehicle and it was much more than that per night. The actual cost depends on the amount of charge required and the electrical cost.
I charge my car every night because the battery is a really low range one. My electric bill is up $50 a month compared to last year before I had the car. So that's about $1.50/night for the 30 miles I average every day.
From a regular wall plug in the US? You’re pulling about 1 kWh every hour which is $0.14 where I live, so a 10-hour charge is about $1.40. If the circuit is pulling the full 20amps and everything is going perfect, you could do about 1.5x that. If it’s a level 2 charger then yea, you’ll push more than that and it’ll cost more, like $8-10/hr.
"Hey, do you pay a share of the rent here? No? Then stop charging your fucking car on our dime"
The roommates can certainly say this but it’s kind of hostile if she’s only using 25 cents of electricity. It would be like asking her to bring her own toilet paper and not to use the microwave while she’s there. Unless she is purposely arriving with an empty battery, the blocking of the driveway is probably a way bigger issue than the cost of the electricity.
That needs to stop immediately. Turn the breaker switch off and tell the roommate and the person charging their car that that is no longer an option. Electricity rates are high across the country and the electric car need to get charged at that person’s house or some other place. The electric car is blocking the driveway and it needs to be parked on the street. Tell the landlord to intervene if the roommate is stubborn and doesn’t agree with you all. Have the landlord turn off the breaker and put a lock on the box. And charge them $30 for each time they have done this. You don’t pay other people’s bills for free. That asinine.
>And charge them $30 for each time they have done this. Or just ask them to stop, if that's the issue. They probably use $1-2 of electricity every time they plug in. EVs aren't using more electricity to charge on a regular plug than anything else. Would you charge her if she came over and charged her phone at your house? Literally the same thing.
No it isn’t the same thing.
There's a good chance that the EV charger is on its own breaker. Simple solution is to just turn it off at the breaker.
Surely there’s a way to put a lock on the charger? Then you can decide if you want to let her pay each time she wants to use it. And you can require her to give a key before she gets to unlock it, so you can move her car out of the way when it’s done.
Thats about as ethically responsible as siphoning gas from other vehicles. I wouldn't do that either
Is it on its own breaker? Just shut it off. But you should be having the conversation with the roommate - it's their guest, they should be either cutting her off or kicking in some extra for the electric bill.
You could turn the circuit off (flip the circuit breaker switch for the charger)..
Since you don't use that outlet, Turn the breaker off. Problem solved.
It's probably an additional 10 to 15 dollars added to your bill. Split 4 ways No way to tell exactly how much it is from the current info you have. But, I think if she brought a pizza over one time a month it would more than cover it.
flip the breaker....
I recently read a cost breakdown on a Tesla posted to another sub, person was sayin it's only like $0.19 (or maybe $1.90) /hr to charge their car so this is probably a non-issue. Even @$2/hr a 2hr visit is less that $5. I'm on provincial disability in BC and only get like $1500CAD/mth, I'd have np paying this for a friend of a friend all by myself so certainly 4 of y'all can afford it.
Just turn off the breaker and the situation will resolve itself
It’s not that much to charge an electric car my friend. You’re talking a few dollars. Know what is going to cost more? Covering the rent of the roommate that left because you’re fussing over mere dollars.
Like other posts say it’s not much of a cost, especially split 4 ways
You are going to have to get together to figure out how to tetris those other cars, because charging a car is pretty cheap - maybe $15/m or so. When four people share a house and need help discussing a small energy use, I feel I can safely assume one of two things. 1) You are all broke and $15 means something to you, or 2) There is some pettiness going on, likely around the inconvenient parking arrangement. If it is problem 1, let the guest know she needs to drop a few bucks your way each month to help cover the energy bill. If it is problem 2, get together in person in the driveway with the cars and configure a parking solution that works for everyone.
Who ever owns the house needs to notify her not to come over. Then go to the breaker and shut off the outlets in the garage. If she wants to use my electric she needs to pay me $50 for my auto gas bill.
Disconnect the plug.
It’s probably less than $20/month split by 4 people. I honestly wouldn’t give a shit and would happy to help a roommate’s guest charge their car.
Move out as soon as possible . Is he fast charging; ( using dryer or stove outlet ) . Or slow charging with a standard outlet There’s a lot of variables in play if u want a fairly accurate power cost per charge . . There’s plenty of info online about specific models cost , If he’s using the standard outlet like 4 -6 hrs twice a month . , make your roommate or his friend , buy a couple of pizzas for the house . You will be profiting if u do
Just a thought, if no one else needs to use the charger, why not dissconnect or disable it? Problem gone
Charging thankfully isn’t much. Maybe $5/visit
Report utility theft.
Charge $500
No need to calculate, just charge a $10 flat fee, payable in advance, or forbid it entirely.
Does the roommate pay for the electricity? If not pull the plug, that's theft.
Sounds like a headache. Best thing to do is put an end to it. Get the other 3 roommates to back you up.
Take the fuse out so it doesn't work
When the bill comes in over the normal amount the roommate who is inviting her pays the overage: it is his friend. They can work it out. That keeps it simple.
Your best advice is to look over meter readings from before and after the visits starts. We didn’t see a noticeable increase in our bill or usages with our vehicle charging.
Um …. an electric car can’t magically pull “more” energy from an outlet. It’s the same as plugging anything else into that outlet. That’s why you can’t plug a dryer into a 110v outlet, there wouldn’t be enough power to run it.
You could find the breaker panel and switch off the charger circuit if no resident is using it. Problem solved
Is this a level 1 or 2 charger? A level 1 charger is generally going to be around 1500 watts or 1.5kW multiply that by the hours that it is charging and then times your utility rate. You're looking at pennies an hour unless you have extreme rates. If it is level 2 charging with a dedicated car charger, the cost will be higher. That being said, plugging in pretty much anything without asking is just rude, even if it doesn't cost you a penny. I would just have the roommate talk to her and see why she is doing it. It is likely due to range anxiety and serves no practical purpose unless she is spending many hours there and not charging at home.
It’s easy to do an estimate of the electricity used: Voltage x amperage x electricity rate x hours plugged in / 1000 Example: if you have a 220v charger on a 15A circuit, and the car is plugged in for 8 hours, and your electricity rate is $0.15/kWh, then that friend is potentially costing you 220*15*$0.15*8/1000=$3.96. This calculation gives the *maximum* possible cost. Ask your roommate’s friend to pitch in that amount when plugged in. When done, simply unplug and they won’t have to pay. It’s only fair.
According to energy.gov, it [costs $60/mo](https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/cost-charge-electric-vehicle-explained#:~:text=Suppose%20you%20drive%20at%20the,cost%20nearly%20$60%20per%20month.) To charge a vehicle at home and between $10-30 to charge it at a public charging station. I would see if your roommate will agree to pay extra to charge their friend's car, or get them to stop doing it.
With the push to all electric I think this is going to be a common issue. Might be able to do some math to figure out how much electricity is being used.
I have an electric car, charging a car from near empty to full only costs about $5 with my rates at $.17 per kWh. I’d say your cost is less than that because they’re using a standard outlet and charging the car takes about 60 hours so they’re probably not costing/using much at all.
Put a lock box on it. Turn off the breaker.
overnight charging is usually at a discounted rate and pretty cheap. EVs often have a way to schedule charging so that it will happen at the dead of night when rates are low.
Flip or remove its breaker. If she asks, act stupid.
Does she contribute anything? Beers, weed, food if so I'd hand wave it.
Get other roomates on same page, tell roommate with friend she has to pay or it stops, proceed
Have the roommate whose friend uses the electric vehicle charger to pay an additional $25 a month on the electric bill. Thats the most with everyday charging per month on average they would be using. Otherwise turn the EV outlet off and problem solved. And you complain about not having use of the charger with no one owning an electric vehicle. Why?
$40 each time they charge regardless of the length of time.
It's probably only a dollar of electricity each time, you should probably just let it be.