Our apartment association wants to streamline electric wires to respective users parking slots. This is to ensure that each person does not randomly pull a line from his sub meter(main) to his parking lot. The prime driver for this is the current cables wires for television, telephone and internet which haphazardly come in from the road.
We wanted to lay a common conduit pipeline from the mains area to the respective parking slot so that Individuals who would like connections would only need to pull a wire from his mains within this conduit pipeline. The local electrician suggested that we do not do this given that there will be issues of short circuiting etc and will lead to problems. He also pointed out that from the mains, an individual concealed pipeline is given to each flat and it is not bundled in a common conduit.
Any thoughts or suggestions on this will really help.
Just checked with our Charging Infrastructure team, and here’s what they had to say for your situation:
The solution depends on the apartment and the existing infra also. The suggestion by the association (having a common conduit and all new EV cables used in the same conduit, would not exist if there are adequate cable trays. Cable trays are also relatively safer than conduits because they don’t degrade the rating of cables as much. The other solution can be, having common electrical infra with individual sub meters. Or common infra with multiple users sharing the infra and the association puts a prepaid sub meter.
Hi @abhishek.balaji, Thank you very much for taking this up with your team.
Having submeters at each carpark too is not a good idea as this wil involve the same process as below where we need to pull wires from each apartment owners main meter.
Having a common sub-meter is not viable as we will not be able to charge people who use it.
Our apartment is a 59 apartments and does not have complex wiring which requires cable trays etc. Please do give a suggestions on how to proceed as we do not want every individual to pull separate lines as this will become cumbersome.
In the absence of common infrastructure like cable trays, a common conduit can be used as a stop-gap arrangement. The reasons most people don’t use common conduits are:
When more conductors are in a closed conduit and tightly filled, it heats the & de-rates the individual core of the cable.
In case there is a fault, it is difficult to replace those cores.
To avoid such problems, here are some options. A local class A contractor or electrical contractor would be able to implement it.
In the common conduit have extra cores in case something fails due to any fault. Have single-core cables only to avoid junction boxes.
Design conduit spaces to avoid overcrowding. If the conduit is filled up to 50-60% of the bunched diameter, it will cause lower de-rating.
Depending on how many cores are kept in the conduit and how many of the cables are actually being loaded, space can be kept free to avoid heating.
Depending on the routing of the conduits, you can take a call if you want to install cables upfront or later. If the routing is complex, it won’t be easy to push the cables in the conduit.
@abhishek.balaji, I need a clarification regarding the stand of BESCOM towards charging point installation. I stay in an apartment where the builder is still maintaining the campus. He’s not letting me install a charging point from the BESCOM meter. Instead, he’s offering to draw a line from my geyser point in 11th floor to the basement (which he says will cost me Rs. 8000).
He says that BESCOM will disconnect the entire building if a line is drawn from the meter for the charging point. How true is this statement?
I have tried telling him that there are more than 1500 homes with Athers which have installed it this way, but he is not ready to accept. Is there a document from BESCOM that has clarifications on what is allowed and what is not, that I can use to convince him?
I’ll have to check with the team on the communication from BESCOM, but I did use the FAQs and EV Policy of Karnataka to convince mine. These were linked in my “Ready for delivery“ email.
We don’t have any document from BESCOM on this, but after speaking to the team again, they clarified that BESCOM only does something if the meter is modified. The installation of charging point is done through the breaker after the meter and hence shouldn’t cause any issues
Thanks Abhishek! I’ve got the contact of the BESCOM JE of our area. I’ll talk to him today and check their policies too. I’ll use the diagram in the document and Raghav’s photos. Hopefully, they’ll respond.
Just an update after talking to the BESCOM JE of JP Nagar. His words were “Before meter it’s our responsibility, after meter it’s your wish”. He told me that a new circuit can be drawn after the MCB post the meter. I’m assuming MCB is the circuit breaker in the diagram. The next step is to convince our builder to let Ather access the meter!
Yes. MCB is the breaker. Anything after the breaker is billed to the meter. Unless your builder is worried about cables spoiling the asthetics of your parking lot, don’t understand why he should deny permission.
According to Tamil Nadu’s EV policy, does charging your vehicle come under residential or commercial rate? My apartment association wants to know this. It seems our entire ground floor parking area runs in commercial rate and hence they were wondering about this
