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Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

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Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#21

Post by toast0 »

dhosek wrote: post #8

Multi-family housing has lots of issues like this. How can rooftop solar be managed for a multi-family building (especially a rental building)? For a smaller apartment building with a shared garage, even if you go through the expense of running electric lines to the garage tied to individual units’s meters, what’s to keep an unscrupulous neighbor from using someone else’s charger? I’ve been contemplating buying a ren…

A multifamily building should have one meter per unit, plus one for common areas needs like garage and pathway lighting, etc. Rooftop solar would be best put on the common area meter, but that's not ideal under most net metering regimes because the common areas won't have much draw. If you add charging stations and those charging stations are actually used, then that may give you enough usage to offset your generation or at least a meaningful portion.

I'd put in something like a chargepoint charger and set the kWh price to about the local average electricity prices, and maybe help your tenants get chargepoint rfid tags. If you can put a publicly accessible charger at the street as well as tenant only chargers, that would again help you make economic work of your solar panels.

You could also run the whole building on one utility meter, and include electricity in the rent... But that's asking for cryptocoin miners or grow operations as tenants.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#22

Post by BitwiseFool »

logicalmonster wrote: post #18

At one time, hotels didn't offer free (or any) Wi-Fi, and now it's basically standard even at the bargain basement cheapo motels. As the market demands a feature, it will eventually come. I think time will ultimately solve the EV charging issue in many apartment complexes, multi-family homes, townhouses, and other types of residential areas as that feature gets more demanded. Property management companies are particu…

One other thing to consider is installation costs. The office complex at which I work spent roughly $45,000 in order to install two electric charging stations. There was a lot of debate about justifying the expense at a management level. That expense was only for a mere two stations, and that was also before the supply chain issues and inflation we're seeing now. I can easily see how most apartment complexes would avoid installing charging stations - unless they were forced to install them because of a city ordinance. Maybe it wouldn't be as much of an expense for new construction where the charging stations were planned from the beginning, but that is just speculation on my part.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#23

Post by coredog64 »

toast0 wrote: post #16
giantg2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think being low income is itself prohibitive to adopting electric.

If your needs fit its range, off lease Leafs were pretty low cost when I was last looking; you could get an older gas car for much less and not everyone can afford a $10,000 car. Electric $/mile operating cost is very often less than gas $/mile, especially if you have significant access to free charging. Of course, if you move, you might need to get a different car.

Nissan cheaped out on the Leaf and didn’t include any battery cooling. A used Leaf that spent any time in a hot climate and was charged to get the published range is unlikely to have a battery at full capacity.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#24

Post by lostapathy »

logicalmonster wrote: post #18

At one time, hotels didn't offer free (or any) Wi-Fi, and now it's basically standard even at the bargain basement cheapo motels. As the market demands a feature, it will eventually come. I think time will ultimately solve the EV charging issue in many apartment complexes, multi-family homes, townhouses, and other types of residential areas as that feature gets more demanded. Property management companies are particu…

I was really surprised on my vacation last summer how often I saw EV chargers at hotels in rural locations. Especially in central and western Kansas.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#25

Post by coredog64 »

zamalek wrote: post #7
yboris wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the next sentence: "Unsurprisingly, renters tend to have lower incomes than those who own their own homes; they are also more likely to be Black or Latino." Given the history of the US, this seems a worthwhile thing to note.

> Unsurprisingly, renters tend to have lower incomes than those who own their own homes Not only that, but renters are often put in the situation where their rent is the same as a mortgage, but can't afford to save for a down payment. Renting is a cockroach motel.

Two years ago I had to replace my roof and the cost was more than the sum of mortgage payments for a year. Not too long before that, the AC needed replacement and that was ~ 6 months of mortgage payments.

I’m grateful that I can afford it, but I understand that the mortgage isn’t the entire cost of the house and that renting allows me to leverage someone else’s capital in an efficient manner.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#27

Post by sigio »

logicalmonster wrote: post #18

At one time, hotels didn't offer free (or any) Wi-Fi, and now it's basically standard even at the bargain basement cheapo motels. As the market demands a feature, it will eventually come. I think time will ultimately solve the EV charging issue in many apartment complexes, multi-family homes, townhouses, and other types of residential areas as that feature gets more demanded. Property management companies are particu…

Here in suburbia in the Netherlands, there's chargers on basically every street in area's without driveways, and in areas where people mostly have a driveway, you can find most will have a private charger.

I can't charge in the carpark with my house, but never have an issue finding (many) free charging spots on the streets around my house. And besides the level 2 chargers (11/22kw) here, there's also enough fast-chargers around, though these tend to be expensive.

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#28

Post by netsharc »

I wonder if a hack would be - just like a USB power bank to power your phone away from an outlet - to have a portable lithium ion battery (something like Jackery, the only name I know since I watched an LTT video about it[1]) to charge your car. You fill up the Jackery at home, and you drag it to your car when it's time to charge.

Optimally you could leave it in inside your car while charging (otherwise it'd be stolen), and route the cable in a weatherproof way to the charger port.

Alternatively, cars should start having a charging port inside the car.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1hZ9zJAd2s

Re: Think apartment-hunting is frustrating? Try doing it with an electric car

#30

Post by mcculley »

I was office and apartment hunting in 2018. I ended up moving into a freshly built apartment building with no infrastructure for charging. Five years later, those that have electric cars compete for the few available 15 amp outlets on each parking level.

I asked each broker/property manager (residential and commercial) of new construction why they were not making accommodations for electric cars and Ubers. (Ubers are a lot more convenient where there is a portico or designated area for getting in and out and waiting for cars instead of holding up traffic in the street.) It was obvious that how people prefer to use cars is changing.

All of them told me that it was too far away to worry about.

Now they are trying to figure out how to retrofit the building for the necessary wiring and to correctly meter the tenant. Right now all of those electric cars are going against the common area usage.

Myopia seems an expected consequence of bad housing market policy.

I won't be buying an electric car until I move elsewhere.

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