What Happens Between Signing and an Energized Charger?

The question a Florida property manager brings to an EV charging project is usually narrower than how long it takes. It is whether the chargers will be working by a particular date.

A lease-up. The start of a season. The meeting where someone promised residents an answer.

Short answer: Florida Chargers quotes 6 to 12 weeks from a signed agreement to an energized charger. It is a range rather than a schedule because several of the steps inside it run on clocks the property does not set -- a permit office working to standards established by state rule, a utility application of its own, and a building whose electrical service has to be read before anything can be designed around it. The questions a property can answer on its own are mostly answerable before the agreement is signed.

Three different dates, and only one of them is quoted

The 6-to-12-week figure measures a signed agreement to an energized charger. Energized means the chargers have power and have been commissioned. That is a narrower thing than it sounds, and it is worth separating from the two dates on either side of it.

The first is the day the hardware is installed. Installed is not energized: a mounted Wall Connector on an un-energized circuit is hardware on a wall.

The second is the day a property tells residents or guests the chargers are there. That date belongs to the property rather than to the installer, and it is the one that usually sits on a calendar somewhere. A property that names only one of these three dates at the start is likely to be measuring something different from the company it hired.

The permit is local. The rules are not.

A reasonable assumption about a newer category of equipment is that each city has written its own rules for it, and that a property in one county faces a different review than a property in the next. In Florida, local governments are not permitted to do that.

Fla. Stat. 366.94(2)(b) provides that a local governmental entity may not enact or enforce an ordinance or regulation related to electric vehicle charging stations. Paragraph (3)(c) carries the permit half: local governmental entities shall issue permits for electric vehicle charging stations based solely upon standards established by department rule and other applicable provisions of state law, and the department shall prescribe by rule the time period for approving or denying permit applications.

Read together, those two say something specific. The permit application is still filed locally. What is not local is the standard it is judged against.

What the statute does not do is print that time period. It assigns it to department rule rather than stating a number, so a property that wants the current figure should ask the permit office or its counsel rather than take one from an installer's proposal.

One permit question is worth settling before an agreement is signed rather than after: which company's electrical licence the permit is pulled under, and whether that is the same company signing the agreement.

Utility coordination is a separate application

A utility make-ready credit is not a discount applied at the end. It is a separate application to the utility that serves the address, with its own requirements and its own review, and it is worth raising at the site assessment rather than after the electrical work is scheduled.

Whether a particular property's setup qualifies for a credit is confirmed with the serving utility, not assumed from a program description. The Florida utility make-ready guide covers what the Florida programs do and do not reach.

What a site assessment answers that a calendar cannot

Design, engineering and the electrical work all depend on facts about the building. Some of those facts are on existing drawings or in prior permit records. Others are not, and the ones that are not tend to be the ones that move a scope.

Whether the existing service and panel can carry the ports a property wants, and at what output, is the first of those questions. Whether a service upgrade is needed is answered from the building rather than from the number of ports. How far the work has to reach from the electrical room to the parking spaces is the second. Florida Chargers offers a free site assessment, and doing it early is what converts those two questions into a scope before anyone commits to a date.

Florida Chargers puts installed cost at $5,000 to $8,000 per port before incentives, and sizes multifamily projects from a starting point of about one Level 2 port per 20 to 30 units. Both are starting points that a site assessment either confirms or revises.

Energized is not the same as open to drivers

Tesla's commercial charging page, under the heading Set Up Your Wall Connectors, states that once Wall Connectors are successfully installed, a Tesla Certified Installer will commission the units. Commissioning is where a Wall Connector's output configuration is set, which is why what the panel and service can carry reaches all the way to the last step rather than only the first.

The same heading carries the listing condition. To qualify for listing on the Find Us map and Trip Planner, Tesla states, a site must have reliable connectivity and a Tesla Certified Installer must commission the units. Tesla also states that it retains the right to make the final decision on initial and continued public listing, so no installer can promise that outcome or a date for it.

Florida's statute adds one more pre-service item worth knowing about. Fla. Stat. 366.94(3)(d) provides that before a charger at an electric vehicle charging station is placed into service for use by the public, the charger must be registered with the department on a form prescribed by department rule. Whether a particular property's chargers fall within that description is a question for the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and for the property's own counsel. It is not a question an installer should answer in a proposal.

Under Share the Revenue, the property invests in the professional installation and Florida Chargers owns and operates the chargers. Tesla Wall Connector hardware is included. Financing is available for qualified properties to cover the electrical infrastructure and installation with no money down, so a project can start without a capital outlay from reserves or a special assessment. The property then shares in net charging profit for the full term, and the ROI calculator carries that arithmetic.

What a property can settle before it signs

Some of the steps above cannot start until an earlier one finishes, and others run alongside. What the two kinds have in common is that the property's own answers are inputs to them. Four are answerable now, and none of them requires a vendor commitment first.

• Which utility serves that specific address, and what its make-ready program requires of an applicant.
• What the building's electrical service and panel can carry, read by a licensed electrician rather than estimated from a port count.
• What the governing documents or the lease say about the parking areas and the electrical distribution serving them.
• Which date the property is actually working toward -- the day the chargers are energized, or the day it wants to announce them.

These apply to any EV charging proposal a property reviews, including one from Florida Chargers.

The honest limit of this article

Nothing above tells a property that its own project will land at six weeks rather than twelve. Florida Chargers publishes the range because the range is what is knowable before a building has been looked at. Any installer naming a date before a site assessment, a permit application and a utility determination is naming a hope rather than a schedule.

Florida Chargers is a veteran-owned, Tesla Certified commercial EV charging installer serving apartment communities, condominium associations, hotels and resorts across Florida, licensed as Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13009718. A site assessment is what turns the questions above into a scope. Reach out for a no-pressure free site assessment.

Call 321-475-2689 or visit flchargers.com.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. It describes what the cited statute says and does not tell any property how to apply it. Consult a licensed Florida attorney for guidance specific to your property or association.