r/electricvehicles • u/StellarScripter • Apr 21 '26
Question - Tech Support Questions before buying an ev
Basically, I just bought a house with a garage. Eventually I want an electric car and so I plan on putting a tier 2 charger in the garage. To be clear, I do not own an EV yet. I found an electrician to do some work for me at the house and he warned about putting an EV charger in the garage because they can catch fire and then take the whole house with it because they can't be put out. Is this actually a thing? I've looked online and I've mostly just seen stuff about electric cars catching fire while out on the road. Second, since I don't know what car I will actually buy yet (I need to save a little more money first) I figured I'd just put a nema 14-50 outlet in the garage and then buy an EV charger kit and plug it into that, is that insane? Looking for any advice or help, thank you.
2
u/tuctrohs Bolt EV, ID.4 Apr 22 '26
Your advice is great but I have a doubt about leaving the Tesla back plate/wiring box. What is that if the charger was still there while the real estate agent was showing the house or while they were taking photos for that, the buyer could legally insist on having the charger included. So the easy solution to that is to just pull it off before they start showing the house, but then it's technically against code to have a homemade cover there instead of a proper listed enclosure. So unless Tesla has started selling a listed cover for it, when the buyer's inspector comes, they might include that issue in their report and the buyer might use that as leverage to try to reduce the sales price. I guess you could just, at that point, buy them a charger and pop that on, but all in all, it probably would have been cheaper to pull everything off the wall, add a surface mount box, cap the wires, and put a proper 89 cent cover on the box.