What to expect from your Nissan Leaf home charging assessment

So I had my home charging assessment this afternoon for my Nissan Leaf order. Here’s a quick overview of what happened, and what I learned.

I had a local electrician come by, as well as a representative from Aerovironment. I wouldn’t expect everyone is going to have an AV rep at their assessment, but because today was the first day they were checking out some of the assessments to see how things can be streamlined.

So the first thing the electrician did was take a picture of the house and address. Then he inspected the box where the electrical meter is located and verified that the overall capacity of the house was fine, ours was with a 100amp (remember I’m no electrician so what I say may be totally wrong). From there he took a picture of the box and meter, then moved into the house to find the sub panel, the circuit breaker for the house. His first thought was that I would have to replace the panel entirely because it is full and old. Fortunately I showed him that we have a 220v hookup for an electric dryer that isn’t being used, which means we should be able to pull the 30amp breaker for that and replace it with the required 40amp breaker that the Leaf charger will need.

He looked around the garage, told us where he would suggest installing the charger, and then let me choose where I would like it installed. We talked about the pros/cons of various locations, the main con being the 15’ charging cord that will run across the floor when the car is plugged in.

The Aerovironment rep asked me a few questions such as how I thought Nissan was doing with the Leaf as a whole, to which I said I was pleased. He also made notes about items he would follow up with his supervisor on, questions the electrician had about the paperwork he had, as well as some other general things that he thinks might make the overall process smoother. 

The last thing that the electrician did was hung up a “sticker” to mark where the Charger would go. He then took a picture of that, I also took my own picture, of course


So what’s next? Well apparently the assessment will be sent to AV once the local electrician fills out all the paperwork. Then they will send me a quote for how much it is going to cost to do the installation. I think it looks to be pretty straightforward for our house, so hopefully it’s not a price proposition.