cts | Volt a Day | Last Mile Finished October 20, 2010

That was certainly easy. I detailed it in Tweets, but the electrical contractor that GM brought in could not have been better. They showed up at 11:20am for an 11:30am appointment. Scott B. from GM wanted to see the install happen and since he was on time, he nearly missed it.

I have an alley behind the house where the garage entrance is. They pulled up in the van, slid open the door and had the measuring tape rolled out immediately. And I mean immediately. I was talking with two guys from Southern California Edison, and Mr. Electric's head guy just stepped into the garage with the tape, zip zip zip, and inside of ten minutes they had a piece of conduit (BX) cut to length.

They sent a fishtape through the conduit, pulled through three wires (hot, neutral, ground), and clipped that off. They popped the cover off my subpanel, tapped loose one of the knock-outs in the top of it, and put on a connector for the BX. With the BX connected they drilled up through the top plate of the wall, and started running the conduit up, over the rafter in the garage, and down the exterior of the plywood covering the other wall.

While they were hammering in the brackets to hold the conduit I was allowed to open the box with the charger in it. They could learn a little from Apple about the unboxing experience. Nothing exciting in the box.

The charger looks really, really simple. They put it onto the stud with a couple lag bolts. Then, with the cover off, they ran the conduit to the bottom and just connected the three lines. After getting the breaker connected in the subpanel, and screwing the cover back on, they were done.

It was less than an hour, even with the clean up. That was a great experience. (The experience with SCE trying to remove the TOU-EV meter... not as good. I might detail that in another post.)