Federal tax credit - install Wall Connector today and service upgrade down the road - leaving $500 on the table?

[timeshifter]

I understand that if I hire an electrician to install a Wall Connector and as part of the job they also have to upgrade my service from 100A to 200A, the whole job would be eligible for the tax credit, 30% up to $1,000 maximum credit.

A full service upgrade is quite expensive. So I was thinking about having a Wall Connector professionally installed now (even though I could only do 30A instead of 60A if I had upgraded service). Say that runs $1,500. I'd only get a $500 tax credit.

But if I did it all at once, which I'm sure would be more than $3,000, I could get the whole $1,000 tax credit.

So if do just the Wall Connector now and take the credit this year, then do the service upgrade a year or more down the road, I'd be leaving $500 on the table?

Is my thinking correct on this?

 

[RTPEV]

Is my thinking correct on this?

Not entirely (in my opinion).

Sure, if you are confident that in a year (or maybe two) you are going to do that service upgrade, then you should probably just do it all at once.

But I suspect the more likely scenario is that you will find that you can get by with 30A (we have two EVs and have gotten by just fine with a 30A EVSE--well, at least until it partially died on us), and will continually postpone that service upgrade. And since you have to spend quite a lot of money to access that money you think is just sitting on the table, if in fact you are able to get by with 30A charging, you would be spending $2000 that you didn't really need to.

Tell us what your commuting patterns and daily charging needs are so we can better advise.

 

[timeshifter]

The electrical service upgrade has been on my wish list since I moved into this house in 2010, before EVs were ever on my radar. 1800 sq ft house with a full basement that is unfinished but have used for my office and the like. Plan has always been to upgrade / partially finish the basement. 200A is an evitable necessity in my mind.

Regarding my commuting patterns... I've put 38,000 miles on my car in three years, so pretty typical. I've gotten by on 110V 15A all this time. Occasionally I might have had to run to a Supercharger to top off, but rare. I did have one issue where the circuit failed because one of the receptacles in the circuit got a little brown. It's OK now but I'd feel better getting it done right.

The thing that's making me revisit this is that Tesla recently fixed my car by replacing the HV battery with an LFP pack that likes to be charged to 100% at least once a week.

 

[RTPEV]

The electrical service upgrade has been on my wish list since I moved into this house in 2010, before EVs were ever on my radar. 1800 sq ft house with a full basement that is unfinished but have used for my office and the like. Plan has always been to upgrade / partially finish the basement. 200A is an evitable necessity in my mind.

Regarding my commuting patterns... I've put 38,000 miles on my car in three years, so pretty typical. I've gotten by on 110V 15A all this time. Occasionally I might have had to run to a Supercharger to top off, but rare. I did have one issue where the circuit failed because one of the receptacles in the circuit got a little brown. It's OK now but I'd feel better getting it done right.

The thing that's making me revisit this is that Tesla recently fixed my car by replacing the HV battery with an LFP pack that likes to be charged to 100% at least once a week.

If you are mostly surviving on a domestic 15A circuit, a 240V 30A circuit will definitely meet your needs, even if you have to charge to 100%. A 24A EVSE will replenish approximately 25 miles of range per hour, so well within the ability to receive a full charge in an overnight 10 hour charging session unless the battery is nearly empty and you are trying to get to 100%. But for the most part, if you have a typical 40 miles per day commute (and it looks like you do), you will be able to replenish your daily use in about 2 hours on a 30A circuit.

But again, if you do think 200A service is inevitable, then I suppose it's inevitable, but if it were me, before spending that kind of money, I'd want to be sure that I actually had that kind of load. I don't think your EV is going to impact your household load much unless you do a lot of charging during the day. As long as you can charge overnight, you're probably fine.

 

[swaltner]

I am not a tax lawyer, but that is my interpretation of the tax code. If you're wanting to claim the EVSE tax credit for the service upgrade, that should be done with the same installation job. Waiting to do the service upgrade until a later date would make it difficult to argue that they are related. You want to be able to successfully and easily argue any potential tax audit in the future!

As @RTPEV mentioned, once you have a working L2 charging solution, upgrading it at a later date may prove not necessary. If your vehicle is fully charged before midnight or it is only finishing right before you wake up in the morning doesn't make a difference to your usage.

Also, while you should be thinking about tax consequences of various financial decisions, it should be several steps down on the decision tree.