By Alexandru Goncear, Owner and CEO, ElectON Enterprise. Washington electrical contractor license ELECTEL765MN. Kent office: 1609 Central Ave S Suite E, Kent, WA 98032.
When someone asks how long an EV charger takes to install, they are usually asking one of two questions and do not realize it. The first is how long the truck will be in the driveway. The second is how many days pass between the phone call and the moment the car actually charges.
Those two answers are wildly different. The truck is there for half a day. The calendar can run three weeks. Almost every complaint I hear about EV charger installs traces back to somebody quoting the first number and the homeowner hearing the second.
So this post gives both, broken out by the four situations we run into most in Kent. Timings are approximate and based on how this work typically goes here. Your house will vary, particularly if we open a wall and find something nobody expected.
The two clocks
Install time is hands-on work. Drilling, pulling wire, terminating, mounting, testing. This is what you schedule around and what you are billed labor for.
Calendar time is everything else. Estimate visit, permit purchase, parts, scheduling, inspection, and if a service upgrade is involved, Puget Sound Energy.
A simple Kent charger install is roughly 4 hours of work spread across about 8 to 14 days of calendar. A job needing a 200 amp service upgrade is roughly 16 hours of work spread across 3 to 6 weeks. The work is never the bottleneck. Scheduling is.
Scenario 1: Attached garage, charger on the wall behind the panel
The fastest version of this job, and more common in Kent than you might expect, because in the Panther Lake and Meridian era subdivisions the panel is very often on the garage wall already.
Typical on-site time: about 3.5 to 5 hours.
Here is roughly how that breaks down:
| Step | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| Walkthrough, confirm mounting height, shut off and verify dead | 20 min |
| Open panel, confirm capacity, set breaker location | 20 min |
| Mount charger and back plate, level and anchor to studs | 30 min |
| Drill, run conduit, pull 6 AWG | 60 to 90 min |
| Terminate at charger and panel, torque to spec | 45 min |
| Energize, commission, wifi setup, test charge on the customer’s car | 30 min |
| Label panel, clean up, walk the customer through it | 25 min |
Most of these finish before lunch. The step that varies most is the wire pull, and the variable is whether the stud bay is open or finished.
Calendar time from first call: usually 8 to 12 days. Two or three of those days are the permit and parts. The rest is inspection scheduling.
Scenario 2: Attached garage, panel on the far side of the house
This is the East Hill split level problem. Panel in the basement or a utility room, garage on the other end, and 40 to 60 feet of house in between with finished drywall the whole way.
Typical on-site time: about 6 to 8 hours.
The install steps are identical to scenario 1. What changes is the wire pull, which goes from 90 minutes to 3 or 4 hours, because now we are fishing through joist bays, drilling top plates, and occasionally cutting a small access hole that has to be patched. On a 1970s house with blown-in insulation and a finished basement ceiling, that pull is most of the day.
We can usually keep drywall damage to one or two access points. Sometimes the honest answer is that surface mounted conduit along a garage wall is faster, cheaper and less invasive than fishing, and it looks fine in a garage. We will offer both and let you pick.
Calendar time: still 8 to 12 days. A longer install does not extend the calendar. It just eats a full day instead of a morning.
Scenario 3: Driveway or carport, exterior mounted
Kent has a lot of houses where the garage is full of everything except a car. Mounting outside is completely normal and every Level 2 charger we install is rated for it.
Typical on-site time: about 5 to 7 hours.
The extra time over an interior install goes to three things. Exterior conduit has to be properly supported and sealed. The wall penetration needs flashing and sealant that will hold up to a Kent winter, and if you have ever watched water track along a poorly sealed penetration into a wall cavity, you know why we do not rush this. And the mounting surface matters: brick, stucco and lap siding each need different anchors and different amounts of patience.
One practical note that has nothing to do with electrical work. Measure the cable. Most Level 2 chargers ship with 18 to 25 feet of cable, and that sounds like plenty until the charge port is on the far side of the car and you back in. Walk the parking spot and dry fit before we mount anything. It costs five minutes and prevents a very annoying conversation later.
Calendar time: 8 to 12 days.
Scenario 4: Detached garage or shop
Deep lots out toward Lake Meridian and the Soos Creek corridor mean the shop can sit 60 to 100 feet from the house. This is a genuinely different job, and it is the one where estimates from different contractors diverge the most.
Typical on-site time: 1.5 to 2 days, sometimes split across two visits.
Day one is usually the trench, conduit, and feeder pull. If we are trenching 40 feet, that alone is several hours, plus the utility locate that must happen before anyone puts a shovel in the ground. Call 811 at least two business days ahead. This is not optional and it is not a formality.
Day two is the subpanel in the outbuilding, the charger circuit, terminations and testing.
If usable conduit already runs to the building, this collapses to about one day. That single question, whether an existing conduit path can be reused, is worth asking any contractor who quotes you.
Because you have the trench open anyway, think about what else that building might need. Running a larger feeder now costs a little. Reopening the trench in two years costs a lot. We cover the sizing logic in our page on dedicated circuits, and it applies doubly to outbuildings.
Calendar time: 2 to 3 weeks, mostly because of the locate window and coordinating two work days.
Scenario 5: When a service upgrade has to happen first
If your panel cannot carry the load, the charger is no longer the project. The service upgrade is the project, and the charger is an afternoon at the end of it.
On-site time: about 12 hours for the service upgrade across one long day, plus 4 hours for the charger circuit, usually the same day or the next.
The calendar is where this gets real. Puget Sound Energy has to disconnect your service so we can replace the meter base and panel, then reconnect it. Their construction FAQ asks contractors to contact them at least five business days ahead to check crew availability and schedule that disconnect. In practice we build in more than five days, because five business days is the minimum, not the typical.
Add the permit, the utility scheduling, and the inspection, and a service upgrade plus charger runs 3 to 6 weeks from first call to first charge.
I know that is not what anyone wants to hear when the car is already in the driveway. The one thing that genuinely shortens it is starting early. If you have ordered an EV and delivery is six weeks out, book the estimate now rather than the week the car arrives.
Where the calendar time actually goes
For a straightforward install with no service upgrade, a typical Kent timeline looks like this:
- Day 0: You call. We schedule an estimate, usually within 2 to 4 business days.
- Day 3: Estimate visit. We open the panel, run the load calculation, measure the run, and give you a written itemized number.
- Day 4 to 5: You approve. We buy the permit through the Department of Labor and Industries and order anything we do not stock.
- Day 8 to 10: Install day.
- Day 10 to 14: Inspection. We book it and we are there for it.
You can use the charger after it is energized and before the inspector arrives. The inspection is a legal requirement and a quality check, not a gate on your car.
What actually makes a job run long
In rough order of how often it happens:
A panel that is not what the homeowner described on the phone. This is the big one and it is why we insist on walking the property before quoting. Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco panels turn up regularly in Kent houses from the 1960s and 1970s, and we are not putting a new 60 amp circuit into either of them. That conversation changes the whole project.
Aluminum branch circuits. Common in Kent homes built between roughly 1965 and 1973. Not an automatic problem for the EV circuit itself, but it changes how we handle terminations elsewhere in the panel.
Blocked panel access. Storage, shelving, a freezer. Code requires clear working space in front of a panel, and clearing it is time we bill for. Move it the night before.
HOA or condo approval. Anywhere from two to eight weeks, entirely outside our control. Start it before you call an electrician.
Crawlspace conditions. Standing water or a crawlspace nobody has entered since 1994 slows a wire pull considerably.
Four things you can do that actually help
Clear the panel and the wall where the charger goes before we arrive. Dry fit the parking spot with the cable so the mounting location is settled. Have the charger on site if you bought your own, because a unit that arrives the day after the install turns one visit into two. And if you are in an HOA, start that approval now.
Common questions
Can it be done in one visit? Most single circuit jobs, yes. Service upgrades and detached buildings usually take two.
Do I need to be home the whole time? For the start and the finish. We need access, a decision on mounting height, and a few minutes at the end to walk you through it and do a test charge. The middle hours you can be at work.
How long does the inspection take? The visit itself is fifteen to twenty minutes. The wait for it is the part that takes days. We schedule it and we stay with the job until it passes.
Will my power be off? For a charger circuit, yes, briefly, while we work in the panel. Usually 30 to 60 minutes. For a service upgrade, most of a day.
Is it faster to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet instead? Slightly, maybe 30 to 60 minutes less. Not enough to drive the decision. Choose based on how you want to charge, not on the schedule.
What if I need a panel upgrade too? Then the panel becomes the main job. We break down what that involves on our electrical panel page, and you can check your own capacity in about five minutes using this self-check walkthrough.
Book the estimate before the car arrives
We walk the panel, measure the run, do the load calculation and give you a written itemized number and a real date. If you want the money side of this, we itemized what an EV charger install costs in Kent in a separate post. For everything we install and which connectors we work with, see our EV charging station page, and for the rest of what we do locally, the Kent electrician page.
ElectON Enterprise 1609 Central Ave S Suite E, Kent, WA 98032 (253) 508-7529 Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Emergency calls answered 24/7. Washington electrical contractor license ELECTEL765MN. Licensed, bonded and insured. Request a free estimate
We install EV chargers across East Hill, West Hill and Riverview, Panther Lake, Meridian and Lake Meridian, Scenic Hill, Midway, Star Lake, downtown Kent and the Kent Valley, covering zip codes 98030, 98031, 98032, 98035, 98042, 98064 and 98089, plus Auburn, Renton, Covington, Des Moines, SeaTac, Tukwila and Maple Valley.
Alexandru Goncear is the owner of ElectON Enterprise and a Washington licensed electrician working across King, Pierce and Snohomish County. He writes every estimate the company issues and stays as the point of contact through permitting, installation and final inspection.