Bentleigh grew quickly from the mid-1920s, helped along by the electrification of the railway in 1922, as estates such as the Garfield Estate were laid out over old market gardens between Jasper Road and the line. A century later, the cars in those driveways are going electric as well. EV charger installation Bentleigh work is mostly a single-phase wall charger at a house with a garage or carport, and the details that decide the job are the switchboard, the driveway and, in a few streets, the heritage controls. Our electricians come from our Brighton premises on Bay Street, about 4 km west, and the work is covered by our registration, REC 35838.
Market gardens, electric trains and two-car driveways
Glen Eira’s history of the municipality names Bentleigh among the areas that still most strongly evoke post-war settlement. Closer to the station, the heritage streets are mostly interwar. The housing numbers back up the garage-and-driveway picture. At the 2021 Census, separate houses accounted for 59.7 per cent of occupied homes, with townhouses and semis on 19.9 per cent and flats on 19.6 per cent. About half of all households had at least two registered vehicles.
That second figure is the one we plan around. A household with one EV today may well have a second within a few years, so we size the circuit, the switchboard space and the cable route so a second charger can be added later without starting again.
The streets have their own character too. The Bentleigh Heights Estate on The Highway was developed in just three years, from 1939 to 1942, by the agents Waters and Ennis. Around Centre Road, the Bentleigh Retail Precinct and the Centre Arcade’s neon sign are heritage listed. Elsewhere the map is patchy: Bentleigh Hodgson Reserve on Higgins Road and Victory Park on Patterson Road are each within a couple of hundred metres of a heritage precinct, so check your own address rather than assuming.
EV charger installation Bentleigh, step by step
A standard single-phase job in a Bentleigh house follows the same order every time.
- Site visit. We check the switchboard, the meter, the existing loads in the house, the cable route and the maximum AC rate your car can accept.
- Board work, if needed. No spare room or no suitable safety switch means the switchboard is sorted first.
- Circuit and charger. A dedicated circuit runs from the board to the charger, with the cable gauge chosen for the distance. We’ll fit a charger you already own, including one supplied by your car dealer.
- Testing. Six tests are compulsory in Victoria after this kind of work, and one of them proves the safety switch operates.
- Paperwork. We issue a Certificate of Electrical Safety covering the job and lodge the charger’s details with United Energy on its myEnergy portal.
- Set-up. We connect the charger’s app and set a schedule that suits your tariff.
Before we arrive
A photo of the open switchboard, one of the meter box, a shot of where you park and the make and model of the car let us turn up with the right parts. If the car hasn’t been delivered yet, the model is enough. Its onboard charger rating tells us whether a 7 kW unit will be fully used or whether a smaller one would do the same job.
What moves the price around is fairly predictable: the distance from the board to the car, whether the switchboard needs work, whether the cable goes underground, and the charger model. We explain each of those on site rather than guessing over the phone.
Original garages and grass-strip driveways
Two residential heritage precincts in particular are where Bentleigh owners need to slow down. The Bentleigh Residential Precinct (HO69) covers two areas near the station between Centre Road and Brewer Road, including Burgess Street with its Canary Island date palms, Cairnes Grove, Campbell Street, Eddys Grove, Gilbert Grove and Sunnyside Grove. The Bentleigh Heights Estate (HO169) covers The Highway. Both statements of significance list original garages and original concrete driveways, especially the ones with a central grass strip, among the features that matter. The houses in HO69 date from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, and their original low front fences count as well, so a charger bolted to a front fence pillar is the wrong answer here.
Under the Heritage Overlay, a charger in plain view of a park or of any street except a lane needs a planning permit. Fitting it inside the old garage, or well back along a side wall, usually keeps it out of that net. If it can’t, the permit goes through Glen Eira’s VicSmart fast-track process, which has a 10 business day turnaround once Council has everything it needs.
In our view those grass-strip driveways are worth keeping, and there is nearly always a cable route that leaves them alone. We won’t cut through an original concrete strip to save a few metres of conduit.
Why the Bentleigh zone substation rewards smart charging
United Energy runs the network here, and its December 2025 planning report says the Bentleigh zone substation, fed from the Heatherton Terminal Station, supplies Bentleigh, McKinnon and parts of Ormond and Caulfield South. The same report lists it among the zone substations with a forecast limitation: in a high-load summer, losing one of its two transformers would leave some load at risk until supply could be shifted to the North Brighton and Caulfield substations.
That’s a planning scenario, not a reason to worry about blackouts. It does show why the network is interested in when cars charge. United Energy says some chargers can communicate with the grid and ramp charging up or down with network conditions, and, like every wall charger on the network, they need a registered electrical contractor to install them and record them in myEnergy. A charger set to run outside the busiest hours, overnight or in the middle of a sunny day, adds little to the summer peaks the planners are watching.
If there are panels on your roof, our solar EV charger installation work sets the charger up to use daytime solar first.
When an older switchboard has to go first
Switchboards vary a lot from house to house, from tidy modern boards to older panels with rewireable fuses and no spare room. A charger is a long, steady load, so it needs its own protected circuit and a board with space for it.
Safety switches are the other common reason for an upgrade. Older Type AC safety switches are no longer permitted in new Australian installations, and can fail to notice the pulsing DC leakage that EV chargers sometimes produce. So we pick the protection to suit the unit: Type A when the charger detects DC faults itself, Type B when it can’t. When the board needs replacing, we try to do the switchboard replacement before the charger on the same visit.
Occasionally the limit is the supply rather than the board. United Energy acknowledges that the extra load from EV charging pushes some homes into a supply upgrade. Before anyone talks about three-phase, we total the existing loads and check whether a load-managed charger will do the job on the supply you have.
Centre Road townhouses and the Stage 2 rezoning
Council approved its Bentleigh Major Activity Centre Structure Plan in June 2024, but planning for the centre has since been taken over by the Victorian Government’s Activity Centres Program, where Bentleigh is a Stage 2 centre with Ormond, Glen Huntly, Caulfield and Elsternwick. On our measurements of the state’s zoning maps, roughly a third of Bentleigh is now in the Housing Choice and Transport Zone.
More townhouses and apartments will follow. If you’re building, have a spare conduit run to every garage and keep a few spare positions on the board. It costs little during construction and saves a lot of chasing walls later. In an apartment building the questions shift to the owners corporation, shared car park boards and metering, which is the territory of our owners corporation EV charging service.
Frequently asked questions about Bentleigh home charging
Our house is on Burgess Street. Can we still fit a charger?
Yes. Burgess Street sits in the Bentleigh Residential Precinct, so the only question is visibility: a charger the street can see goes through VicSmart, while one in the garage or on a hidden side wall needs no permit under that rule.
Should we charge overnight or during the day?
Either works, as long as it’s outside the busiest hours. With solar panels, daytime charging uses your own generation; without them, an overnight schedule on a time-of-use tariff usually makes sense.
Will our old switchboard cope with a charger?
Sometimes. We check the space, the existing loads and the safety switches on the first visit, and if the board isn’t suitable we quote the upgrade alongside the charger.
Is one 7 kW charger enough for two drivers?
Usually. United Energy pitches a dedicated wall unit at drivers doing 200 to 500 km a week, and two cars can take turns on alternate nights. Beyond that, a second charger with load management is the next step.
What paperwork comes with the finished job?
A Certificate of Electrical Safety, issued by us, plus the charger’s registration with United Energy, which we lodge through myEnergy.
Our car dealer supplied a charger. Will you fit it?
Yes. Our home charger installation service handles dealer-supplied units, as long as the charger is approved for Australian use and matches your car.
From a Burgess Street bungalow to a new townhouse off Centre Road, every job opens with the switchboard and the run to the car. McKinnon, next door, hangs off the same zone substation, and our McKinnon EV charger installation guide covers its new heritage listings. Book through our online contact page or call 1300 003 853 from 7am to 7pm, Monday to Saturday.