Your charger isn't the bottleneck. Your car is.
Plenty of Australians pay for a 22 kW three-phase charger, then discover their EV can only accept 7 kW of it. Work out what your car will actually draw — before you spend a dollar.
Independent. Australian. We show our maths and cite our sources.
The "granny" cable · really 8 A, not 10
The default Australian home charger
Needs a three-phase supply
Almost no car here can use it all
Australian nominal supply is 230 V single-phase and 400 V line-to-line three-phase (AS 60038). Single-phase power = V × A; three-phase power = √3 × 400 × A. The 10 A figure reflects the fact that portable chargers self-limit to about 8 A on a general-purpose socket. See the full maths →
Start here
Three questions decide your charging speed
Get these right and everything else is detail. Get them wrong and you'll either overspend on hardware or wait around for a car that charges slower than it should.
Question one
What supply does your house have?
Single-phase caps you at about 7.4 kW. Three-phase opens up 11 kW and 22 kW — but only if your car can use it, and upgrading isn't cheap.
Question two
What can your car actually accept?
Every EV has an onboard AC charger with a hard kW ceiling. It's the most overlooked spec on the sheet, and it's usually what limits you at home.
Question three
How much range do you actually need overnight?
You're not filling the battery from empty — you're topping up yesterday's driving. A 7.4 kW home charger adds roughly 300 km overnight, which is far more than most people use in a day.
Stop guessing. Run your numbers.
Pick your car, pick your supply, and see the real kW, the real kilometres per hour, and exactly what's holding you back.
Open the charging calculatorGuides
The things people get wrong
Fundamentals
Single-phase vs three-phase charging in Australia
What the difference actually is, how to tell which one you have, what an upgrade costs, and when it's genuinely worth it.
Fundamentals
EV charging speed explained: kW, amps and km/h
Where the 7.4, 11 and 22 kW figures come from, why √3 shows up, and how to convert kW into kilometres of range per hour.
Reference
Onboard charger limits for every EV sold in Australia
The single spec that decides your home charging speed, for every major model — with variant-level detail and sources.
Buying
How to choose a home EV charger in Australia
Match the hardware to your car and your supply — and skip the capacity you'll never use.