Is an EV worth it if you can only charge in public?
Apartment dwellers: is an EV actually worth it if you can't charge at home? I've been relying on public charging and it's way more expensive than I expected. Anyone made this work long term?
Filed under: Renters, Apartments & HOA Charging
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18 answers
18 ANSWERS
@driftbadgeJune 18, 2026
How often do you have access to public charging, and is it mostly fast or Level 2? Some folks manage with workplace charging, but if you're paying fast charger rates all the time, long-term costs really creep up. What city are you in?
@palecomet_dJune 18, 2026
You can make it work, but public charging does add up. For two winters I managed by combining workplace charging with public Level 2s, rarely using DC fast unless on trips. You’ll notice cost differences right away. Cold temps mean extra trips to the charger. What’s your average weekly mileage and city?
Does the range really drop that much just from the cold? My battery seems to drop a chunk overnight here, but I thought it might be the charger acting up. In Texas I barely noticed any change week to week.
Yes, lithium-ion batteries can see 10–40% range reduction in sub-freezing conditions, depending on chemistry and whether the car preconditions the pack. What overnight low temps are you seeing when you notice that “chunk” drop?
First really cold night I watched my state of charge drop 12% just parked outside, zero driving. I used to think the charger was broken too, but nope, just the battery not loving single digits. Concord gets plenty of those nights.
Hey, fellow southern transplant here! I thought "outdoor charger" just meant it was safe outside—not that I’d be out there chipping ice off the plug. How do you handle connectors freezing over after snow? Do you just brush the snow off or is there a trick?
In Arizona I never had to think about this. I assumed the connectors always worked. Do you really have to defrost them? Is there a cover I can bring, or do people just wait until things thaw naturally?
You don't need to bring anything special — I've got zero home charging option at all, so it's public lots every time for me. Most of the time it's not the plug that's frozen, it's a skin of ice on the port door that cracks off the second you push it open. The times it's actually frozen shut, a couple minutes of cabin heat with the door cracked or just waiting it out works fine. I'd save the money on a cover and just budget an extra five minutes on the really cold mornings.
For anyone doing public-only charging all winter — are the fast chargers actually reliable when it's freezing, or do you deal with as much downtime as we get with home units?
Reliable is generous. Of my three dead-on-arrival stalls, two were in genuinely cold weather — one iced-over screen that wouldn't take a card tap, one that started a session and dropped it at 4%. Neither was a connector-freezing issue, it was the unit's own electronics or payment system choking in the cold. Checking recent user reports on the network's app before you go helps you avoid being the one who discovers it's dead, but I always plan on at least one stall per trip being unusable in real winter weather and pick routes with a backup station within range.
Public charging means dealing with someone else's connector, not your own, so you can't holster it or keep it dry between uses — it's whatever the last person left it like. My routine: brush snow off the handle before I even try to pull it, and if it's iced to the port on my car I just wait a minute with the heater running instead of yanking. I've had maybe three real freeze-ups a winter, never had to call it in. The bigger annoyance is other people leaving connectors lying in slush at the stall, not the freezing itself.
My sessions almost doubled last January—cold days plus no home charging meant more time in grocery and library lots. Do you find yourself rearranging errands around charge stops in winter, or is your workplace charger enough to cover most of it?
@pixelmango19June 18, 2026
My apartment has no charging, so I tested a year with only public L2 and DCFC in Queens and upstate NY. L2 works if you can leave it overnight (8+ hrs) and your schedule is predictable, but it’s slow for top-ups. DCFC fees add up fast—last winter was over four times my friend’s home charging bill per kWh. My cost per mile sometimes matched gasoline Prius in winter. Battery preheating in cold eats more range when you rely only on public DCFC too. Main hassle: planning for stalls in use or out of order. If you can reliably get L2 at work or overnight public, it’s doable but not cheap. Long-term, depends a lot on your local charging density and rates.
Battery preheating on DC fast chargers pulls quite a bit of energy, especially when it’s cold and you have frequent short trips. That extra consumption doesn’t show up in charging efficiency stats, but it does shift your real cost per mile closer to a hybrid if you rely only on fast charging in winter.
Did you ever get a breakdown from your public L2 provider showing peak vs off-peak rates, or is it just flat pricing? I’ve been trying to find examples where nighttime rates actually drop for public L2, but most NYC-area stations I’ve checked just list one price regardless of time.
Never seen off-peak discounts at public L2 in New England—every ChargePoint and EVgo I’ve used was flat rate, 24/7. Know any in NYC or Boston that actually do variable pricing?
There's a gap between the big networks and the smaller regional ones on this — ChargePoint and EVgo tend to run flat-rate pricing, but a few of the utility-run or municipal Level 2s in the NYC area do offer cheaper overnight rates specifically to shift load off peak. It's inconsistent enough that I wouldn't recommend planning a routine around it unless you've confirmed pricing for your specific station, since the app-level pricing doesn't always reflect time-of-use accurately. A more reliable way to save than chasing off-peak rates is signing up for the individual network's membership tier — ChargePoint's and EVgo's both knock a meaningful amount off the per-kWh rate once you're not paying the guest price. That's a bigger and more consistent discount than hunting for the rare off-peak station.
It's worth it, but only once you stop trying to replicate a home-charging routine in public. The approach that works best: treat charging like a weekly errand instead of a nightly habit. Charge once, maybe twice a week at a Level 2 near a stop you'd already be making — a grocery run works well — and reserve DC fast charging for the weeks you actually need the range. The cost premium is real, but it's not as bad as people assume once they stop paying for convenience-charging out of anxiety instead of actual need.
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