Two Things, and Only One of Them Is Visible
What you can see is a piece of listed equipment on a wall. The unit is the part that is best known: a manufactured product with its own protection and instructions. What nobody handed you is any record of what sits behind it.
What you cannot see is the circuit behind it, and that is the entire question. Conductor size against the breaker. Whether that breaker matches the unit's draw. How the terminations were made, and whether anybody torqued them. Whether it runs off a receptacle that should carry ground-fault protection and does not. Whether it went into a panel with room, or squeezed into one without.
None of it is visible, and nobody can guess it from outside. So the sequence starts with what you can gather without tools and ends with a meter. A fair number of inherited installations turn out to have been done properly, and the check ends with readings and nothing to act on. Others do not. Which one you have is not knowable until the circuit has been read.
What New Owners Ask Us First
1.What does an assessment visit involve?
You read us two numbers off the wall and the panel first, so the visit starts on a question instead of an inventory. Then we read the circuit with your car actually drawing on it: voltage under load, both terminations while they are warm, and the conductor confirmed against the breaker, the run, and the ambient. Most of a short visit is spent on two ends of one cable.
2.What do I end up with?
A written result either way: what the unit is, what the circuit is, what we checked and measured, and what we corrected. Where something has to be put right, the list comes with reasons, split into what stops you using the unit now and what can wait. Running those two together is how people end up doing everything at once or nothing at all.
3.It has been working fine. Is this really necessary?
Working is not the same as verified, and the specific failure this check is designed to detect is a termination heating under sustained load, which works perfectly until it does not. That said, comparing the unit's output against the breaker rating is worth doing today, because that comparison can tell you to stop. What it cannot do is clear the installation: the conductor, the terminations, and the ground-fault arrangement are not visible from where you are standing.
4.The seller said an electrician installed it.
Quite possibly true, and it does not change the checks. Paperwork would: an invoice, a dated photograph of the panel, an installer's name. Any of those turns an investigation into a confirmation, and they are worth a proper look. Where none exists, the checks run the same way; the paperwork shortens the reading without replacing it.
5.Can I just have it removed?
Yes, and it is a short job. Removing the unit does not remove the circuit, though. A circuit left behind comes off its breaker, and we cap and mark it. The version to avoid is one still landed on a live breaker with nothing on the far end. If you might ever want a charger again, correcting the circuit and leaving it in place is usually the better answer.
6.What if it turns out the circuit is wrong?
Then you find out what it would take to make it right, and you decide. Most of what we find is correctable without disturbing the wall: a breaker of the wrong size, a termination to remake, a missing ground-fault device. The awkward version is a conductor genuinely undersized for its run, and that one matters either way.
7.Does it matter which car I have?
For this purpose, only in that the car sets what the unit actually has to deliver. A unit capable of 48 amps, set to 40, feeding a car that pulls 32 amps is working well on both counts. The readings come from what the circuit actually carries with your car on it, which is the number that matters and the one nobody can get off a label. Tell us the car; it changes what the numbers mean.
Everything Else We Cover in Maricopa
A house bought secondhand usually raises more than one of these:
What Maricopa Customers Say
Our Google listing is not curated, and there is no testimonials page. The live feed below is the whole record, good and bad, which is the only version worth reading.