Queensland's 32A home charging change and your off-peak window

Twelve amps is the whole change, and none of it touches your tariff.

zecar.com and evnex.com both report that Energex and Ergon Energy Network have withdrawn clause 8.14.4(b) of the Queensland Electricity Connection Manual, the QECM, and both give 1 October 2026 as the effective date. evnex.com ties the change to a stakeholder notice dated 22 September 2026. Under the old rule, a single-phase home charger with no network management device was capped at 20A, which is about 4.6kW. Both sources say a single-phase 32A charger can now run at full current across both network areas without one. That's about 7.4kW.

Here's the driver this article is for. They're illustrative, not a real customer. They live in Caloundra and have a single-phase wallbox that went in without a network device, so the electrician set it to 20A. Their off-peak window runs, say, five hours overnight. They've seen the news and want to know whether it's worth calling the sparky.

Whether they're allowed to run at 32A is settled. Whether their car and their five cheap hours can use it is the real question, and that's what the rest of this covers.

What changed, and who changed it

The change came from the two distribution networks, Energex in the south-east and Ergon Energy Network across regional Queensland. It sits in their connection manual, the document electricians work to when they install a charger. zecar.com and evnex.com are our sources for the clause number and the date. We haven't read the primary notice on the Energex or Ergon sites, so check with your electrician if you want it from the network itself.

The old 20A figure isn't new. SolarQuotes, writing in 2024 about the managed-connection options on offer back then, gave the same 20A, 4.6kW limit for anytime single-phase charging without active load management. That article predates this change and doesn't cover it, but it confirms the number most Queensland home chargers have been living with.

zecar.com puts 32A at about 60 percent more power than 20A. On paper that's a big jump. In your garage it depends on two things: your car, and how many kilowatt-hours you need to get through each night.

The sum that matters: kilowatt-hours in a fixed window

Your off-peak rate stays the same. What changes is how much energy fits inside the hours that rate covers. Everything in this section is our own illustrative arithmetic, not a figure from the sources, and it ignores charging losses.

Back to Caloundra and that five-hour window:

• At 4.6kW, five hours puts about 23kWh into the car.
• At 7.4kW, the same five hours puts in about 37kWh.

That's roughly 14kWh more landing in the cheap hours instead of spilling into the dear ones, on the same tariff and the same window.

Now run it on a real-world night. Say the driver gets home from a long weekend up the range and needs about 35kWh to be back where they want to be by morning. At 4.6kW that takes around seven and a half hours, so about 12kWh lands after the cheap window closes. At 7.4kW it takes under five hours and fits inside the window.

Flip it around for a normal week. If the driver does, say, 40km a day, five hours at 20A already refills them most nights. The extra speed buys them nothing on those nights. The 32A setting earns its keep after the big trips, when you roll in low and need a large top-up before you leave again.

So the useful test isn't "is 32A faster". It's "how often do I need more than my window holds at 20A". If the answer is rarely, the change is a nice-to-have. If you regularly run the battery down, it's worth a conversation with your electrician.

Your car decides first

A wallbox offers power. The car decides how much it takes. Every EV has an onboard charger that converts AC from the wall into DC for the battery, and it has its own maximum rate on single-phase power.

zecar.com makes the point plainly: the extra power over 20A only counts if the vehicle can accept 7.4kW. evnex.com says the same, and states it makes no claims about cost or bill savings from the change. A car with a lower onboard limit charges at that limit, whatever the wallbox can deliver. If your car tops out near 4.6kW anyway, moving the wallbox to 32A changes nothing.

Before you book anyone, find your car's maximum AC charging rate for single-phase. The owner's manual or the manufacturer's spec sheet will have it. Then check how your wallbox was configured when it went in. If it was set to 20A, that's a setting, and changing it is a job for a licensed electrician, not a weekend fiddle with the app that came with the charger.

What hasn't moved

The withdrawal is narrow. Plenty of the rules around it stay exactly where they were.

• Maximum demand limits still apply. evnex.com points to QECM clause 8.4, and zecar.com says the same.
• Your service fuse rating still applies, per evnex.com.
• Phase-balancing rules still apply, per both sources.
• Three-phase chargers aren't affected by this change, per evnex.com.
• Existing network management devices don't have to come out. zecar.com says Energy Queensland has confirmed existing Type 2 and Type 3 devices can stay in place and will still be supported.

That fourth point catches people. If you're on three-phase, this news isn't about you. And if you already have a Type 2 or Type 3 device, nothing here forces you to do anything. Your electrician is the right person to tell you whether your switchboard, your service fuse and your existing load leave room for a 32A charger running flat out alongside the oven, the air con and the hot water.

Doing the sum with Charge Nomad

You can do all of this by hand with your manual and a calculator, or Charge Nomad can do the working for you. Pick your car from more than 300 EVs in the catalogue, brand then model then trim, or add a custom vehicle with its own battery health percentage. Then use Charging Time to see how long a top-up takes for your car, and Off-Peak Savings to weigh up your overnight charging. Both tools are free and run on the phone, so they still work with no signal in the garage.

If you want to track what the car costs after the switch, Running Costs on iPhone logs odometer readings and charges and shows what your EV really costs month by month. Charge Nomad+ only covers the Route Planner, the Range Estimator and more than one car in your garage. On iPhone it's $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year in Australia, with a 7 day free trial on the monthly plan. On Android there's a 7 day free trial on the monthly plan, with the price shown in Google Play, and prices vary by country. The app runs on iPhone with iOS 17 or later and on Android 8 or later. There are no ads, and most of it works without an account.

See what the app actually does before you download it: evbygenz.com/app