Here at Linus Media Group, we decided offering free EV charging is a pretty easy win: it helps our employees’ wallets, and it’s one less excuse to keep burning gas. Unfortunately, some copper thieves decided our Level 2 chargers were basically a copper buffet and straight-up cut the charging cables off. The police showed up and provided… moral support, and then it was on us to figure out what to do next. So, naturally, I went on “vacation” and made everyone else deal with it. In the video I break down how a Level 2 charger actually works—power from a 240V breaker, some simple wiring, the electronics that talk to the car, and a big contactor that only energizes the cable when a car is connected (which is why the thieves didn’t get turned into a cautionary tale). The frustrating part is the repair should be easy: just replace the cable and J1772 handle. But between hard-to-source 4-core EV cable, $200 CAD replacement assemblies, shipping, and labor, the math made repairs a bad deal compared to replacing the units—especially with rebates. The silver lining: we finally moved to Ubiquiti’s UniFi EV Station Lite chargers, which integrate with our existing UniFi access system, fix our scheduling headaches, and generally make the whole setup less janky. We also used the opportunity to add a charger at the studio and relieve our EV charging bottleneck.