Apartment and Community EV Charging

The three decisions that come first

• Assigned or unassigned parking, which determines whether points are private or shared.
• How energy is attributed and billed, which is where schemes fail politically.
• Who maintains the equipment, named before installation rather than after a fault.

Build the infrastructure once

Containment and distribution sized for the eventual position, with charge points added as residents request them. That avoids both redoing the civil work and carrying idle capital.

Managed charging makes it possible

Residential buildings rarely have spare capacity sized for vehicle charging. Managed charging is what allows a meaningful number of points without a supply upgrade the building would have to fund.

Charging that works without internet

Most chargers need a connection to a backend before they will authorise a session, and a software subscription to go with it. In a basement car park there is no signal, so the charger fails intermittently and residents report it as broken equipment.

We designed around this rather than asking buildings to solve it. Our community model runs locally with no internet at all.

• Users are created and managed on site, not on a platform somewhere else
• Sessions authorise locally, so charging starts whether or not anything is reachable
• Consumption is recorded per user and billing is generated monthly
• Every resident gets an RFID card, so there is no app to install and nothing to log into

For a basement this is usually the deciding feature. A charger that needs signal is a charger that does not work where apartment charging actually happens.

Power Master, and the load problem

The second constraint is supply. Most buildings do not have much power allocated, and residential charging concentrates overnight, which is exactly when the building has least headroom.

Power Master is the device that manages this locally. It is where users are created and managed across all the chargers in the building, and it is what shares the available supply between them rather than letting each charger assume it has the whole connection.

• Local load management, so charging uses what the building is not using
• User creation and management across every charger on the site
• Phase-aware allocation, since single-phase points on a three-phase supply unbalance it by construction
• Monthly billing per resident from what was actually recorded

The alternative is a supply upgrade, which for an occupied building is expensive and slow. Managing the load is usually cheaper than raising it.

Ask for the solution, not just the chargers

The mistake both builders and associations make is buying chargers and discovering afterwards that the questions were never answered: who manages users, how billing works, what happens with no signal, or what stops the supply tripping on a Tuesday evening.

Those are software and system questions and they arrive whether or not anyone planned for them. We supply the whole arrangement: the chargers, Power Master for local users and load, the community software, and managed charging where the building does not want to run it itself.

If you are buying from anyone, ask for the community solution rather than the hardware. The hardware is the part everybody can supply.