Housing company charging can also be done at a reasonable price and in a scalable way
September 8, 2024 by Tuomas Sauliala
Commercial cooperation. Original publication Oikosulku blog.
Charging cars in the housing company's parking lot is a standard topic of many yard talks and WhatsApp groups: what would be the best way to organize car charging when only some of the cars can be charged, but approximately all of them heat with a block heater in the winter?
Enabling charging and preheating of the internal combustion engine in the parking area is basically easy: pull sufficient cables from the housing company's main electrical center or a similar outlet to the parking screens and install suitable charging devices for use by motorists.
However, Tempus has tricky details: Is the power center's capacity sufficient to provide full power to each panel, or is load management necessary? How is charging electricity measurement and billing arranged? And how do you prevent third parties from downloading without permission? And how do you manage the parking spaces of moving residents, when in the future not only the parking screen but also the charging device may change owners?
A large part of these questions end up on the desk of the property manager and the board of the housing association. For example, the Finnish eParking offers answers.
Housing company charging easily, clearly and cheaply
eParking's service for housing associations is an easy, reasonably priced and clear invoicing charging and heating point for every parking space of the housing association that treats shareholders equally. The basis of the service is eParking's own, intelligent eTolppa charging device, which can be managed using eParking's cloud service. For the motorist, i.e. the resident of the housing association, the service appears as an easy-to-use charging device and a smartphone application with which one's own charging can be managed.
- We offer a comprehensive service where the charging devices are brought to the housing company's parking lot and the charging service is delivered to the partner's smartphone, eParking's sales director Teemu Marku says.
In the service, the housing company pays the electricity bill, so it also determines the price of charging electricity itself. eParking, on the other hand, invoices a monthly fee per charging point from the housing company. eParking is also piloting charging with exchange electricity prices, which will be available at charging points later this year.
Charging is started, stopped and paid for with the eParking application. The range of charging devices is large and largely domestic, starting with devices equipped with a couple of kilowatts suko plug and ending with sturdy Kempower high-power charging devices.
Charging devices and their maintenance ensured
From the building company's point of view, a wide coverage of equipment suppliers is a good thing, because it provides security for the availability of spare parts and maintenance far into the future. Teemu Marku emphasizes the evaluation of the costs of the entire life cycle:
- Too often we only look at the charging power and the purchase price of the equipment. Often, however, low-power charging is the cheapest not only during the installation phase, but also during its entire life cycle, Marku reflects.
Low-power charging usually means charging of around 2–5 kilowatts. The lower end of the scale can be implemented with a standard Suko plug, otherwise the basic charging, also known as Type 2 charging, is used. Even low powers charge up to 100-300 kilometers of operating range to the car's battery overnight when charging.
The lower the charging power is chosen for a single parking lot, the more cars the electric connection is sufficient for. eParking's intelligent technology takes care of the mutual power distribution and load management of the charging devices and thus enables almost any charging power per parking space. The limiting factor is the electrical connection and the cabling of the parking area.
Load management can be expanded with an additional device developed by eParking that can be installed in the power center, which monitors the property's other electricity consumption. In this way, all available free power can be used for charging.
eParking also makes life easier for the property manager
The larger the parking area, the more there is to manage. Often, the day-to-day care of parking spaces is done by the property manager, for whom the arrangement of charging is one more task in addition to the previous ones.
This is where eParking's cloud service rises to its value, as it enables flexible management of spaces, i.e. management of usernames and, for example, monitoring the amount of charged energy. eParking also functions as a single, centralized channel for ordering new charging devices and their spare parts.
- There is no easier service for the property manager. For example, invoicing and customer service are services offered by eParking, so the property manager's time is not spent on these, Marku continues.
And how should large companies connect with eParking?
- Personally, I have roughly kept the limit as to whether all the residents in the housing association are known by name or not, Marku answers.
That is, if the company is so small that it is easy to share all kinds of costs in the yard parliament or at the mailboxes, the structure of charging and heating the cars and the sharing of costs can be easily managed. However, there are many larger companies in Finland for which eParking is a good solution to the challenges related to the distribution of charging electricity.
A flexible mesh network reduces costs
eParking's charging solution for parking areas is technically interesting. eTolppa charging devices communicate with each other wirelessly using a so-called mesh network. In such a network implementation, individual Charging Devices only communicate with their nearest neighbors, but at the same time forward messages from more distant devices to others. In this way, individual poles can form huge data networks of even sato of charging points.
The wireless mesh network implementation is suitable for environments where high transmission capacity is not required, where scalability is important and where conditions can be challenging. For example, parking garages and caves with reinforced concrete and rock structures are often difficult for wireless communication devices, but communication is possible with a mesh network. An expensive internet connection is basically only needed for one charging device in the mesh network. The mesh implementation therefore reduces the costs of charging devices and installation work.
The individual eParking eTolls in the parking area therefore communicate both with each other and in the direction of the internet to eParking's servers. eParking's servers give the identified user permission to start charging and collect information about the amount of energy charged for invoicing. Mutual communication between charging devices is especially necessary for load management: eTolls tell each other what their charging situation is and know how to limit charging according to the limited capacity of the electricity network.
eParking offers not only housing association charging, but also parking services and public charging services.
Text: Tuomas Sauliala, Photo: eParking (Anniina Nummela)
The author is a professional in electrical engineering, communication and marketing who has been writing about electric cars and their charging systems as well as vehicle software since 2013.
Tuomas Sauliala on Twitter
Tuomas Sauliala on LinkedIn
Contact us: tuomas.sauliala@gmail.com
