Housing company charging can also be done affordably and in a scalable manner
Charging cars in the housing association's parking lot is a regular topic of conversation in many yard work groups and WhatsApp groups: what would be the best way to organize car charging when only some of the cars are rechargeable, but almost all of them heat their homes with a block heater in the winter?
Enabling charging and preheating of the combustion engine in a parking area is in principle easy: run sufficient cables from the housing company's main electrical switchboard or a similar outlet to the parking spaces and install suitable charging devices for use by motorists.
However, there are tricky details in Tempus: Is the power center's capacity sufficient to provide full power to each space, or is load management needed? How will charging electricity be measured and billed? How will unauthorized persons be prevented from charging? And how will parking spaces for moving residents be managed, since in the future, not only the parking space but also the charging device may change owners?
Many of these questions end up on the desks of the property manager and the housing company board. Finnish eParking, for example, offers answers.
Housing company charging is easy, clear and affordable
eParking's service for housing associations is an easy, affordable and transparent charging and heating point for every parking space in a housing association, with equal treatment for shareholders. The service is based on 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 that can be used to manage their own charging.
– We offer a comprehensive service where charging devices are brought to the housing company's parking lot and the charging service is delivered to the member's smartphone, says Teemu Marku, Sales Director at eParking.
In the service, the housing company pays the electricity bill, so it also determines the price of the charging electricity itself. eParking, in turn, bills the housing company a monthly fee per charging point. eParking is also piloting charging based on exchange-priced electricity, which will be available at charging points later this year.
Charging is started, stopped and paid for using the eParking application. The range of charging devices is large and largely domestic, starting from devices with a couple of kilowatts of SUKO plug to robust Kempower high-performance charging devices.
Charging devices and their maintenance ensured
From the housing company's perspective, a wide range of equipment suppliers is a good thing, as it provides security for the availability of spare parts and maintenance far into the future. Teemu Marku emphasizes the assessment of the entire life cycle costs:
“Too often we only look at the charging power and the purchase price of the equipment. However, low-power charging is often the most economical, not only during the installation phase, but also throughout its entire life cycle,” Marku reflects.
Low-power charging usually refers to charging at around 2–5 kilowatts. The lower end of the scale can be achieved with a standard SUKO plug, otherwise basic charging is used, also known as Type 2 charging. Even low powers can add up to 100–300 kilometers of range to a car battery when charged overnight.
The lower the charging power selected for a single parking space, the greater the number of cars that can be charged with an electrical connection. eParking's intelligent technology takes care of the mutual power distribution and load management of the charging devices, thus enabling 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 is installed in the electrical center and monitors the property's other electricity consumption. This allows all available free power to be used for charging.
eParking also makes life easier for property managers
The larger the parking area, the more there is to manage. Often, the day-to-day management of the parking spaces is done by the property manager, for whom arranging charging is yet another task in addition to the previous ones.
This is where eParking's cloud service comes into its own, as it enables flexible management of spaces, i.e. managing user accounts and, for example, monitoring the amount of energy charged. eParking also acts as a single, centralized channel for ordering new charging devices and their spare parts.
– There is no easier service for a property manager. For example, invoicing and customer service are services provided by eParking, which means the property manager's time is not spent on these, Marku continues.
And how large companies should connect with eParking?
– I have kept the line roughly between whether or not all the residents in the housing company are known by name, Marku answers.
So if the company is so small that all kinds of costs can be easily shared in the courtyard parliament or by the mailboxes, it is easy to structure the charging and heating of cars and share the costs. However, there are much larger companies in Finland for whom eParking is a good solution to the challenges related to the distribution of charging electricity.
Flexible mesh network reduces costs
eParking's charging solution for parking lots is technically interesting. eTolppa charging devices communicate with each other wirelessly using a so-called mesh network. In this type of network implementation, individual charging devices only communicate with their closest neighbors, but at the same time relay messages from more distant devices to others. In this way, individual poles can form huge data networks of even satoof charging points.
A 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 with a mesh network, communication is possible. An expensive internet connection is basically only needed for one charging device in the mesh network. A mesh implementation therefore reduces the costs of charging devices and installation work.
The individual eParking eStations in the parking area therefore communicate both with each other and with the eParking servers over the internet. The eParking servers give identified users permission to start charging and collect information about the amount of energy charged for billing. Communication between charging devices is especially needed for load management: the eStations tell each other what their charging status is and are able to limit charging according to the limited capacity of the electricity grid.
In addition to housing association charging, eParking also offers parking services and public charging services.
Commercial cooperation. Original publication the Oikosulku blog.
Written by Tuomas Sauliala . 8.9.2024
Photo: Anniina Nummela, eParking.
The author is a professional in electrical engineering, communications, and marketing who has written about electric cars and their charging systems, as well as vehicle software, since 2013.
