Getting started
Please set up your profile. It should only take a few minutes. You do need to take payments for your sessions though so you will need:
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- Your driving licence and a recent utility bill. You need to take a photo of these as part of the initial setup. Note these details are sent direct to our highly secure payment service provider, Stripe, for security/anti money laundering purposes only.
- The speed and connector type of your charger. For most people this is 7.4kW and Type 2 but please check as Chargees may not want or be able to use other types.
- Knowledge of how much you pay for your electricity, so that you can set an appropriate host rate. The mini spreadsheet attached here will hopefully help.
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About the session
- You are paid only for the time the charger is charging. So once fully charged (eg overnight sessions) Chargees don’t pay for any extra time the car is parked.
- You can if you wish adjust your price to cater for the fact you are offering parking too but we don’t encourage this. Co Charger is primarily a charging app not a parking one.
- Please note – the app does not integrate with or talk to your charger. It provides an approximation to the time and cost charged. As chargers vary their speed, especially at the beginning and the end, the estimated time of active charging may be shorter than the actual time the charger was running for. BUT the amount paid by the Chargee will be proportional to the electricity used. Please rest assured that while the “active charge time” may not match what your charger’s app tells you, the amount you get paid will allow for what you have paid. You will not be out of pocket!
- The app is set up so you don’t have to be present. We recommend you both meet for the first few sessions until you’re happy with the process though.
- If a charger is kept locked, or requires access to a garage/secure area, please arrange access between you eg sharing combination locks, or using a key-safe.
- The app allows booking of one off or weekly, recurring bookings. Recurring bookings are sent to as a single request, which split into a sequence of individual bookings once accepted.
- If some sessions don’t suit or are double booked, you can reschedule these.
After each session
- At the end, you will receive a summary with basic information to check. If it all looks correct just tap ‘Confirm’ and the payment will go through for processing. If you are unsure about anything though please tap ‘Query’. You can then see the photos of your car’s dashboard, showing the times and battery percentages your Chargee logged. If you are still unsure please send us a message and we’ll look into it for you. We recommend both parties read our FAQs page about how payments are calculated.
Other things
- A Chargee can start a session up to one hour before the booked time, and at any time during the period booked. This allows a bit of flexibility if for instance they are held up. We advise them to communicate with you if they are going to be delayed.
- Chargees don’t need to manually end a session. They can just unplug and go and the app will assume, one hour after the end of the booked session, that the car has charged to 100% and ends the session automatically.
Coming up…
At Co Charger we’re great believers in keeping things simple and evolving based on what users tell us. Our roadmap is updated and prioritised constantly. At the moment it includes:
- Offline functionality: The app only works currently if a phone is connected to the internet with a reliable connection. Over time we’ll start making some functions work offline. Until then, if your charger doesn’t have a reliable mobile signal can you please allow access to your home Wi-Fi network instead?
- More options for notifications and messaging, including “push” notifications directly to your phone.
- More calendar controls for hosts: including ability to block out chunks of time or recurring time-slots for your own use.
Please also read the FAQs page before taking bookings.