Using Co Charger for Communal Parking

The cost, convenience, and environmental benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) are game-changing. But businesses and housing developments with shared parking areas can find it tricky. Installing a charge point in each parking bay is expensive, and commercial chargers are often costly and inappropriate for charging at home – especially overnight.

Co Charger offers a quick, easy, scalable method of delivery, providing the benefits motorists look for when switching to EVs:

Dependable: Book in advance, knowing it’ll be available and operational
Convenient: Plug in, go home, and come back when it suits
Affordable: Pay a reasonable amount, ensuring you make the most of “going electric”.

With easy setup, Co Charge ensures everyone pays their share. The service provides booking reminders and payments, and without any of the expense of installing a commercial charge point.

There’s no need for a special electricity supply or groundworks: just start with one charge point and increase, as you need, over time. It’s quick, easy, low cost and scalable.

What you need

You don’t need much to get going:

Someone to run the ‘Host’ account, accept bookings and approve the sessions (very little work).
A parking space that can be kept available for booked charging sessions.
A good quality, domestic spec (Type 2, 7kW) charger, next to the parking space and accessible by those permitted to use it.
The Co Charger app (for the ‘Host’ and all ‘Chargees’)

How it Works

Identify and mark the parking space (eg paint lines, add signage etc) and get the charge point installed. (The Co Charger app works with any charge point).
Install the app on the Host’s and Chargees’ phones and set up accounts.
Agree on a price per hour and minimum session price (see here for guidance – it can be changed at any time).
Contact Co Charger to link the Host account to the bank account into which session fees will be paid.
Each Chargee links the Host account to their profile and sets up a payment card in the app.
If you don’t want the charge point to be available outside your community or workforce, the Host can set the “Show pin on map” setting to “No”, to prevent any other Chargee from requesting a booking.
Each Chargee then sets up their bookings, with recurring weekly bookings possible up to a year in advance.

That’s it! Each Chargee uses the charge point at their reserved time (they get reminders from the app). This simply means starting the session in the app, going home and leaving the car to it. Bookings can be overnight, but Chargees pay only for the hours the car was actually charging.

At the end of each session the Host checks the numbers and approves them (or taps the ‘query’ button if anything doesn’t look right). Payment is taken from the Chargee’s card, including a 12% (10% plus VAT) Co Charger fee. The rest goes to the bank account linked to the Host. Clearance for the first payment by any payee take a couple of weeks, thereafter reducing to a few days.

Anything else?

The system is completely flexible. You can:

Set a higher fee until the charge point installation is paid for, then drop it as you see fit.
Make extra income by opening the facility up to other people in the neighbourhood.
Add more chargers as needed – they are domestic specifications so do not need major groundworks to install.