Wallboxes for businesses and multiple bays: what to settle before buying

The first question is the supply, not the charger

Five 11 kW points is 55 kW. Few company supplies have that much headroom spare alongside normal operation. So with businesses you start at the end: how much have you got, and how much of it can go to charging.

If capacity is short, you are looking at increasing the reserved capacity with the grid operator. That takes months, not days, and you keep paying for it monthly. So it is checked first, not after the chargers are bought.

Load sharing: how to avoid the whole investment

Most companies do not need all five cars charging at full power at once. Cars sit in the car park for eight hours and need a fraction of that.

Managed load sharing splits the available power between connected cars. One car gets everything; five get a fifth each — and all are full by morning. This often avoids a capacity increase entirely, saving both the one-off fee and the monthly charge for years.

Who pays for the electricity

In a company it is usually simple. In an apartment building where individual owners pay for their bays it is the most sensitive question — and leaving it open means arguments.

The answer is sub-metering: each charging point has its own meter and consumption is attributed to a specific user, so it can be billed fairly.

User identification

A charger on a company car park usually should not charge just anybody. That is handled with a card or app — the station releases power only after authentication and knows who to bill.

The smartest move: prepare for more, fit fewer

If the garage or car park is being dug up anyway, it pays to run the backbone for every bay even if only two chargers go in now. Adding a third in two years then means a breaker and a wall mount, not a new trench.

What we do

For businesses and apartment buildings we do not start with a quote but with a survey and a capacity calculation. We tell you how many points the supply carries, whether the operator needs involving, and what reserving future capacity would cost.

The survey and that document are free, and you can use them to compare other companies too.