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If they quoted you that much money, it sounds like there's a market there ready for disruption. 10k Euros is far too much, especially when you can do the job fo

If they quoted you that much money, it sounds like there's a market there ready for disruption. 10k Euros is far too much, especially when you can do the job for many parking spots at once.

close04 7y ago
To be clear I was referring to shared parking with multiple spots. Where I live one underground parking is spanning multiple houses (I go from the parking directly inside), and there are maybe 3 or 4 in total. The provider would do the work "once and for all", considering everything from replacing the transformers for the additional power, to digging up the trenches and installing the upgraded cabling everywhere, and to every parking spot 11KW charger. The assumption behind this is that all the vehicles in the parking might end up charging at the same time (over night) so everything has to be sized for that. The electricity provider normally sells the charger with installation for ~2500E. But that is assuming the end-to-end wiring already supports this. With dozens of chargers to install in the same parking the chances that the rest of the network was already so overspeced and up to the task are slim. The manpower to dig a trench, replace cables and transformers is more or less the same whether you do do it for 10 parking spots or 100. So there's probably a sweet spot between having enough demand to split this between more people but not that much that you need the next level in transformers.
ptaipale 7y ago
There may be substantial digging works to be done if you need to install new power lines to housing, which is not cheap, and various installation works are costly when done afterwards. I live in Finland, where it is typical that blocks of flats as well as terraced and single-family houses have parking lots where there already is an electric supply to each car (for the purpose of heating the enging before winter morning starts). Even here it's not directly suitable for charging, because the feeding capacity is OK for warming cars, but not for quick charging. Fuse boxes and feeding cables have to be replaced, at a substantial cost.

If they quoted you that much money, it sounds like there's a market there ready for disruption. 10k Euros is far too much, especially when you can do the job for many parking spots at once.

close04 7y ago

To be clear I was referring to shared parking with multiple spots. Where I live one underground parking is spanning multiple houses (I go from the parking directly inside), and there are maybe 3 or 4 in total. The provider would do the work "once and for all", considering everything from replacing the transformers for the additional power, to digging up the trenches and installing the upgraded cabling everywhere, and to every parking spot 11KW charger. The assumption behind this is that all the vehicles in the parking might end up charging at the same time (over night) so everything has to be sized for that. The electricity provider normally sells the charger with installation for ~2500E. But that is assuming the end-to-end wiring already supports this. With dozens of chargers to install in the same parking the chances that the rest of the network was already so overspeced and up to the task are slim. The manpower to dig a trench, replace cables and transformers is more or less the same whether you do do it for 10 parking spots or 100. So there's probably a sweet spot between having enough demand to split this between more people but not that much that you need the next level in transformers.

ptaipale 7y ago

There may be substantial digging works to be done if you need to install new power lines to housing, which is not cheap, and various installation works are costly when done afterwards. I live in Finland, where it is typical that blocks of flats as well as terraced and single-family houses have parking lots where there already is an electric supply to each car (for the purpose of heating the enging before winter morning starts). Even here it's not directly suitable for charging, because the feeding capacity is OK for warming cars, but not for quick charging. Fuse boxes and feeding cables have to be replaced, at a substantial cost.