Case Study: Commercial Installation, Stratford

Brief

This site had various EV charging points that were out of order, and they wanted to introduce billing for users across the 10 buildings on site. Due to the age of the existing EV charging points, it wasn’t possible to connect an Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) billing platform - so the best solution was to replace all of the EV charging points to make way for this. 

Recommendation

The recommendation was to leave the existing wiring in place, which was a mixture of three phase and single phase supplies. For the installation of an OCPP-compatible charger, the Zaptec Pro EV charging point is capable of working from both types of supplies. We were also able to introduce some level of conformity across all the buildings.

Product design

Due to the use of existing infrastructure, the design on this product was not too complicated from an installation perspective. However, we did need to ensure the new EV charging points were configured to suit the current capacity of the supply protection devices in order to prevent overloading the miniature circuit breakers (MCBs).

Installation

Due to the installations taking place across multiple buildings, we first needed to locate empty bays so we could proceed with swapping the chargers. With all the planning in the world, you won’t stop people from charging their cars! And then, we soon had a rhythm. We could inform the estate manager where we would be working next, and then start on bays that became available.

Some minor alterations were required to the EV charging point supplies in order to provide a quality finish. This was achieved by using COPEX and installing the EV charging point near to the existing charger supply installed in conduit.

In order to ensure the circuit protection device didn’t trip unnecessarily, we reduced the max charge current to below the MCB size, so as to maintain the service life of the MCB. These EV charging points were installed on the Fuuse back office software.