EV charging for blocks of flats.
Charging in a block is not a row of home chargers. It is one shared electrical supply serving many bays, which makes it a design problem before it is an installation problem. Get the design right and the building can grow its charging for years without touching the supply again.
The constraint: one supply, many cars.
A building’s incoming supply was sized for lifts, lighting and landlord services, not for a car park of chargers all drawing at once. The answer is load management: a system that shares the available capacity across active chargers, slowing everyone slightly at peak rather than tripping the building. Designed properly, far more bays can charge than a naive calculation suggests, because cars sit plugged in for hours but only need a fraction of that time at full draw.
The questions that decide the design.
- Allocated or shared bays? Allocated bays mean per-resident chargers and per-resident billing. Shared bays mean communal chargers and a payment system. Most blocks end up with some of each.
- Who pays for the electricity? Through the landlord supply and recharged, through per-charger metering, or through a charging operator. Each has admin consequences the freeholder should choose eyes-open.
- How much capacity is really spare? A proper survey of the incoming supply and existing peak load is the first job. Everything else is built on that number.
- What does phase two look like? Installing containment and capacity for future bays while the car park is already dug up costs a fraction of returning later.
Why residents should not DIY this.
A single resident running a cable from their own flat to their bay creates an unfused, unmanaged load on a shared system, usually without the freeholder’s consent and outside the building’s insurance. Blocks need one designed system with the landlord supply, metering and load management thought through together. That is a design-to-completion job, which is exactly the work we built the firm around, most recently a full block-of-flats package at Linmere, Houghton Regis.
Asked about this.
Can every bay in a block have a charger?
Usually yes over time, with load management sharing the supply. The design decides how many can charge simultaneously at full rate, and phasing spreads the cost as demand grows.
Who pays for charging electricity in a block?
It depends on the metering design: per-charger meters billed to residents, an operator handling payments, or the landlord supply with recharging. We design for whichever model the freeholder chooses.
Where do we start as a managing agent?
With a survey of the incoming supply and existing loads. That single document turns the question from guesswork into a costed, phased plan you can put to the freeholder and residents.