The Chalkhill Apartments block is a rental property development in Wembley that in recent months has undergone extensive refurbishment. In addition to the interiors being modernised, the landlord sought to provide his tenants with Electric Vehicle (EV) charge points.
The landlord, who was aware of the issues around how much EV’s could potentially draw when charging, knew there was limited power supply to the apartment block that would have to be considered throughout the project.
When the apartment block was developed several years ago, power cables were routed from the mains intake to the apartments’ dedicated car parking spaces at the front and rear of the building. While this would have been sufficient at the time when non-smart charge points were permitted, with the introduction of The Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 (which came into force in 2022), this cabling is now insufficient.
In order to simplify it for homeowners, it was considered more suitable for the electric vehicles to be powered from the individual apartments as this would prevent the need for having to separately bill homeowners for the electricity used.
Alternatively, using a management company to manage the charge points was also reviewed. The take up by residents, however, was unknown as only some residents had PHEV. Therefore a management company’s costs would be an additional burden with no or very little gain.
In response, Deta came up with the solution – the installation of the eVoom 7.4kW single phase charge points, which are OZEV and SEAI approved. These charge points were fed from supply to each apartment, just after the meter, which was in the ground floor riser cupboard. As the apartments were balanced across the phases, the charge points were too.
With the landlord being concerned about not overloading the supply to the block of apartments, should the charge points be heavily used, electrical load management was required. Three energy meters were added, one per phase. The charge points were configured during commissioning with all on one phase placed into one group, creating three groups. An RS-485 cable was routed through existing ducting from these energy meters to the Primary charge point in the group, as was CAT5e data. Additionally, Separate Wi-Fi networks were set up, one for each group connecting to the secondary chargers.
When the charge points were commissioned, the maximum power available per phase was set and the primary charge point ensured (through cloud management) that when EV’s were being charged, the total power being drawn by the EV’s and the apartments was not overloading the DNO fuses.
To ensure the charge points could easily be used by residents, each apartment was issued with two RFID cards, which were paired with their charge point to start and stop charging.
Furthermore, with the charge points being OZEV approved, the landlord was able to claim against the grant available, reducing his outlay.
Kroum Kakalov, the property owner, said: “Although we initially saw this project to be quite complex, we are pleased Deta could provide a solution that would achieve our objectives. We have been impressed at how these eVolo charge points have been extremely easy to install and commission, as well as operate from a user perspective.”