Commercial EV Chargingin Worcester

Capacity first, chargers second

A single three-phase 22kW charge point draws thirty-two amps on each of three phases. Six of them is a serious addition to a building's load, and most commercial supplies were sized for the business rather than for a car park. So the first job is not choosing a charger, it is establishing what your incoming supply actually carries and what your building already uses at its busiest, which usually means metering the load over a week rather than reading the fuse and hoping.

If the headroom is not there, the options are load management or a supply upgrade, and they are very different propositions. Load management shares the available capacity dynamically: eight bays that each charge fast when the car park is empty and share the supply when it is full. For a workplace where cars sit for seven hours, that is nearly always the right answer, because nobody needs a full charge in forty minutes. A supply upgrade means an application to the distribution network operator, a connection offer, a price and a lead time that is measured in months rather than weeks. If your project has a deadline, start that conversation before you order anything.

Then the civils, which is the cost people do not budget for. Getting a cable from a plant room to the far side of a car park means a duct route, and a duct route means digging, reinstating tarmac, and working around drainage you cannot see on a drawing. The single best decision at this stage is to lay more duct than you need. The trench is dug once; pulling a second cable through a spare duct in three years costs a fraction of digging the same ground twice. Bollard mounts suit open bays, wall mounts suit bays against a building, and the choice affects the cable run more than it affects the price of the unit.

Finally, how you get paid or account for it. Staff-only charging can run on an access card. Customer charging needs a back office, a tariff and a payment route, and it is worth deciding whether you are selling electricity or giving it away as a reason to visit, because that changes the hardware. Grant support for workplace charging exists and the schemes change; we will tell you what is open when you ask rather than quote you a figure from a scheme that has since closed.

What a commercial installation covers

Survey and capacity first, written price second, nothing ordered before both.

• Incoming supply and existing demand measured, not estimated
• Load management designed where capacity is the constraint
• Network operator application handled where an upgrade is needed
• Duct routes planned with spare ways for later bays
• Bollard or wall mounting to suit the bay layout
• Back office, access control and tariff set up and handed over
• Bay markings and signage coordinated with your groundworks
• Tested, the certificate issued, and the installation documented

How a car park job runs

Measure the load

Logged over a working week, so the headroom figure is real rather than a fuse rating.

Decide the route

Capacity sharing or a supply upgrade, with the lead time for each stated plainly.

Civils and install

Ducts in with spare ways, cable pulled, units mounted, surfaces reinstated.

Commission

Load management proven under test, back office configured, certification handed over.

Commercial EV charging across Worcester and Worcestershire

Offices and trading estates around Worcester, units at Droitwich Spa, hotels and visitor parking in Malvern, and the larger agricultural sites near Evesham that often already have the three-phase capacity for it. Also Pershore and Stratford-upon-Avon. The board and sub-main work is ordinary commercial work, and staff wanting a charger at home is a domestic install, which is a different calculation entirely.