Charge at home with credit card

1. General information

The following article describes a standard configuration for home charging with eCarUp (for example for MFH / STEWG / MEG). Here, drivers pay by credit card and the credit is automatically transferred from the driver to the station owner.

The advantage of this variant is that the money is automatically transferred from the driver's credit card to the station owner's account. This has two key advantages:

You will find all further information about credit card billing and the legal regulations regarding the transferred credit in our Wiki.

Billing by credit card always results in a 10% commission, regardless of whether an eCarUp Premium license is active or not.

With the settings described below, the use case "charge at home by credit card" can be configured on eCarUp. The target state / benefits are as follows:

An eCarUp Premium license is highly recommended for this use case (otherwise some important features like the maintenance tool, the reports or the extended user management with the user groups are missing)

2. Connect charging stations to the eCarUp backend.

First, the stations need to be connected to the eCarUp backend:

The transferred money is continuously transferred to your station owner account and can be paid out to any IBAN at any time under the menu point "Account".

3. Set up charging stations

Once the charging stations have been connected to eCarUp, they will appear in the eCarUp account in the dashboard and in the station management.

Basic settings

After that, the stations can be set up by clicking on "Stations" and then "Station management":

Public = all users / Limited = station owner and special user / Private = ONLY station owner or account in which the stations are installed

All settings for station owners are summarized in a wiki article.

Create station groups

Important for the management of the charging stations, is the organization in station groups (e.g. by locations or by apartment blocks):

Ready configured, it can look like this:

Create special user

So that the stations can only be activated by the authorized drivers / end customers, the authorizations must be made accordingly. There are two ways to do this:

1. Maintain user groups

In this variant, a user group is created and assigned to the stations. This makes it easy to add or remove a new member from the user group when there is a change of tenant or a new driver. This makes the administrative effort smaller.

2. Assigning individual users to the stations.

In this variant, the individual drivers / end users are assigned to their respective stations, only the respective special user can activate his own charging station. This means that the accounts have to be assigned to the stations each time there is a change of tenant or a new driver, which means that the account has to be actively managed on an ongoing basis.

4. Inform drivers / end customers

It is recommended to inform the drivers / end customers about the release of the station. Drivers must create their own eCarUp account for payment and provide a valid credit card as a means of payment:

With eCarUp's flexible system, the administrative burden is minimized. The drivers / end customers can create and manage the accounts independently.

5. Label stations

To enable drivers to unlock the stations without an RFID card and with the app, we recommend labeling the stations with a QR code and a short instruction text. This helps, for example, if a driver loses his RFID card or does not have it with him.

You can find some examples of labeling directly on a wiki page.

6. Visitor parking

Charging stations can also be made public with eCarUp and thus billed to anonymous drivers. For this, the stations must be assigned the status "public" in the setup and a location must be set. In addition, the labeling of the charging stations is very important here, since the QR code can also be used for ad-hoc and thus barrier-free charging.

Other prices can also be easily assigned to the visitor parking spaces (see below).

Optionally, the stations can also be published in third-party charging networks via the roaming function. However, this is only possible if the station is publicly available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You must also be aware that the station will then be found very widely (in various apps and car navigation devices) and thus attract foreign users.

7. Error analysis and correction

With the help of the eCarUp portal, simple faults can be detected and the appropriate measures can be initiated. If stations are grayed out in the dashboard or in the station management and therefore marked as "inactive", they have lost the connection with the backend (longer than 10 minutes) and therefore cannot be used via eCarUp. There are two possible reasons for this:

With the maintenance tool included in eCarUp Premium, the communication between charging station and backend can be tracked and a deeper error analysis can be done.

If the error is deeper, you have to contact the person responsible for the project (e.g. executing electrician).

Practical tip: To test or check the functionality of stations on site, an account can be created for the technical service or another responsible person on site (e.g. hauswart[at]musterhaus.ch). This account can be deposited at the stations as a special user with a price of 0 per kWh and 0 per h and can thus carry out tests without incurring costs.