Public charging

1. General information

The following article describes a standard configuration for setting up and operating a public charging station with eCarUp. Drivers pay by credit card and the credit is automatically transferred from the driver to the station owner. If your station (e.g. in a SME) is semi-public, we have documented this in a separate wiki article.

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.

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

An eCarUp Premium license is strongly recommended for this use case

 (otherwise some important features like the maintenance tool, reports or roaming 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 item "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.

Charging stations can be easily charged publicly with eCarUp and thus to anonymous drivers. To do this, the stations must be assigned the status "public" in the setup and a location must be set. 

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.

Ready configured, it can look like this:

4. Label stations

For public access charging labeling of charging stations very important so that drivers know how to unlock the charging station. You can also use clear labeling to communicate important information such as additional rules (max. parking time, parking fees, etc.) to drivers.

There are two ways to do this for unlocking directly via eCarUp:

Charging via eCarUp app.

Ad-hoc charging via QR code

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

5. Roaming

Optionally, the stations can also be published via the roaming function in the store networks of third parties. 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 be found very widely afterwards (in various apps and car navigation devices) and thus attract foreign users.

Moreover, you need to define a separate price for roaming. This is transmitted by eCarUp to the roaming network and serves as a basis for the pricing of the other connected charging networks. However, you as a station operator as well as eCarUp as a platform have no influence on the pricing of the other platforms.

For detailed information, please refer to the Wiki article on roaming.

6. Error analysis and troubleshooting

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. This account can be stored 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.

7. Optional: Create charging station groups and define special users.

Even for public charging stations, special users (e.g. employees, neighbors, etc.) can be defined at any time, who can then charge at the stations at a special rate.

Create station groups

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

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.