Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.
on the show today we'll be looking at sharing your home charger.
Our main topic of discussion today is charger sharing.
getting electric cars, the market share for new EVs is above 25 % now, there are a higher and higher number of chargers being installed on people's driveways.
For the vast majority of these times, these chargers are not being used.
Now, if your car is out of the house all day, then the charger is free and it's only being used at night.
If you work from home, your car will usually be charged
either on solar if you have it or via overnight rates if you don't and is effectively not adding any value to anyone once your car is charged.
What if there was a way to use your charger and have it earn some money for you while you're not using it?
Well good news is there is and it's called charger sharing.
Now we did a complete episode on this many seasons ago with Joel Teague who is the CEO of Co-Charger Now their model is simple.
They have an app that allows people with chargers to rent their chargers out to people without chargers.
The financials are defined between each party with Co-Charger taking a small fee.
Since that episode aired, the market for charger sharing has expanded and there are now several different options available.
So today I want to take a look at the pros and cons of this and help listeners know if you might be in the right position to take advantage of charger sharing.
Now it's something of a tradition in neighbourhoods that if you need something that you don't have and your neighbour has it, you can go over and ask to borrow it.
I've done it several times where I live because my neighbour has a fantastic electric hedge trimmer and I don't.
He lends me it, I trim the hedge and we're all good.
Now if he needs to park his car on my drive when he has visitors, I let him.
It's all part and parcel of being a good neighbour.
However, as soon as you start to bring the financial aspect into things, this relationship changes.
If you went over to your neighbour and asked to siphon off a couple of gallons of unleaded every night without payment,
that could become a different thing entirely.
Charger sharing is very similar.
What you're effectively doing as a charger share is saying to neighbours or even complete strangers, hey, come over here, plug into my electricity supply and suck out as many
electrons as you need to get on your way.
With the price of electricity at the moment, the cost to you can be anything from £2.50 per charge right up to about £30 per charge, depending on the time of day and the charge
received.
Plug in a Polestar 3, for example, 110 kilowatt hour battery into charge during the day on a typical
peak rate charger of 30pkWh can set you back £33 if the battery is empty and is charging right up to 100%.
So how does charger sharing work?
Well basically it's all app driven.
You create a host account on the app, co-charger, JOOSUP just park etc.
and then you log the details of your charger, speed, availability and price and wait.
Anyone who has the app but is not a host can then see all the chargers available for them in their area.
They can use the app to book a charge and you, as the host, are notified.
Then it's the simple case of turning up, plugging in and charging.
All the payment is dealt with via the app.
So how do the apps deal with the tricky concept of pricing?
Well, generally the charger sharing apps ask you to provide a cost per kilowatt hour for using your charger.
And this is where it becomes interesting.
Now, if you're only allowing charging at night and you're on a cheap charging tariff, you can add a rate of say 10 pence a kilowatt hour to cover your electricity and make a small
profit.
But if you're allowing people to charge during the day,
The rate has to be enough to cover the fact that your day rate is often considerably higher than your overnight off-peak tariff.
Now, I have neighbors with electric vehicles who are on a fixed rate tariff for electricity of 20pkWh 24-7.
Now, yes, they're not benefiting from cheap overnight charging, but they are getting cheaper electricity than most other people during the day.
As a result, they can stick their charger onto an app and charge, say, 25pkWh and make money at that rate.
But will anybody pay
25pkWh
to charge their car on somebody else's driveway?
Well the short answer is yes.
If you live in a dwelling where you can't charge at home, so a flat for example, your options for charging are limited to whatever public charging you can find in the local
area.
There are very, very few options where you can charge an electric car for 25pckwh on a public network.
Tesla offer a rate around that overnight if you have a subscription.
But that means literally sitting in your car at a charger in the middle of the night.
The only street charging solution I know that comes anywhere near that is the Char.gy offering of 39pkWh at their chargers.
If you live in a city where they operate, that's still a good deal and cheaper than the rate for petrol and diesel, especially nowadays.
If you don't, 25pkWh becomes very attractive.
Now we could talk theoretically about charger sharing all day long.
But when the rubber metaphorically hits the road, what's the shared charger experience actually like?
Well, let's bring in somebody who's actually done this.
So my name is Michael.
am, I'm a multiple business owner is the easiest way to describe it, but I am also in the world of performing arts.
So I've done a few things over the years.
I did theatre for many, many years and now occasionally I do a bit of TV and film, but few and far between, but I enjoy it when I'm there.
And as part of that, you and I have had lots and lots of discussions um about things like electric vehicles.
And as a result of that, you're what I call one of my success stories.
And you've moved to electric.
Now, we've had you on the show before.
You've talked about that.
But one of the aspects of that that I want to cover today is the whole concept of sharing a charger.
Now, you've been sharing your charger for quite a while now, I understand.
So take me back to.
that time when you had your charger installed and you thought, you know, there might be the possibility of making a bit of money out of this.
What was your thought process?
I believe it was actually listening to the podcast, Gary.
So thank you for bringing that into my life.
I believe you have the chap who runs co-charger on and I heard that episode and I thought, actually, this makes full sense because ultimately my car only needs a little bit of
charge every so often.
It doesn't need a massive amount.
It's a Hyundai Ioniq, it's a 38 kilowatt hour battery and an overnight charge.
I can charge that from zero to a hundred percent every night if I wished.
Obviously I will never need to do that, but if I needed to, I could.
Ultimately, I don't drive enough miles to charge
every single day, in which case I heard the episode and thought, oh, great idea.
Why don't I just hire it out?
So that was the process.
You are of course referring to Joel Teague who runs Cocharger.
Fantastic organization, as I say, I'll put a link to that episode in the show notes for those who want to go and look at that or listen to it.
I think it was just audio at that point.
So yes, it's a listen only episode for that one.
Now, obviously you've selected, as a result of that discussion, Cocharge came onto your radar.
Are you aware or were you aware at the time of any other charger sharing options that are around?
I hate to disappoint you, but no.
Very short answer.
At that point in time, I was really, really new to electric vehicles.
The technology was all up and coming.
All the apps were kind of being built.
Even back then, we're talking like five, six years ago, ZapMap was fantastic and it still is fantastic, but it's come along dramatically in that period of time.
And now it's like, you know, there's a lot more different levels of support you can get on there if you wish.
And it was similar back then.
There wasn't really that much around.
So after listening to the episode, did some research, got on board.
Since then, I believe there's another company called Charge Share.
I might be mistaken, but I believe that's what they're called.
And I've also got their app as well, but I have never had any interest from anybody on Charge Share.
So it's all co-charged.
Yeah, there are a couple of others.
Juicer, J-O-O-S-U-P is another one.
And I think, is it Park and Charge actually do a home charger sharing option on their app?
So the underlying infrastructure is getting better and better and better.
So, you you've been doing this, how long have you actually been sharing your charger?
Ooh.
So it was back, we started in our old house when we had a little pod point.
We've moved house since, which was two and a half years ago.
So probably about four years, I'd say.
So slightly hypothetical question, but I'll ask it anyway.
If you were in that position now where you just decided to share a charger, what would you do in terms of researching the different apps and the different solutions that are out
there?
Because as you say, at the time it was only code charger.
Now the infrastructure is a little bit more robust.
Would that change the way you did things?
I think so.
Obviously now there's so much more available and there's so much more tech and even as we're fully aware, it love it or loathe it, AI has come a long way since then as well.
So ultimately we could get, you know, um a large language model to go and search out and find those different applications if needed and do a little bit of research into that as
well.
So Michael, once you downloaded the co-charge app, what was the actual onboarding process to get you set up as a co-charger?
I believe it was quite quick and easy.
just a case of obviously setting up your profile, doing the email, two facts or authentication, and then logging in and just basically setting up, setting it all up.
So really, really quick and easy, took no time at all.
Now, how did you calculate the value, the cost that you were gonna charge to people who are gonna use your charges?
Because there are many different ways of looking at it, this, you do you wanna make money on this or do you wanna just cover costs and offer a service?
So what was your attitude?
What was your approach on this?
I went down the line of I just feel like where I live, there's a lot of houses, there's a lot of flats, and there's a lot of people who don't have access to charging or overnight
charging at a cheap rate like the people who do own properties, we do have driveways, have that opportunity.
So my logic was I don't want to overcharge people.
And especially when you've got the app, obviously you can go in and you can see everybody else's prices in the local vicinity.
And it's not that I wanted to undercut people deliberately, but I just wanted to...
kind of charge people appropriately for what I think it's worth, if that makes sense.
So yeah, I went on the lower level of things, but that did mean that we ended up picking up quite a few people quite quickly who did appreciate having that opportunity.
And in terms of the actual calculation of the price, because I'm assuming you're on a time of day tariff such as Octopus.
So are you working on the basis that I'm only going to open up the charger for overnight, therefore I'll be on the low tariff, the whatever it was, seven and seven and half, nine,
depending when you, when you joined.
And I'm going to add a little bit on that.
Or did you say, right?
No, I'm going to open it up 24 seven.
So I'm going to have to find a balance between the
peak rate, the off peak rate.
I did a bit of both.
we do, I say to people, ultimately we do offer it out as an overnight charge.
And specifically I say that to people just because obviously that's where the value is if they do want to come and do that.
But ultimately, even today, I've got uh a lovely Polestar on the driveway who's charging through the daytime because the chap comes down, parks, we live really close to train
station.
goes down to TrayStation, works in London all day, comes back, jumps in his car, drives off.
So we do add a similar sort of kind of like top up to the regular rate.
So obviously we're not out of pocket and obviously Code Charge does have, I believe it's a 12 % kind of general admin fee to use the process anyway, which is fair enough.
You they've got to make money somewhere and we are talking about such small margins anyway.
So ultimately it was, yeah, we are looking at maybe just a similar sort of sliding scale across the board.
And is all the, for people who don't know how code charger works, do they deal with all the payment and you just get a at the end of the month or whatever the equivalent is
nowadays?
how does the actual routing of the money work?
What's the process from that point of view?
So it's fully automated and built into the app itself.
So as a consumer, you can open the app, have a little look, see X amount of driveways or charge points in your area, click on one, then potentially contact the owner and say, I
see it's free at this time and you're charging this rate.
Is it available?
Can I come and charge?
Once they've done all of that and you've got it all locked in, once they've come and done the charge, basically when they drive up, they'll...
kind of authorise it on their end and it will say, you know, the starting rate so it knows how much has been vended into the vehicle.
And then after that, obviously they'll put, you know, what the end game was and, you know, the end goal, I should say, and then work out the finances.
Once it's done that, then it deals with the whole payment system and you pop in your bank details and then you get the money in your account.
So it's really, it is really, really straightforward and open and honest and simple really.
And that brings up sort of the next big question mark that I've always had with co-chargers, with sharing a charger specifically.
Is this something where you as the owner have to be there when the co-charger comes up or does the app link into your charger or does that have to be managed separately?
What's the physical logistics of someone pulling up to your driveway and getting the whole thing set up and charging?
So on our end of it, as long as we know somebody's gonna come at a certain time, obviously we make sure the space is available, then all they need to do is drive on the driveway,
plug in the vehicle, and then leave, and that's it.
So as plain and simple as possible.
Obviously for people who own chargers where you have got a physical display, like we have a Zappi, and it has a physical display on the screen, and it will show you exactly how
much has gone into the vehicle, which is obviously super useful, especially for co-charging.
Whereas our previous house was a pod point, so you didn't have that, it would just tell you on the app, but at least this way.
The chargee knows exactly by just reading what's on the screen instead of kind guesstimating how it all works.
But it is pretty much a contactless service.
It's all done via the app.
You don't physically need to be there.
Obviously, if you have got a smart charger, you need to do your...
thing back end of the system to make sure it's charging at the right time and making sure that they are getting the electric.
I would say the one time we had a fail and that was a lady with a ID4 who wanted an overnight charge.
think it was relatively, I mean the vehicle doesn't matter, but she was relatively new to the EV world.
She plugged in.
And I specifically said to her about 20 times, make sure the car does not have any automated charging set up on the system because it won't work.
She went away.
The following day came back for the truck, for the car.
Obviously hadn't vended anything.
There was no charge had gone into the vehicle and she swore blind.
There was nothing set up in the car, but that was the only way it wouldn't have worked.
And I was like, you have to have done that because there's otherwise it would have charged.
So here we are, but you know, it's.
As we often talk about, it's all about education and that was potentially the beginning of her journey and maybe hopefully next time if she did try somewhere else, which was a
little bit closer to where she lived, because she said we live quite far away from her.
Hopefully she managed it and works it all out by then.
And how, I don't know whether this applies, because I know Zappi, you could put a uh pin code on it.
If you have a pin code protected charger, is there a way of putting that pin into the Atlight co-charger and say, this is what you need to be putting in, or is that something
you'd physically have to manage as the owner of the charger?
yeah, you could definitely do that via the app.
They have a message function on there anyway, so...
you know, like anything, I guess, like Just Park or any of those similar sorts of apps where they have options of doing things like that.
You can always message in advance to person and just say, by the way, here's a pin code, you know.
I mean, we don't have ours pin coded anyway.
just know from probably most people to have this anyway, like we've got our Ring Cam, there are ones available and also our Zappi charger.
So I know obviously when someone pulls on the drive and they plug in, I know who it is.
I know what vehicle it is.
I mean, I've never had a rogue person rock up and just suddenly plug in.
And if that was the case, I would see who it was and I would stop the vehicle charging immediately.
So if I was to put your address details on here, nobody would be able to come up and just plug in willy-nilly.
Hopefully not, as long as I've got a phone signal.
So when you first set this up, what was the uptake like when you added yourself into the system?
Was it a little like, know, tumbleweed when you started or what?
Yeah, I mean, it was slow.
Obviously, it was back about four or five years ago when electric vehicle ownership was slightly less.
So there were less people in the vicinity, which probably wanted a charge.
Also, I know we spoke about this many times back then.
This was in the day where there was the occasional public charger, which was free.
And if people are looking for a cheap charge, they potentially could have gone there.
And I know your thoughts on that.
So yeah, was slow, it was slow, but it's picked up a lot over the years.
And have all the people who've used your charger, have they approached you via the app or have you found people locally and kind of said, by the way, you know, if you need my apps,
my charger is available.
Funnily enough, I've only said that to one person who's my friend.
who lives down the road from me.
He lives really close.
He's recently got an MG5.
He doesn't have a home charger.
His neighbor has a home charger, but he does a lot of public charging.
And I said to him, this is the offering.
You're more than welcome to come down and charge.
You literally are two minutes walk away.
And he's never taken me up on that offer.
So he's the only person I've ever mentioned it to in person just as an offering.
Otherwise everyone else has been via the app.
It's not like I go out and publicize it.
I'm not like come and charge your car guys.
No.
Are there any issues that could potentially arise sort of early morning?
So we assume somebody is going to be plugged in all night.
You may not be getting up until seven o'clock.
may need to leave or disconnect at 5.30, six o'clock, six thirty.
Is that all completely transparent or do you actually need to be there when they unhook as well?
No, that's absolutely fine.
They can come and unplug and like I said, obviously by the app or via the screen, then you know how much has been vended from the Zappi anyway.
So it's not a problem.
The only challenge we had recently was doing someone having a night charge into a day charge.
Now that was a bit of a headache because the guy who normally, the guy with the fabulous Polestar sitting on the drive now, he'll often arrive about 6.30 in the morning, clearly
goes into work early and you know, that's absolutely fine.
And we have another chap who charges potentially two to three times most weeks.
uses his car for work.
He normally leaves about six every day.
And there was one point where he was charging overnight and he, I think he picked his car up about quarter to seven instead of the time he told me he was going to pick his car up.
And then the Polestar arrived and I'm not going to lie.
Like I have a three year old, I'm awake at six most days of the week.
And I just messaged him and I said, listen, pop your keys through the door.
It's not a problem.
reverse you on the drive and get you charged.
So it wasn't, it wasn't that much of an issue.
And to be fair, he did message me back and said, if you want Michael, go and take it out for a drive.
It's a lovely vehicle.
And I was like, thank you very much for the kind offer.
But it's a very expensive vehicle, which uh I do not want to do anything stupid to.
So I just reversed it very, very gently on my driveway, plugged in and left him to it.
Oh, as a Polestar owner myself, I have to say, take any opportunity to go out for a drive in a Polestar.
Absolutely.
now correct me if I'm wrong, you're not just a one EV family, you're a two EV family, yeah?
Has that caused any sort of conflict with access to the charges and the need to charge two vehicles plus potentially have that access to third parties?
Not really.
Initially at the beginning, I thought it could prove a challenge just because we did have over Christmas and beginning of this year, we had so many regular charges, like literally
six or seven days a week, somebody was on the driveway charging, which was a headache.
A couple of those have dropped off.
for various reasons, not because I don't like them anymore or they're not nice people because they are and I speak to them and they're lovely.
just, know, logistics and things like that.
But my car has a really, really small battery, which is really lucky and it's very efficient.
My wife's car Corsa E also, I think it's about a 50 kilowatt hour battery.
So it's not massive.
She doesn't do many miles, thankfully, in which case it works quite well, but.
we do have a three pin charger on the drive as well.
So worst case scenario, if someone is charging and I desperately need to charge, I will three pin my car at the same time as another vehicle being using the actual, you know,
seven kilowatt charger.
There may be listeners who are, or viewers who are listening or watching this, might think, like that idea.
I think I've got a charger.
I want to open it up to the public.
Any learnings or any words of advice for somebody who wants to do that from your experience?
You know what, honestly, like, no, I would say just do it.
The systems out there are so plain and simple to use.
I mean, if you're worried about potentially getting any sort of problems or anything like that, I mean, I cannot.
explain how many hours and hours and hundreds of hours of time we've had people charging on our driveway.
We've never had an issue.
I guess the only potential issues you could have is if you had somebody who potentially couldn't park their car very well.
But we all know EVs come with a lot of safety kit on there anyway, and they should be able to park their car on your driveway without hitting a front wall or taking off, you know,
or driving into another vehicle or anything stupid like that.
So you should be OK.
Luckily nothing like that has happened with us and to be fair we live on a hill as well so people have people generally back onto our driveway down a hill which could you know prove
difficult.
Our neighbors our neighbors the other day did say they've had they've reversed a car three times into their garage door just because it's down quite a steep slope.
We've never had that we've never had that thankfully.
But I just say yeah just crack on and do it I mean it's what can you lose really?
your time as always.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks.
Now a good use case for sharing a charger is if you have a pavement gully installed.
And we talked about pavement gullies when we interviewed Ben Whittaker from Kerbo Charge in an earlier episode, link below.
Now they allow a groove to be dug in the pavement outside a terraced house to pass a charging cable safely across the footpath to charge your car.
And when I spoke with him, he told me that their business model was for one Kerbo Charge gully for every three houses.
Now all three houses would use a single home charger and charger sharing apps to manage who gets the charge and when.
Now this has the added advantage that you don't need to be parked right outside your house to use this.
And you can be in one of three adjacent parking places without issue, providing you have a long enough charging cable, obviously.
Who shouldn't be a co-charger?
Well, sharing your charger is not for everyone.
I, for example, would probably find it difficult to share my charger because my driveway layout means I would need to move my car to allow another vehicle to access my charger and
my car would then block the charging vehicle in.
So in the morning I'd need to move my car to allow the car to exit.
If the car needed to be out by say 6 a.m.
That could be an issue for some people who usually don't get up until 7am.
That's not me, but it could be for some people.
There are also things to make sure when it comes to the way the charger interacts with the car.
For example, I'm on the Intelligent Octopus Go Tariff and that means that whenever a car is plugged into my charger, the Octopus app will determine when the charge will take
place.
Now, ideally it will start charging whenever the car is plugged in, but if the plug-in is early in the evening, it might then wait until later at night to start charging.
On top of that, Octopus recently announced that they're looking at limiting the cheap hours to a more strict six hours per night too, and that will also alter the availability
for...
renting charges out.
Now that's not a problem if your charger is wanting an overnight charge.
But if they plug in during the day, wanting to charge while at work, as Michael's Polestar charger does, this means you have to go into the Octopus app and start a bump charge,
which is obviously going to be more expensive than an overnight charge.
But these little foibles aside, if you have a charge which either sits empty most of the day, or several nights a week,
after all the number of people who have to recharge their car every night is minimal
You might be able to go into one of the various apps and rent or hire your charger out to someone who has an EV but no ability to charge overnight at their place.
Now remember the statistics are quite clear.
There is a sizeable majority of the people who do not have enough space off road to park a car for driving around 32 % of households and an additional percentage who do have the
space but can't install a charger for whatever reason.
They may be renting, the landlord won't allow him, they'll allow him, it might be distance from the house,
electricity supply or fuse issues and none of these people should be denied the ability to charge near their home without needing to sit on a public charger for hours at a time.
charger sharing is the solution.
So let me know if you'd be happy to charge a share.
What would stop you from doing so?
Send me a note info at evymuseums.com or leave a comment, like and subscribe.
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You know, I asked him if his newfound love of a polyamorous lifestyle was causing him any problems.
I mean, how does it work logistically?
So on our end of it, as long as we know somebody's gonna come at a certain time, obviously we make sure the space is available,
Thanks listening.
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