Chargers don't run themselves.
Underneath the hardware, six jobs run every day for as long as the unit is plugged in. Some owners take them on. Most hand them over. Either way these are the things you can tune — and the things to ask about before you buy a charger, from us or from anyone else.
1
Who's allowed to plug in?
Open to the public, or gated to people you name — residents, guests, staff, your
own vehicles. Gating means somebody keeps the list current: on at move-in, off the day
they leave, or you are powering a car that left in June. Hand it over and you do not
keep the list at all. One honest limit: that access runs off a standing list, not
your reservation system, so a hotel guest arriving tonight charges as a member of the
public.
2
What do they pay?
You set the price. That holds on every platform we sell — the only
exception is a site owned by a partner or a third party, where their terms govern. Run
more than one rate if you need to, a resident rate and a public rate say, and change
them when your power bill changes. The number that matters is your margin per kWh after
demand charges, not the headline rate.
3
How much power is required?
Four chargers on one feed will each try to draw everything they are rated for. Power
management stops that: it shares a circuit between units, holds the site under a ceiling
you set, and moves load out of your expensive window. It is often the difference
between needing a service upgrade and not needing one — which is the single
most expensive line on a build.
4
Is it working right now?
A charger that is down does not announce it. Answering this yourself means somebody
checks, and somebody picks up when a driver cannot start a session at 11pm. We monitor
around the clock, we usually see a fault before your customer does, and the driver calls
us instead of your front desk.
5
What is it about to do?
Sessions and faults leave a pattern, and reading it turns maintenance from a reaction
into a plan: a unit whose error rate is climbing before it fails outright, a stall
saturating at hours you would want to price differently, a second unit worth buying
before drivers start finding both of yours busy. Reporting tells you what
happened. This is the part aimed at what happens next.
6
Where does the money land?
Card payments need a processor and a merchant account, and someone has to reconcile
what the charger says against what landed in the bank. You can hold those relationships
yourself, and some owners do. On our paid platforms you do not have to: payments are
taken at the charger and processed for you, settled into a Stay-N-Charge account, then
distributed to you monthly net of fees, with a report showing what each charger earned.
You own the asset and the revenue is yours — the collecting and the
reconciling are ours.
Decide which of these you want to own, and the platform follows from the rest.
In plain English
What a demand charge is — and why the software is the answer to it.
A business electricity bill usually has two parts. The first is for how much power you
used over the whole month, the way a water bill counts gallons. The second is for the
single busiest moment in that month — the fastest you ever drew power, even if it
only lasted a few minutes — and the utility bills you for that peak every month,
whether or not it happens again. That second part is the demand charge, and on a
quiet site it can cost more than the power you sold.
Which is the whole argument for power management. The charger cannot decide not to set
a peak. The software can. It holds the site under a ceiling you set, shares one feed
between several units instead of letting each pull everything it is rated for, and moves
charging out of the expensive hours where your utility runs time-of-use pricing. Same
hardware, same drivers, a materially different bill.
Utilities differ enormously in what they charge for that peak, and it is the first thing
we check on an address. How far
demand charges vary from one utility to the next →
The uptime number, answered honestly
99% network uptime — and the thing it does not cover.
Monitoring deserves a number, so here it is. 99% network uptime is our platform commitment: the system behind your chargers being available, so sessions start, cards clear, the dashboard answers and the monitoring is watching. It is not a promise that any particular charger is working, and we won't dress it up as one — a unit with a cut cable or a dead screen is down while the network behind it is perfectly up. If a vendor offers you one number that covers both, they've quoted you the easier one.
A dead unit is a hardware problem, and hardware gets its own answer: VoltCare advance exchange, where a failed unit is replaced rather than queued behind a parts order for repair. Two different mechanisms, two different promises, and priced separately — what VoltCare costs →. If you have ever had a charger sit dead for months, that second line is the one to read twice; the uptime percentage was never going to be the thing that fixed it.
