Commercial charging is a different project from residential, and it fails in a different place. Residential jobs go wrong at the load calculation. Commercial jobs go wrong at the service, and at the decision about how much ground to open.
Start with the service, not the chargers
The first question is not which units to buy. It is what the site’s electrical service can actually deliver, and what your utility would require to increase it.
That answer determines everything downstream, including whether the project is straightforward or whether it involves a transformer and a conversation with the utility that will dominate the schedule. Specifying hardware before establishing it is how commercial projects acquire six-month delays that nobody budgeted for.
Load management usually changes the answer
Ports are rarely all drawing maximum simultaneously. Employee parking fills in the morning and sits; residential parking fills in the evening and sits overnight. In both cases the aggregate demand is far below the sum of the nameplate ratings.
Active load management exploits that. It holds the site inside its service rating while allowing more ports than raw capacity would suggest, sharing available power across whatever is actually plugged in. On a constrained service it is frequently the difference between a viable project and one that requires a service upgrade.
Trench once
This is the single most expensive avoidable mistake in this category.
The cost of a car park installation is dominated by opening and reinstating the ground — saw cutting, trenching, backfill, patching, traffic management. The conduit itself is cheap by comparison. Installing pathways and pull boxes for the full eventual port count while the lot is already open adds a modest amount to phase one and removes almost the entire cost of phase two.
Sites that trench for their current port count invariably come back. When they do, they pay for the excavation a second time and disrupt the car park again.
Layout
Cable reach and vehicle circulation drive the layout more than anything aesthetic. Pedestal or bollard mounting with impact protection, positioned so a cable reaches the port on vehicles that park in either orientation, and so a charging vehicle does not obstruct the aisle.
Accessible parking and route requirements are designed in from the start rather than corrected after an inspection. Retrofitting accessibility compliance into a completed installation is expensive and avoidable.
Multi-family, which is its own problem
Apartment and condominium charging carries questions a workplace does not: whose meter the energy comes from, how residents are billed, what happens when a resident with a reserved space moves out, and who owns the equipment.
Those are commercial and governance questions rather than electrical ones, but they change the specification — particularly whether the hardware needs to be networked and access-controlled. Worth settling before the design is fixed.
Utility coordination
Six providers serve the cities we cover, with different commercial requirements, different capacity study processes and different incentive positions. We identify the serving utility from the site’s supply rather than its address, and confirm the current incentive position rather than assuming it, because these programmes are funded annually and close when the allocation is spent.