Overnight charging for your vans and company cars

How Depot Charging Is Planned

Depot charging is an energy problem before it is an equipment problem. The number of chargers you need is not the number of vehicles you run, it is whatever delivers the required kilowatt-hours into the fleet between the last vehicle returning at night and the first one leaving in the morning. Get that calculation right and most depots need far less installed power than the vehicle count suggests.

Sizing against the duty cycle

We start with daily mileage per vehicle and realistic miles-per-kWh for the duty being performed, a loaded 3.5t van in winter is a very different figure to a manufacturer's brochure. That gives the nightly energy requirement. Divided across the hours vehicles are actually stationary, it gives the average power draw the site must sustain. A fifteen-van fleet parked from 6pm to 6am rarely needs anything close to fifteen times 7kW.

Load management instead of a supply upgrade

Dynamic load management reads the site's live demand and shares whatever headroom remains between active chargers, sequencing vehicles across the overnight window. It costs a fraction of a Distribution Network Operator supply upgrade and avoids the months-long connection timescale that comes with one. Where an upgrade genuinely is unavoidable, typically eHGV depots and high-power DC installations, we apply to the DNO early and plan the rollout around the energisation date rather than hoping for it.

Civils once, chargers in phases

The expensive parts of a depot install are the trenching, ducting, sub-main and distribution board. Those are shared across every charge point on site, so installing them for the full future estate during the first dig is dramatically cheaper than returning to break the same ground twice. Spare ducting laid at build time costs very little; a second mobilisation, excavation and reinstatement costs a great deal.

Matching charger power to turnaround

Van fleets returning to base for the night are well served by 7kW or 22kW AC units. Coaches, eHGVs and any vehicle with a short mid-shift dwell need DC, typically 50kW to 150kW, and that changes the supply conversation entirely. Mixed fleets often run both, with AC on the overnight bays and a smaller number of DC units for fast turnaround.

Uptime is an operational requirement

A charger that fails overnight is a route that does not run in the morning. We specify OCPP-compliant hardware with remote monitoring so faults surface before the depot manager finds them, agree a response SLA that matches your operational tolerance, and build in enough redundancy that a single unit failure never strands a shift.