The Real Cost of the Wrong EV Charging Partner

A client came to us with EV charging stations across a portfolio that had stopped working.

Not at one property.

At several.

They had not done anything unusual. They hired an installer, the installer put the stations in, and the invoices were paid. Then stations started dropping offline, and there was nobody whose actual job it was to notice.

Corners get cut

Once an EV charging install is done, you cannot see most of the work. The conduit, the panel work, the mounting, the commissioning. A property manager walking the lot sees a charger standing upright and assumes the job was done right

.

Whether it was done properly shows up two or three years later, and by then the installer is gone and the invoice is long since closed.

On this portfolio, one of the faults we found was faceplates that were never installed correctly when the stations went in. Water worked its way in behind them and sat there. Over time it damaged the units from the inside and the stations started malfunctioning. Nobody was going to catch that from the parking lot. It passed every visual check a property manager could reasonably make, right up until the chargers stopped working.

The faceplates are one fault among many we have found since taking this portfolio over, and we are still finding them.

The manufacturer is not going to call you back

This is the part owners underestimate. When a station fails, somebody has to open a claim with the manufacturer, prove the fault, get a part released, and then get a qualified electrician to the site to put it in. That is a sequence of phone calls and emails across several weeks, and nothing happens between them unless somebody keeps pushing.

A regional manager with a dozen properties is not going to win that fight, and they should not have to. It is not their job and it is not a good use of their time.

How we're fixing it

We're still working through this portfolio. Every site needs it's own diagnosis, because offline does not mean one thing. Some stations have a hardware fault. Some have a network problem. Some were never set up correctly to begin with.

REVS handles the diagnosis, the claim, the parts and the scheduling, and we deal with the manufacturer so the on-site team doesn't have to. Stations are coming back one by one, and the properties are getting something that works instead of something that embarrasses them.

Get it right the first time

We're glad to take this on. It's what we do and we're good at it. But the honest version of this story is that none of it needed to happen.

Every problem in that portfolio traces back to decisions made before the first station went in. An uninformed person decided who was doing the installing, which brand of hardware was going in, and who would be responsible for the stations once they were live.

Choosing the wrong charger brand can do as much damage as a bad install, because a station is only as good as the company standing behind it, and a manufacturer who is slow to answer a claim leaves your stations dead while you wait. Getting those decisions right costs nothing at the start.

Fixing them later costs a lot.

If you are planning EV charging now, an EV charging due diligence report tells you what your property can carry before you commit to anything. If you already have stations and they are not behaving, that is a conversation worth having sooner rather than later. Our multifamily EV charging page covers how we work, and you can contact REVS directly.