Reviews
Part of Shared charger planning mistakes that cause delays
Shared charger planning comparison: score bids by criteria
A shared charger planning comparison for condo and HOA boards: fix weighted criteria before bids arrive, then score each proposal on one sheet.
What to take away
- In a shared building the comparison has to survive a committee, which is a different problem from picking the best product.
- Agree the criteria and their weights before anyone sees a proposal. Afterwards, weights become arguments.
- Score in writing. A verbal comparison gets relitigated at every meeting.
- Public program standards are a free shortcut to a defensible baseline specification.
Running a comparison for yourself is straightforward. A shared charger planning comparison for a group is not, because the decision has to be defensible to people who were not in the room and who each have a different idea of what matters.
That is a process problem wearing a technical costume, and it is solved before the proposals arrive rather than after.
Fix the criteria before you see the options
Write down what you are comparing on, and how much each factor counts, while nobody has a preference yet.
Criteria and weights to agree first
Criterion
- Guaranteed minimum power
- High
- Ten-year total cost
- High
- Offline behavior
- Medium
- Cable replaceable on site
- Medium
- Portability to operator
- Medium
- Support response
- Medium
- Peak output
- Low
Weight
- Guaranteed minimum power
- What residents feel
- Ten-year total cost
- Fees exceed hardware
- Offline behavior
- Bad-night outcome
- Cable replaceable on site
- Failure and downtime
- Portability to operator
- Lock-in risk
- Support response
- 11pm contact
- Peak output
- Cars park overnight
Why
- Guaranteed minimum power
- Ten-year total cost
- Offline behavior
- Cable replaceable on site
- Portability to operator
- Support response
- Peak output
Once a board has seen three proposals, any change to the weighting will be read as an attempt to favor one. Doing it first removes that entirely, and takes about twenty minutes.
A workable set for a shared residential building:
| Criterion | Suggested weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Guaranteed minimum power per car at full occupancy | High | The number residents actually feel |
| Total cost across ten years | High | Recurring fees usually exceed the hardware |
| Offline behavior | Medium | Decides what happens on a bad night |
| Cable replaceable on site | Medium | Most likely failure, and its downtime |
| Portability to another operator | Medium | Whether you are locked in |
| Support response commitment | Medium | Who a resident reaches at 11pm |
| Peak output | Low | Cars park overnight |
Adjust the weights to your building. The discipline is agreeing them first, not adopting mine. The criteria that actually separate products are a reasonable place to draw the rows from.
Use a public baseline rather than writing one
You do not have to invent a specification. Public funding programs have already written minimum requirements, and they are a reasonable floor even if you take no public money.
Federally funded charging carries defined requirements. The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) formula program, administered by the Federal Highway Administration, sets interoperability, uptime and certification conditions in 23 CFR Part 680, and the record of the national formula program for charging infrastructure documents that approach. Borrowing that framing gives a board a baseline it did not have to argue about, produced by people with no stake in your tender.
The baseline also hands you the vocabulary for the spec rows. Connectors come down to SAE J1772 and NACS, now standardized as SAE J3400, plus a plan for adapters. Network interoperability is OCPP 1.6J or 2.0.1, with ISO 15118 for plug-and-charge where the hardware supports it. Ask for the listing too: UL 2594 for the equipment, UL 2231 for the protection circuitry, and NEC Article 625 for the installation.
It also helps to know which way the market is moving before locking in. The Alternative Fuels Data Center's material on charging infrastructure trends is a better guide to what is becoming standard than any vendor's roadmap.
Score it on one sheet
Bidders in columns, criteria in rows, filled in from written answers rather than impressions.
Scoring sheet rules
- Bidders in columns, criteria in rows
- Fill from written answers, not impressions
- Unanswered items marked unknown, score zero
- Ten-year cost row most often left blank
- Ask for itemized total with assumptions
- Filler is not the sales-meeting person
- Circulate completed sheet before the meeting
Two rules make this work. Anything a vendor did not answer is marked unknown and scores zero, not quietly disappearing. The ten-year row is the one bidders most often leave blank.
Ask for it as an itemized total with the assumptions stated. And the person filling it in is not the person who ran the sales meetings, if you can manage that.
That row should separate who pays for what across the decade: the building's capital cost for hardware and installation, the ongoing network or software fee, and the electricity itself. Say whether each lands on the owner, on HOA dues, on residents per session or by subscription, or on a third-party operator that recovers its cost from drivers. Proposals that blur those lines are the hardest to compare honestly.
Then circulate the completed sheet before the meeting. A committee that reads a comparison in advance discusses the result. A committee that sees it for the first time in the room discusses the format.
The comparisons that waste time
Enclosure and screen size. Almost never decides anything.
What to rule out explicitly
Distraction
- Enclosure and screen size
- Almost never decides
- Peak kilowatts
- Irrelevant overnight
- App design
- No predictive value
- Brand reputation
- Mostly marketing spend
Why it wastes time
- Enclosure and screen size
- Peak kilowatts
- App design
- Brand reputation
Peak kilowatts. For overnight residential parking this is close to irrelevant, and it is the number vendors lead with. More ports at lower output serve more residents from the same panel.
App design. Everyone has an opinion and none of them predict whether the system works.
Brand reputation. In a market this young, reputation is mostly marketing spend.
Rule these out explicitly at the start, or they will consume a meeting.
Handling the disagreement you will get
Someone will prefer the option the sheet did not favor. That is normal and it is not a failure of the process.
Ask which criterion they would weight differently and why, then check whether that change actually flips the result.
Often it does not, and the disagreement resolves; when it does flip the result, you have found a genuine difference about what the building needs.
That deserves a proper conversation rather than a proxy argument about hardware.
What you are avoiding is the version where the decision turns on who spoke last.
Delays in this process rarely come from the hardware. They come from a comparison nobody agreed on in advance, so set the schedule around your committee's dates rather than a vendor's timeline.
