AC or DC: decide by purpose first
7kW AC is the community and home workhorse. A 500km-range car gains about 45km per hour; eight overnight hours restore roughly 350km — enough for any commute. A 7kW unit needs only a 32A dedicated circuit, which most community distribution rooms accept without drama.
60–120kW DC is for 30–60-minute stops — malls, offices, public lots. It demands dedicated capacity or a transformer, costs ten to thirty times an AC unit, and brings heat and noise questions of its own.
- Underground bays, fixed owners → 7kW AC
- Surface public bays, visitor top-ups → 60kW DC
- Taxi / ride-hail fleet hubs → 120kW dual-gun DC
- Old community retrofit, tight capacity → AC + ordered charging
Capacity short? Ordered charging is the cheaper road
The classic bind: twenty 7kW chargers want 140kW and the distribution room has 60kW left; a new 630kVA transformer costs RMB 300,000–600,000. Ordered charging instead lets all twenty units run at full power when community load is low and automatically reduce or queue at peak. Measured on typical community curves, the same capacity then serves two to three times as many chargers — at roughly 10–20% of reinforcement cost, with no power-cut construction. For Yantai's existing stock it is the realistic path.
Installation and grid application, step by step
- Property issues written consent (fixed bays need ownership or long-lease proof).
- Utility application: ID, bay proof, property consent, vehicle purchase document.
- Utility site visit fixes the meter position and connection scheme.
- We build: cabling, conduit, device, earthing and RCD.
- Utility installs the meter; we commission and register the charger on the platform.
Private units typically see power 7–15 working days after application in urban Yantai. Bulk community builds follow the unified build-and-operate route, 30–60 days.
Operation — or the chargers become ornaments
Unmanaged chargers become petrol-car parking within six months. Operations must answer three questions: who may use it, how it bills, and who fixes it. Our platform handles: plate recognition or lock interlocks against bay squatting; time-of-use tariffs (valley around RMB 0.3/kWh, peak above RMB 0.8); memberships and monthly passes; remote metering and reconciliation; automatic fault tickets. The property sees utilisation and revenue per charger, live.
Price reference
7kW AC: device RMB 1,500–3,500; standard installation (30 m cabling, RCD box) RMB 1,000–2,500; longer runs at RMB 25–40 per metre. 60kW DC: device RMB 30,000–60,000; installation and connection RMB 20,000–50,000, site-dependent. Bulk projects (20+ units) are priced as a package, including our zero-investment revenue-share model.
The mistake we see most
Eight-hour bays wearing 120kW DC hardware — paying for speed the owner never uses; and commercial front rows wearing 7kW AC — turnover too low to pay the rent. Match the charger to dwell time and capacity, then let the payback calculator check the economics. Capacity questions? Start with ordered charging, and see PV-storage-charging for the storage route.