EV Charging for Apartments Without Overloading the Supply

The hardest part of adding EV charging to an apartment block is rarely the charger itself. It is the supply.

Most residential buildings were wired long before anyone owned an electric car. The incoming supply is sized for lifts, lighting, heating and the appliances inside each flat — not for one or more 7 kW chargers. When residents plug in, the building‘s total draw can climb past what the main supply will carry.

Why “just add a charger” doesn’t work

In many homes the total power available is limited, and the household’s own appliances come first. The charger has to be the load that gives way — not the fridge, the heating or the oven. That is what dynamic load balancing (DLB) is for, and it is often the piece that decides whether an apartment project is feasible at all.

What DLB actually does

A DLB hub measures the site’s real-time power consumption and reduces the charging current automatically, so the total never exceeds what the site supply allows. Instead of a fixed 32 A draw, the charger follows the building: full power when the building is idle, less when the lifts, heating or kitchens are running.

Two practical points matter for apartment installations:

• The charging current has a floor. On our DLB charger the minimum is 6 A; below 6 A the charger stops rather than charge at a level that could disturb the rest of the building. That floor is the number you design the site around.
• The household always comes first. Charging only uses the headroom the building is not using at that moment.

The hardware: pole-mounted and pillar-mounted chargers

For apartment courtyards, shared parking areas and forecourts, the practical options are chargers embedded into smart lamp poles or pillars rather than separate wall boxes — no new posts, no clutter. Our TDT-A3-3P-EV032 is an AC charger built to be embedded directly into a lamp pole or a compatible pole structure: 22 kW on a 3-phase 400 V supply, dropping to roughly 7.36 kW when only a 1-phase 230 V supply is available. It has a 4.3-inch display and Wi-Fi, Ethernet and RFID, with optional 4G/LTE.

Installation

If the charger is a standard model and the pole shape matches, fitting is typically completed within a single site visit. Poles that do not match a standard model can still be served: the unit can be mounted externally, or the housing can be customised for the pole.

Do apartment chargers need OCPP?

It depends on who runs them. Commercial deployments — shared parking, fleet bays, landlord-operated sites — generally require OCPP, so the operator can manage users, set tariffs and monitor the site. Our networked chargers run OCPP 1.6J and integrate with standard back-end platforms. For a private home, that overhead is not always wanted: plug-and-charge or a simple RFID card is often enough.

Requirements vary by market

What applies in one country does not apply in the next — supply voltages, metering arrangements and how charging is billed to residents all differ. If you are planning an apartment or residential project, tell us the country, the available supply voltage and how many bays you need, and we will recommend a configuration.

Planning a project? See the DLB AC charger and the pole-integrated AC charger, or contact our engineers — we reply within one working day.

Shenzhen Holeetech Co., Ltd. manufactures pole-integrated and DLB AC chargers in-house.