Before buying a charging station, you should be aware of the different charger classes and models. This will help you save money as you can purchase a product that exactly meets your needs.

For example, why pay more for a three-phase charger if your garage doesn’t have a three-phase power supply?

Or if your vehicle absorbs 16 amperes why buy a 32 amp charger?

We will first divide the charging stations into two categories: a) Single Phase and b) Three Phase (Note that in the response we will deal with AC Charging Stations. For DC charging see next question)

So if we have a single-phase power supply in our building and do not intend to upgrade it to a three-phase one, then we choose a single-phase charging station. Conversely if we have 3 power supply then we can choose either single phase or three phase station depending on the needs of our car. Generally, three-phase charging is faster provided our car can handle it.

The next important parameter is the power of our charger. It is very important to choose a charging power that matches both the vehicle we are about to charge and the electrical capacity of our space.

There are four categories of AC charging power:

– 3.7 KW 1 phase

– 7.4 KW 1 phase

– 11 KW 3 phase

– 22KW 3 phase

Apart from the above if your premises are professional or shared or you are an advanced electric car driver then it is important to consider whether your charging station provides the ability to connect to an on-line monitoring and control platform, one that provides smart charging, load balancing, etc.