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> From our analysis, with a competitive (to public charger) pricing of $3/hr, hosts can expect to make $190-$270/month in profit with just 3 rented hours per day.

$3/hr * 3 hours/day * 30 days = $270. However, this doesn't subtract the cost of electricity to the provider.

My local utility (San Diego Gas & Electric) has a (rather high) standard-rate of $0.51578/kwh in summer (beyond >400% of baseline, which I assume I would hit if I was powering EVs 3 hours every day) [1]. Nissan Leaf's Level 2 charging is 6.6kw [2], so my cost calculation for this service would be:

$0.51578 kwh * 6.6 kw * 3 hours/day * 30 days = $306

So my napkin math says I would lose money ($36/month) providing this service. Am I missing something or would I have to charge more than $3/hour to stay out of the red?

[1] https://www.sdge.com/sites/default/files/regulatory/3-1-19%2...

[2] https://pluginamerica.org/understanding-electric-vehicle-cha...

Related: SDG&E offers a special 'Electric Vehicle' pricing plan with much lower rates ($0.09/kwh), but this special rate is only available midnight to 6am [1].

Most residential EV users will enjoy the reduced overnight rates, but probably not useful for public-service charging which usually takes place during the day when time-of-use electricity rates are at their highest.

[1] https://www.sdge.com/residential/pricing-plans/about-our-pri...

You know your stuff. A major problem the utilities face with EV charging is that there's only 1 meter per house. Utilities actually want to offer lower rates for EV charging, but with a single meter they can't tell what's being used for EV charging vs others. Currently it's the special rate over night. We have a smart switch prototype coming out in a week that can add internet to a switch and supposedly revenue grade metering. Of course, getting things approved by utilities could take months if not years.

PG&E's EV-B tariff is specifically for a dedicated EV meter, but the installation cost of a dedicated meter + box + charger is so much that it really doesn't make sense for residential applications.

eMotorWerks especially is experimenting with chargers that have wifi + a lot of smarts built into them.

Yes, I'm also trying to talk to residential charger OEMs on potential partnerships. I want to stay out of the hardware business if possible.

Yes, the calculation is based on $0.19/kWh charged by PG&E, with tiered rate, that cost does go up. So hosts will need to adjust the hourly prices depending on local cost and actual traffic. The $270 is from hosts with solar panels that have credits stored up. One user living in Santa Clara has 15000 kWhs saved up from almost a decade use of solar.

Thanks, that's a helpful example. This does sound like a great way for residential solar users to offload excess production, particularly if they can't tie it back to the grid directly (e.g., SDG&E's Net Energy Metering program [1]), or if the service rates can be higher than the grid-tie rates.

I guess that underscores that the napkin math gets pretty complicated and local use-cases can vary greatly. I'd be very interested in user-focused calculators that could help in guiding these napkin-math decisions the right hourly price to set locally, and/or whether the combo of residential-utility rates and local average public-charging prices makes it worth providing the service at all.

[1] https://www.sdge.com/residential/savings-center/solar-power-...

Yes, we have a ticket in the back-log to offer a feature that recommend pricing for the hosts. Taking into account public charging rates, utility rates, and traffic. The smart switch also has the purpose to distinguish charging vs just parking. So in some areas, we want to offer a separate rate for parking in the future.

This is really cool Tom! A couple of questions:

- I don't have an electric car charger, but my understanding is that the charger is usually located inside a garage, meaning that the host would have to let the driver into the garage/house. If that's the case, what kind of liability insurance would AmpUp provide?

- Does AmpUp provide pricing recommendations for hosts, or provide information on what other hosts on the platform are charging?

- Is there a internal ratings system for hosts/drivers like Lyft/Uber? Otherwise if a host provides a date/time for charging and doesn't show up and it becomes a major logic path, you would have to provide calls/text support anyways.

- Are you concerned about the possible gamification of prices and hosts on the platform, like that of Airbnb's, that may unduly affect pricing or quality of service for customers that would box you into a corner, and are there any game plans developed for tackling such behavior?

Best of luck, and hope to see greater EV adoption because of AmpUp!

Ratings and reviews are coming. Right now hosts on ampUp are nearly all hand picked. A lot of home chargers in the Bay Area are installed outdoor, and for the ones installed in door the current hosts are all very nice people. I've been to a bunch of them myself. For term of use and liability, we currently roughly follow the same used by Airbnb, but we definitely plan to update. I'm not too concerned about hosts asking for high prices, because public charging will always be an option, so public charging prices will act as a reference.

Congrats on launching! Great job getting >1,000 hosts in a concentrated area--this is where others have fallen short with this idea.

Do you have plans to integrate with public & semi-private CPOs? (charge point operators)

We are a startup CPO. I'm thinking about some of our multi-res customers who installed stations in visitor parking. They have asked us to list their stations publicly so they can recoup their initial costs. Your platform might be a good fit for this.

Let me know if this is interesting!

Let's talk! That sounds very interesting. We firmly believe in the reservation based model. Taxis use to be hailed, but now we reserve them. tom@ampup.io

Yes, removing the uncertainty of if there is a plug available is a big plus

Talk soon!

In TX I got quote for $500-$800 for installing charging panel anywhere I want. I am confused why wouldn't somebody who has a house, and can afford EV car with $7500 credit, not make ONE TIME investment of $1k (US average pricing) to _permanently_ setup house for EV charging?.

Also there is a high chance of pissing neighbors off if you have constant stream of new cars coming into the street, I know me and my neighbors would be, as we have kids playing outside.

Not to mention a lot of utilities will give you rebates for charging equipment. PG&E is now up to an $800 rebate if you switch to their EV plan... that will buy the charger or the install.

It's knowing about all these rates and rebates that's tricky. Dealers should be able to provide you with all this info, but well, that's a whole other story...

Yes, I'm still planning to install a home charger and share it.

Our goal is definitely not make this a business for every hosts. We still have hosts that offer help in case of emergencies, and we love them. They are critical for more EV adoptions. Right now, we have hosts that indicate their chargers are open for emergencies only. ampUp also allow hosts to set a sharing schedule, so limiting the sharing hours within 10am and 2pm when kids are at school could hopefully alleviate the concerns there. Or just offer it for emergencies only! :).

There are any number of reasons why someone is unable to install a charger at home. Highest on the list is that many people rent, and therefore aren't in a position to install, either because the landlord won't allow it, apartment doesn't have parking, or installing is not affordable/practical.

The other issue that comes up is that anyone with an older home most likely won't have the electrical infrastructure to support a Level 2 EV charger, either because of the existing wiring or because the home is served by a <100A panel.

So that's why many can't make the investment you take for granted.

"As a Nissan Leaf driver without a home charger" isn't that the main problem and not the current charging network?

That's definitely a big part of the problem. Many people actually don't have dedicated private charging even today. To get more adoptions to EVs, we definitely need to make sure folks that lack home or workplace charging can predictably charge their cars.

I am also a Nissan Leaf driver. Charging at home is possibly the best reason to have one. Unlike a gas car, I can leave home for every trip with a full "tank".

Fully juiced. haha. Well, I think many people are jealous of you, me included. I actually live in a single family house, but my electric panel is all the way in the backyard. I don't have a sub-panel in the garage. The quotes I got are all around $2000 total to install home charging for me. I wanted to install one and share with people, but so far haven't been able to pull the trigger.

Do you currently just use level 1 charging, or not at all?

Most EVs charge at about 3mph from L1, and if you're on-plug for 10 hours overnight, hey, that's longer than a lot of people commute in a day. Might be able to keep your SoC pretty high with that alone.

Of course L1 is too slow to be useful for sharing, but for a resident it often works out quite well.

Yes, that is my fall back option. I still keep the charging cable that came with the Leaf in the trunk, just in case!

So far, I haven't needed to go to the fall back option. I charge at a l2 host place near my work, and once a week I go to a fast charger near some restaurant.

First off, congrats on the launch and for tackling an underappreciated problem with EVs.

I'm excited about the concept, because it has the elements of something great. But I'm skeptical about the "sharing economy" approach of renting out time on home chargers. Like others have mentioned, the real problem is affordable, available chargers at the user's residence, rather than trying to make more chargers available in residential neighborhoods.

But the other problem that EV users have, especially users that aren't simple there-and-back commuters, is that they need predictable and dependable charging while away from home.

I own an EV myself, and I can't tell you how many times I've made a trip somewhere during the day, expecting to have a charger available, only to find that they're all taken when I arrive. This is somewhat alleviated by networked chargers, where you can see whether they're available beforehand, but there's been many occasions where the charger is snagged by someone else while I'm driving there. Because of this I'm extremely cautious about driving too far in a given day, and in fact, end up using a regular gasoline car if I know I have to drive beyond the range of my EV, since it's too hard to tell if and when I'll be able to charge along the way.

So where your concept comes in is the ability to reserve chargers. That means I can actually plan my day, plan a road trip, etc. And ideally the chargers will be in the same places I actually want to go - along freeways, in shopping centers, downtown, etc (i.e. not far off in residential areas).

I could definitely see this as a service that could plug into existing networks (e.g. EVGo, Blink, Chargepoint, etc), although getting them all to play nice together is difficult. But I would heartily applaud someone who could organize and simplify EV charging away from home and make it dependable and predictable. Good luck!

Hi Jason,

I can tell this problem has affected you and you have thought about it deeply. Really appreciate your feedbacks. Overall I agree with you completely. The biggest assumption regarding this startup/project is that the p2p charging market can be build up to a substantial size beyond just one-off emergencies or long road trip cases. This is something some folks doubt and something I'm betting my blood, sweat and tears in. What makes me confident is my own experience. I was FORCED to try the couch surfing type of charging with Plugshare first that I was super skeptical of myself, and LUCKILY my first experience worked really well. I also noticed with just 2 simple features the experience can be mostly consistently good. There are more than 10,000 hosts on Plugshare, and if the experience can be consistently good, it could turn into THE largest charging network in the world. We are not there, but I want to get there.

Very interesting idea with great potential. I'm sure you will iron out the problems because the demand is certainly there. May I ask what your tech stack is for the app and also are you going to develop a web app and what will be the tech stack for that? Or is a web app seen as unimportant?

So this costs the driver $1 per 6 miles? If gas is $3/gallon and my car gets 24 mpg, then I'm paying $1 per 6 miles. This is not on par with the Mirage's 36/43mpg.

Your service effectively makes electric cars equally or more expensive to drive than gas cars. Could work but seems to remove a solid benefit of EVs.

You have a point on this one. However, it's not my service that's causing this. The price suggested was based on public charging rate, and the money will go to the hosts. There's no way to guarantee profit for the hosts always given electricity rates will change and gas prices will likely drop. The miles per kWh also changes depending on how you drive and the weather. Typical users will have a combination of home, workplace, public, and peer to peer charging. The total should still make EVs cheaper to drive. If all chargings are done via ampUp, yes the cost maybe as high or even higher than driving gas car. It's not likely, and peer to peer charging does add the reservation/predictability benefit to it.

Awesome project!

Few notes about the website:

Check the meta tags. "title" says "Template" and "description" says "Sample". I tried to share this with my friends and url preview said Template / Sample.

Currently your website title is "Home" it probably should be your apps name.

Good luck.

Thank you!

> From our analysis, with a competitive (to public charger) pricing of $3/hr

My 2012 Leaf takes 3 hours to fully charge on a L2 charger, and that gets me 35-40 miles range. $9 for 35-40 miles. My Camaro gets 20 miles to the gallon, it's significantly cheaper to put gas in the 320HP Camaro than pay this kind of rate for charging.

A 6.6 kW L2 charger should put about 20 miles per hour of charging, so for 3 hours that's 60 miles. I do believe the 2012 Leaf gets maybe 40 in total, since battery degrade and older Leafs actually tell you how much your battery has degraded.

With that exact example of $3/hr, yes it's more expensive to use p2p charging than driving your Camaro. There are hosts that offer cheaper or free charging. The $3/hr is an example based on public charging rate in the Bay Area. Another case is if the host happen to be in a highly visited location and charge $10/hr for charging and parking.

EVs are still overall a bit more expensive than gas cars. That's why there are still subsidies. In the bigger picture, it's still paramount we switch to a cleaner and more sustainable energy source, and electrifying transportation is an inevitable step. I'm confident the technology will mature and will mature fast.

We are still working on a long list of exciting features collected from user feedbacks and my personal experiences. Please stay tuned for those by following our Twitter: https://twitter.com/ampup_io

I am happy you all are launching and wish you well. Increasingly seems the companies launching on HN are in search of a problem. Renting a charger because you don't have one at home seems like a backwards way to solve the problem! But, I am only one person and not the market

There are definitely more than one way to solve a problem, and ampUp is just one of the many efforts out there trying to alleviate the range anxiety issue. The way you phrased seem to suggest everyone should install home charging, which is definitely not possible when more people adopt EVs. I started having a problem myself, then trying to use existing solution to solve my problem first, and finally offering something I think works better.

The problem still is the charging time. EV occupied the space longer than a gas car does refill. Until we reached the technology where the batteries can be charged in seconds, 'drive EV as effortlessly as driving a gas car' is a bit of overstatement i think.

That would definitely be the ultimate goal. Tesla just released the V3 charging, 75 miles in 5 mins. Hopefully others can follow quickly. I do think reservations can add quiet a bit of convenience or at least the predictability that feels good. Taxi were hailed, and currently we basically reserve them.

For the majority of EV owners who do have home chargers, the "time you spend involved in charging" is about 10 seconds to plug in when you park at night, and 10 seconds to unplug and stow the cord the following morning. That's less time than you spend at the gas pump.

This also applies to folks who can charge at work. Charge speed does not matter if charging happens while you're inside doing something else for several hours.

Do hosts have to be home in person or are you guys partnering with smart garage door opener companies? I can't see letting people use my garage at night since space is a premium and I need to charge my own car.

At this point if the charger is in an access restricted place, the host will need to somehow allow access. In California, there are many that have the charger installed outdoor and use the garage as another room or a gym. In the Bay Area, for instance, 36% of people who share their charger have it installed outdoor. For chargers installed outdoor, it's fully automated. Working with remote controlled garage opener and some security camera partners are definitely in our plans. We are also looking into the option of extending the charging cable, so it can be left outside.

Many chargers have wifi or bluetooth connectivity. Seems to me that there's an obvious integration here. Visitor's phone and charger authenticate each other, charging starts.

OpenEVSE could be a perfect platform for prototyping this. Our hackerspace has one on the wall right now, and we're adding another because so many members drive EVs now.

Thank you! Let me know if you are open to try an integrated pilot with us.

Can't see how this will be a sustainable business, at all. The whole goal of the network is to eliminate the waiting problems. Which will be solved in 5 years.

EV growth is much higher than charging infrastructure growth. The current network of public chargers are predominantly level 2 chargers. There are many things that limit public charging installations like architectural changes and grid upgrade involved that need approvals from different entities. Some apartment management refuse installations because the architectural changes would violate rights of some tenants. I have heard a year's time was taken from the moment HOA approved EVSE installation to the actual EVSE being installed. The most optimistic projection for EV adoption world wide by 2025 is 14%, and I strongly doubt charging infra will be sufficient or have caught up by then. This problem will get worse before it gets better. If we change the time frame to 10 years, many many things could happen and I hope ampUp can continue to adopt.

Awesome project, guys! Congratulations on the launch. Can't wait to see where this electrification takes us, and stoked YC is supporting EV startups. More!

Thank you! We love feedbacks on the app to keep making it better. Email me directly at tom@ampup.io

Genius! Applauding for the concept and clean, easy to understand design.

Thank you for the encouragements! There are still a ton of work to be done to get the user experience to what we envision. Please keep the feedbacks coming!

Great Idea! I hope you have much success!

Launch HN: AmpUp (YC W19) – A reservable electric car charging network