Everyday life with charging at home
For many e-car drivers, charging at home is the most convenient and at the same time cheapest way to charge their vehicle. The car is parked in the driveway or underground garage every evening anyway — so why not just plug it in and drive off the next morning with a full battery?
But in practice, billing in particular is often more complicated than it sounds. Not everyone has their own wallbox, and apartment buildings and rental properties often lack the option to install an intelligent charging station. Even where there is a wallbox, the question is: How can electricity costs be calculated correctly — especially if the vehicle is used for business purposes?
For companies, this is a key point in electrifying their fleets: How can charging at home be fairly, simply and transparently integrated into existing billing processes — without additional hardware, without complex installations and regardless of where someone lives or charges?
This is exactly where ChargeHome comes in:
With an approach that doesn't start at the charging station, but directly with the vehicle — and thus makes charging at home and billing as easy as it should be.
Why classic solutions are reaching their limits
This is because most standard solutions for recording charging processes are based on station data — i.e. information that comes directly from the charging station. This sounds obvious at first, but in practice it entails several restrictions.
1. High dependence on “intelligent” charging stations
For billing to be possible, charging processes must be measured precisely and determined via an interface. Simple, non-networked wallboxes and power outlets cannot provide this data. They do not record the amount of charged energy or the vehicle consumption. For this reason, a new “intelligent” charging station is required in many cases. This causes costs, installation costs and results in inconsistent data quality, as different formats and accuracies are used depending on the manufacturer.
2. Restricted freedom of choice for drivers
In apartment buildings or rental properties, it is often not possible to freely select or replace the charging station. In these cases, the charging infrastructure belongs to the administration, the landlord or the condominium owner — or it is part of a jointly installed solution. This means that employees depend on existing hardware, and standard solutions, which necessarily require a specific “intelligent” charging station, simply do not work here.
As a result, large parts of e-car drivers are not taken into account — particularly in urban areas where the proportion of apartment buildings is particularly high. In Switzerland, around 75% of people live in multi-family buildings. For companies with company car fleets, this means that the majority of their employees cannot be covered at all with traditional billing solutions. *
3. Closed system landscapes
Existing charging points, particularly in multi-party properties, are often already integrated into a billing or administration system of an energy supplier or external service provider. In such setups, the OCPP interface — the charging station's central communication connection — is already busy. Since this interface can only be used once, it is difficult to connect to an additional system in parallel.
It would be theoretically possible to integrate the station via a second technical interface such as Modbus. Modbus is an older, widely used industrial protocol that transmits simple measurement values (e.g. current, voltage, temperatures) but provides significantly less information than OCPP. In addition, the use of Modbus requires individual programming per manufacturer or even per model, which in practice is cost-intensive, administratively complex and susceptible to faults. Reliable additional integration into fleet processes is therefore realistically impossible to implement.
4. Limited range of use
Many solutions only work at the main residence. However, anyone who charges at a secondary location, at a holiday home or with friends cannot record or bill these charging processes. For companies with mobile employees or multiple private charging locations, this is a clear disadvantage.
5. No clear allocation for multiple vehicles
When different vehicles charge at the same station — such as the company car and the private vehicle — the station is usually unable to distinguish which amount of energy belongs to which vehicle. Accurate and fair billing is not possible in this way.
6. Unequal treatment compared to combustion vehicles
Many employees rightly expect cost neutrality when switching to electric mobility. While fuel is clearly billed using fuel cards for combustion vehicles, e-vehicles often involve manual processes, flat rates or delays. This reduces the acceptance of e-vehicles by employees.
Our approach: thinking from the vehicle
ChargeHome thinks the other way around — from the vehicle.
Because the vehicle knows best when, where and how much is being charged. It recognizes the battery level, the location and the kilometers traveled — in other words, exactly the information that is crucial for fair and simple billing.
Instead of installing new hardware for every employee, ChargeHome uses this existing vehicle data — securely, standardized and brand-independent. This makes the car itself a data source for charging at home.
Here is how it works:
- Charging location recognition: ChargeHome uses the vehicle data to recognize when a vehicle is being charged at a private address — such as at home, at a holiday home or even with friends.
- Determination of charged energy: The app tracks the battery level (state of charge) and uses this to calculate exactly how much energy was added during the charging process.
- Automatic rate allocation: With ChargeHome, tariff allocation is completely automatic: As soon as a charging process is detected at a private address, the system assigns the correct household rate. The basis for this is the official ElCom pricing information, which is updated annually and transferred directly to ChargeHome.
- Direct refund: The loaded amount is refunded directly to the employee — without an additional tool, without manual entry and without intervention in existing processes.
This makes charging at home truly independent of the charging infrastructure for the first time. Whether via a simple power outlet, an intelligent wallbox, or an existing solution: ChargeHome works anywhere — with minimal effort and maximum transparency.
What are the benefits of ChargeHome?
ChargeHome solves central problems of classic, station-based solutions by working completely independently of the existing charging infrastructure. Employees do not have to select or replace their wallbox — a major advantage, especially for the many drivers in apartment buildings who have no control over the installation.
Since billing is not linked to a proprietary wallbox backend, ChargeHome also works where existing systems cannot be opened.
For drivers, everything is bundled in one app: They can enter several private addresses — from their own homes to second homes to holiday homes or the homes of friends and relatives. Each of these locations is automatically correctly identified and assigned the appropriate tariff, so that these private charging processes are also refunded cleanly.
At the same time, companies benefit from an equally simple and transparent administration. All charging processes recorded via the app are automatically incorporated into the fleet management tool. There, the data is neatly prepared so that the refunds can be processed comprehensibly and without additional manual effort.
Is that accurate enough? The answer to one of the most common questions
A common argument against vehicle-based billing is the question of accuracy: Can the amount of charged energy really be calculated reliably based on the battery level — or is a measurement at the charging station necessarily more accurate?
Reality shows a different picture. Physically, charging losses of 5-10% occur with every charging process, regardless of which wallbox is used. These losses occur along the entire charging infrastructure: from the home installation to the supply line, the wallbox and the charging cable to the onboard charger and the battery itself**. Put simply: A wallbox always shows more energy than actually arrives in the battery — even its measurement contains unavoidable losses.
Our internal evaluations show: The average deviation between ChargeHome and the station is only around 2.5%. ChargeHome is therefore within and in many cases even below the natural charging losses that are physically unavoidable.
To continuously ensure accuracy, we regularly carry out variance analyses between vehicle data and wallbox measurements. We use this data to continuously refine our calculation methods and to represent other vehicle models even more precisely.
Charging starts in the vehicle
ChargeHome rethinks charging at home — from the vehicle instead of from the station. With vehicle-based data, automatic billing and maximum flexibility, ChargeHome creates a new standard for simple, equitable and sustainable charging at home. This not only makes electric mobility more efficient, but also fairer and more suitable for everyday use — for companies and drivers alike.
**Charging losses in electric cars: That's how much is lost when charging
