Orange Charger Thinks $750 Plug Will Solve EV Charging for Apartment Dwellers

Nicholas Johnson started a company because he lost a bet.

Johnson was dining with investors from Lyt, a traffic congestion management company he co-founded. As the conversation continued over dinner, it focused on electric vehicle charging and how best to integrate it into multi-family housing.

Apartment dwellers who own electric vehicles are often left with two less-than-ideal choices: public chargers or plugging their vehicles into regular 120-volt outlets, which adds about 3 to 5 miles of range per hour. Johnson wasn’t intrigued by the problem, so one of the people at the dinner made him a proposition.

“One of our investors bet me to drive to and from work, which was about 48 miles at the time, for six months charging my electric vehicle with nothing more than a power outlet. level 1,” Johnson told TechCrunch. “He said, ‘If you don’t need to plug into a DC fast charger other than for weekend road trips, I win the bet and you have to build me a prototype.’ » He won the bet and I built him a prototype.

This prototype would form the basis of a new startup, Orange Charger, of which Johnson is now CEO. The company, which sells homeowners a 240-volt smart plug, among other products, raised an oversubscribed $6.5 million seed round, Orange Charger told TechCrunch exclusively. The round was led by Munich Re Ventures and Climactic with participation from Baukunst, Crow Holdings, Lincoln Property Ventures and Space Cadet Ventures.

Charging has long been the Achilles heel of electric vehicles, and few EV drivers know it as well as apartment dwellers, many of whom aren’t guaranteed a place to charge overnight. Today, the majority of electric vehicle charging happens at home, but most multi-family homes don’t have chargers or even power outlets at every parking spot. If electric vehicles are to achieve mass adoption in the United States, the 40 million people who live in multifamily housing will need a more convenient way to stock up on energy.

Many startups have sprung up to solve the problem, and most of them focus on selling and installing enough charging equipment to serve a percentage of tenants. Even then, this can be an expensive proposition, often costing a few thousand dollars per booth. Landlords are hesitant to install electric vehicles unless there are enough tenants with electric vehicles. “When you have 100 or 200 parking spaces in a multifamily building, you really don’t want 200 cables laying in a parking lot, especially when on the first day, 10 to 20 people are going to be using it,” Johnson said. But at the same time, renters might be hesitant to purchase electric vehicles without a convenient place to charge them.

Orange Charger thinks it has a better solution and is betting that owners will prefer it. Rather than installing a multitude of Level 2 chargers, which provide enough electrons for several days of daily driving, Orange Charger offers 240-volt outlets full of intelligence. Electric vehicle owners can plug in the Level 2 portable charger that often comes with their vehicle and activate the outlet using an app.

Orange Charger’s Level 2 outlets provide less power than a commercial unit, but enough to add about 150 miles of range overnight. The lower power consumption means electricians can use thinner gauge wire, which Johnson says costs about a third less. “The savings per foot add up very quickly. »

The plug design has been tested to withstand plugging and unplugging at least 10,000 times. “We didn’t want to have that experience that everyone has had of plugging into an outlet on a plane or a hotel and having it fail.” » Johnson said.

Orange Charger sells Level 2-compatible outlets for $750, not including installation, which Johnson said is the company’s “core product.” It also offers Level 1 compatible outlets for $600 and a full Level 2 charger for $2,000.

Each of the Orange Charger products has a circuit board inside that serves as a node on its mesh network, which can operate via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and each outlet can still function if the connection to the Internet is interrupted, sending data from session to the cloud once connectivity is restored. “Imagine not being able to charge for five hours because someone cut the wrong cable on our street,” Johnson said. “We wanted to create something robust.” So far, the company has been able to initiate more than 99% of all attempted charging sessions, he added.