UPOWA – Epro EV car charger

Epro EV Car Charger for New Build Housing Market

HBS NE Ltd, trading as UPOWA (part of the Brickability PLC Group) provides house developers, construction companies and commercial businesses with a “one-stop-shop” of sustainable technology products and specialist services to accelerate the journey to net-zero.

UPOWA were looking for a contract design partner to collaborate with them in the development of an innovative and disruptive ‘complete solution’ EV charger targeted at the new build housing market. Ease of installation and product robustness were the key design considerations.

Easy to Install, Robust and Compliant

As a burgeoning market, the regulatory landscape for ‘smart charging’ is evolving rapidly.  UPOWA needed a team that could develop a new EV charger that could meet Part S regulations, make it easy for house builders to install, all in a design for manufacture that met profitability thresholds, without impacting on the end user experience.

Delivering First-to-Market, First Time

• A first-to-market EV charger that does not require fitters to open the case when installing.  This greatly reduces the likelihood of technical issues, or contamination (building sites being inherently messy environments) and boosts productivity by cutting installation time.
• UPOWA’s product passed all regulatory approvals on first pass

Working with the UPOWA team, Newbury Innovation designed

• The first EV charger solution to integrate the T2 connector onto the PCB, and the first to market single PCB approach – making the product more efficient and resilient with better MTBF.
• A novel Waygo electrical interconnection interface means installers don’t need to open the full case when fitting the charger – making this a far more accessible and simplified product for the house builder, with unrivalled installation speeds.

“We worked with Newbury Innovation from concept creation all the way to full regulatory approvals. I instantly saw the value in using a specialist innovation house that had access to every discipline needed for the complex product from firmware, electronics, mechanical design, Apps and cloud development.”

All elements of the product development, including all regulatory and certification, were completed under one-roof at Newbury Innovation’s state-of-the-art design and manufacture facility. A specially selected team of Newbury experts supported UPOWA with a full EV solution including electronics, mechanical industrial design, firmware, App, cloud software – all undertaken in house including the managing of all areas of compliance and approvals testing (OCPP 1.6, OZEV CE UKCA RED).

This significantly improved the development process, enabling rapid iteration to a launch product that achieved full approvals on its first pass.

Working with Newbury Innovation

“I have been working with Newbury Innovation for a couple of years on the development of a brand new product to the market. Without an in-house technical team we needed to partner with someone with extensive end-to-end experience in the UK. 

“Newbury Innovation has been extremely proactive throughout the entire project, bringing innovative differentiation solutions and they quickly became an invaluable extension of the team. On the back of the extensive in-house expertise at Newbury Innovation we also utilized their supply chain experience to develop a full end-to-end solution of our product. They saved us valuable time in the approval proves with proactive pre-compliance work meaning it passed official certification first time enabling us to bring the product to market.

I look forward to working with Newbury Innovation to further develop our product set and would not hesitate to expand our relationship with the team. “

John Southern – Head of Product and Strategy – HBS NE Ltd t/a UPOWA.