Scaling EV charger installations from pilot to thousands

Almost every charger program starts the same way: a pilot with one installer partner, fifty installations, a shared spreadsheet, and a coordinator who knows every customer by name. It works, and that is the trap. Pilots run on personal heroics, and heroics do not scale. Somewhere between fifty installations a month and five hundred, every manual step you tolerated becomes a queue, and the queue becomes your brand.

1. Sell installation at checkout, at a fixed price

The biggest design choice is where the installation gets sold. The weak pattern is “buy the charger, and someone will contact you with a quote.” Every step of that sentence loses customers. Some are never contacted. Some get a quote that feels arbitrary and stall. Some shop the quote around. You sold a charger and handed the customer homework.

The strong pattern is installation as a line item in the same checkout, at a fixed price for a defined standard scope. Customers do not want the cheapest possible installation. They want to know the price before they commit, and a fixed price wins even when it carries a buffer. Tesla's offer with Done in Sweden works this way: the Wall Connector and its installation are added during the car purchase, at a fixed price with the green technology deduction already applied. The customer decides once, when intent is highest.

Define the standard scope tightly and publish it. For example: charger on a garage or outside wall, surface-run cable up to a set length from the fuse box, circuit breaker and residual-current device included. Everything outside that scope is extra work, which is decision three.

2. Collect photos before anyone drives anywhere

If we could give a growing charger program one operational change, it would be this one. The failed first visit is the most expensive routine event in the business. An electrician arrives, finds that the main fuse is too small, the fuse box has no free space, or the parking spot is 40 meters away from it, and leaves without installing anything. You pay for the visit, the customer waits weeks for a new slot, and the rebooked job starts with a conversation about unexpected costs.

A pre-check prevents most of this. Right after ordering, the customer is guided through taking a handful of photos with their phone. It takes a few minutes and catches what would otherwise be discovered on site. Photo analysis takes it further: it reads the meter and fuse box from the images and flags likely extra costs before dispatch, so the price conversation happens before the visit instead of during it.

Commercial sites vary more and cost more to get wrong. There the same principle extends to video site assessments, which is how Wattif runs expansions of its existing charging sites with Done.

3. Pre-price the extras and get them approved in writing

A fixed price only holds if extra work is handled with the same discipline. The failure mode is familiar: the installer finds extra work on site, agrees on something verbally with the customer, invoices you in free text, and three weeks later you are refereeing a dispute about a number nobody wrote down.

The model that scales has three rules:

• Price the catalog in advance. Extra cable per meter, core drilling through concrete, main fuse upgrades, load balancing: the common extras are predictable. Price them once, centrally, so ten installers quote the same job the same way.
• Approve digitally before the work. The installer builds the quote from the catalog, on site or straight after the pre-check, and the customer approves it in writing on their phone before any work starts.
• Only approved items can be invoiced. When the system makes unapproved charges impossible, not merely discouraged, disputes stop being part of the job. This rule protects your margin and your review score at the same time.

4. Build capacity from more than one source

Pilots usually run on a couple of employed electricians or one trusted subcontractor. Neither survives growth on its own. Own crews give you control, along with fixed cost and a hiring ceiling. Subcontractors give you flexibility, along with uneven quality and a pile of invoices. Geography breaks both, because volume never arrives evenly across a country.

Most programs end up with a mix: their own or dedicated crews where they have density, and a managed network for peaks and thin regions. Elbilsvaruhuset works this way on Done, coordinating its own installation teams and network capacity in one flow, and has scaled to thousands of installations. E2Charge made the opposite call: it sells a complete charger-and-installation offer without building an installer organization of its own, and has delivered hundreds of installations at 4.7/5 customer satisfaction. Both work. What fails is deciding once and hard-wiring that decision into your tools, because the right mix shifts as volume and geography change. Our guide to in-house vs outsourced installations covers this decision in depth.

5. Measure per installer and per region

Five numbers tell you whether a charger operation is healthy. Track them per installer and per region, because company averages hide the tail that generates your complaints.

• Time to first contact: from order to first contact with an installer. It sets the customer's expectations for everything that follows. In the Done network, 80% of customers reach an available installer the same day and 50% within two hours.
• Time to installation: from order to completed installation. Watch the distribution, not the average. The slowest tenth of jobs is where cancellations happen.
• First-visit completion rate: the share of jobs finished on the first visit. It tells you directly how good your pre-checks are.
• Dispute rate: the share of invoices contested by customers or installers. It tells you how disciplined your extras process is.
• Customer satisfaction: a rating for every completed installation, tied to the individual installer. Across 20,000+ installations on Done the average is 4.8/5. An installer trending below their peers is a coaching conversation to have early.

What is different in Sweden

Two rules regularly catch out companies new to the Swedish market. The first is föranmälan, the grid pre-notification. Since January 1, 2026, the standard consumer grid terms (ELNÄT 2025 K) state explicitly that a fixed-installed EV charger must not be installed until the grid operator has received and approved a pre-notification. Sweden has 150+ grid operators, and they apply the rule differently: some always require it for chargers, some only above a certain power, some use digital portals, others paper forms. At volume you need to know each operator's rule before you schedule, or approval lead times quietly wreck your time to installation. Our föranmälan guide covers the details.

The second is the green technology deduction (grön teknik). Private customers get a tax deduction on labor and materials for a charger installation. It is applied directly on the invoice, and the company that invoices claims the amount back from Skatteverket. Done checks the customer's remaining deduction via BankID before invoicing. Built into the price shown at checkout, the deduction makes the fixed price visibly lower. Bolted on afterward, it becomes a reimbursement project for your finance team. Plan for it from day one.

The rollout order

Going from pilot to scale, sequence the work like this: pricing and standard scope first, then pre-checks, then the extras catalog, then capacity, then dashboards. Teams that start by adding installers to a broken process just produce failed visits faster.