> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.spirii.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Truck charging
> Unlock depot and on-the-road charging for your heavy-duty fleet with Spirii.
Charging is one of the biggest running costs in an electric truck fleet, and how the depot is set up decides both what it costs and whether the trucks leave on time.
## Overview
Truck charging succeeds on three things:
* Every vehicle charged and ready when its shift starts.
* Drivers authenticating without friction, at the depot and on the route.
* Energy bought at the cheapest hours, inside the grid capacity you already pay for.
The four phases below take a depot from configuration to cost allocation:
Set the depot up, and settle the choices that shape how far it can scale.
Confirm each vehicle is recognised and a full charging window finishes before shift start.
Charge to the duty cycle, keep the fleet moving, and hold energy costs down.
Allocate charging cost across the fleet, and collect revenue where you've opened the site.
The last two repeat for as long as the depot operates. A final section covers the same fleet charging out on the road.
## Before you start
This guide is for an operator running a heavy-duty or medium-duty electric fleet: logistics companies, freight carriers, distributors, and municipal fleets. Grid connection, civil works, hardware installation, and vehicle procurement sit outside it. [Quick start for fleets](/guides/fleet-quickstart) is the shortest path to a working depot if you want that first.
**Who owns and operates the chargers** shapes where the depot sits in the platform:
* **You own and operate them**, on a site you own or lease. The location sits under your own account.
* **The property owner operates them** and your fleet charges as their customer. You sit in their hierarchy, and they set the tariff and access.
* **You operate them on a leased site** where the landlord takes a share of what the chargers earn.
Settle this before you configure anything. It decides who holds the operator role, who receives any payout, and whose service commitment covers the site.
## Configure
### Upfront decisions
| Decision | Consequence | Documented in |
| --------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Circuit design and groundwork for your future fleet | Load balancing shares out whatever the circuit allows. Size it for today's fleet and growing later means new electrical work. Digging up the yard a second time is the costly part, so lay cable and ducting for the bays you expect while the ground is open. | [Energy management](/capabilities/energy-management) |
| Charger model | Load balancing, scheduled charging, Autocharge, and grid balancing each depend on the model supporting them, and grid balancing is validated to a higher bar than charging alone. | [Grid balancing](/capabilities/energy-management/grid-balancing) |
| Authentication method | Autocharge identifies a vehicle by its VIN or MAC address and works only on the Spirii network. Drivers who charge away from the depot need a roaming-enabled token as well. | [Token authentication](/capabilities/access/token-authentication) |
| Who the site is open to | Moving between access tiers is straightforward, and each carries different pricing, regulatory, and access-management work. | [Location access](/capabilities/access/location-access) |
### Choose an access tier
A depot doesn't have to be closed. These three tiers cover most cases, differing in who can find the site and who can charge there.
| Tier | Who can charge | How you set it |
| --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Private | Your own fleet, and anyone you admit deliberately | Leave the location unpublished, bind a token group to it, and issue vouchers for partner fleets |
| Public within opening hours | The public during the hours you set; your fleet at all times | Publish the location and define opening hours. Outside them, only a bound token group or a voucher authorises |
| Fully public with roaming | Any driver, including drivers arriving from other networks | Publish the location, enable roaming, and set both a tariff and a roaming tariff |
A private depot declines an ordinary registered token, so admitting anyone beyond your own fleet means adding their tokens to a bound group or issuing them a [voucher](/capabilities/access/voucher-access). A voucher carries its own price, which is how a partner fleet charges at a negotiated rate while your own pricing stays untouched.
Opening hours are the tier worth understanding before dismissing it. A depot whose trucks are out between 06:00 and 18:00 has capacity sitting idle through the working day, and other logistics operators nearby have vehicles that need charging in exactly those hours. Publishing the site for that window turns an idle asset into a partnership: local fleets charge at a rate you set, your own drivers keep guaranteed access around the clock, and neither of you pays for infrastructure you only need part of the day.
### Set up authentication and pricing
Issue each driver or vehicle a token: RFID for a card, virtual for an app, or vehicle for Autocharge by VIN or MAC address. At a depot, Autocharge removes the friction entirely, since a driver plugs in and walks away without finding a card at 05:00. See [Token authentication](/capabilities/access/token-authentication).
Every location bills against a tariff, including a depot charging its own fleet, where a 0 EUR tariff is the usual answer. Where you've opened the site, the public tariff and any voucher tariffs sit alongside it. See [Pricing options and logic](/capabilities/pricing/pricing-options-and-logic).
Autocharge works only on Spirii's own network, so a vehicle relying on it at the depot won't be recognised on another operator's chargers. Any driver who charges away from the depot needs an active, roaming-enabled token as well.
You set scheduled charging up yourself in Connect. The rest of energy management — load balancing and programmatic charger control — is enabled on a location by Spirii, so ask your Spirii representative to factor it into your timeline rather than assuming it's ready on the day.
## Validate
Before the depot carries a shift pattern, confirm it behaves for the vehicles that depend on it.
Autocharge identifies a vehicle by its VIN or MAC address, and whether a given truck presents one reliably varies. Test each vehicle at the charger instead of trusting a specification sheet.
Charge a vehicle from its typical return state to the level its route needs, inside the window you plan to use. This is what tells you whether the circuit, the charger power, and the window length agree with the duty cycle.
On a private depot, confirm a token inside the bound group charges and one outside it is declined. Where you've published the site, check the hours behave as you set them.
A session started by `EVBUS.0007` at `Munich DC Hub` should produce a charge detail record carrying that token and the customer it belongs to. That attribution is what cost allocation depends on later.
The depot is ready when you have:
* Every vehicle recognised by its own token or Autocharge identifier
* A full charging window completing inside the time available
* Access behaving as configured for your chosen tier
* Sessions attributing to the right vehicle and cost centre
## Operate
Three levers carry the cost of running a depot and the reliability of what leaves it: the charging schedule, the power available, and how quickly you know something has failed.
### Charge to the duty cycle
Trucks sit plugged in far longer than they need to charge, and that slack is what a depot runs on. Charging windows use it in one of two ways: you set the window yourself, or you set the hours and an end time and let the platform pick the cheapest intervals inside them. Either way the vehicle is full before the window closes, and the energy is bought when it costs less. [Energy management](/capabilities/energy-management) covers the mechanics.
Where some vehicles have to be ready whatever else is happening, prioritised charging gives a vehicle with a priority token maximum power first. It takes effect only while a power limit is active, so it works alongside load balancing.
### Get more out of the connection you have
[Load balancing](/capabilities/energy-management) distributes power across the depot within the circuit's fuse limit, which is what lets you add chargers inside an existing grid connection instead of waiting on an upgrade. In markets where connection queues run long, that wait is often what limits fleet growth.
Programmatic charger control opens the depot to your own energy management system, so on-site solar and battery storage drive charging directly: charging follows generation, leans on the battery at peak, and the site stays inside its connection limit. A battery is also how some depots avoid a connection upgrade altogether.
A depot fleet charging between shifts suits [grid balancing](/capabilities/energy-management/grid-balancing), which earns revenue for brief adjustments to charging power when the grid needs them. You control the vehicles and the schedule, so you know how much slack there is to sell, and you choose the hours you expose. That page carries the market, hardware, and portfolio requirements.
### Monitor the depot
A charger that failed overnight is a truck that doesn't leave.
The Monitoring list carries every charge box currently offline and every EVSE reporting a fault. Alerts email you when either happens, so for a depot the one that matters arrives before the morning shift rather than after it.
See [Faults and alerts](/capabilities/operation-monitoring/faults-and-alerts).
Filtered to the depot, the Connectors page is a bay-by-bay view: what each vehicle is drawing and its state of charge, where the charge box reports it. That's how you tell a vehicle that will be ready on time from one that won't.
See [Live status tracking](/capabilities/operation-monitoring/live-status-tracking).
Where the depot feeds dispatch or route planning, the same live data is available through the [API](/developers/fleet-management), including state of charge and expected readiness per vehicle. That's how charging state reaches your transport management or telematics system.
## Settle
A depot charging its own fleet on a 0 EUR tariff produces no payout, so settlement here is about cost rather than revenue: what each vehicle, driver, or sub-fleet consumed, at the depot and on the route, and what it cost.
Model the cost centres you want to report on as customers, and link each token to the one that should carry it. Every session then produces a charge detail record carrying the token and the customer, so an [export](/capabilities/reporting-analytics/exports) splits consumption by vehicle, driver, or depot without joining it to anything else. The [Dashboard](/capabilities/reporting-analytics/dashboard) covers depot utilisation over a period.
On-road charging is where the cost sits. Sessions your drivers run on other operators' networks reach you as a single consolidated invoice from Spirii covering all outbound roaming, rather than separate bills from each network your trucks happened to stop at. Sessions on Spirii-connected chargers outside your own sites are billed the same way, against the token that started them and to the customer it belongs to. Both land in the same records as depot charging, so cost per vehicle covers the whole route and not just the yard. See [Roaming settlement](/capabilities/billing-payouts/roaming-settlement).
Where you've opened the depot, revenue reaches you as it does at any public location: Spirii collects and pays out monthly via a self-billing invoice, net of platform and payment fees. See [Understanding your payout](/capabilities/billing-payouts/payouts). Where a property owner takes a share of what the chargers earn, configure the split on the location and each party receives their own invoice — see [Revenue sharing](/capabilities/billing-payouts/revenue-sharing).
## On the road
The same drivers charge away from the depot, on other operators' networks, with the tokens you already issued.
Enable roaming on each token, keep it active, and label it in the format [Roaming connection](/capabilities/roaming/roaming-connection) describes. An incorrectly labelled token is a common reason a driver can't charge on another network. Autocharge doesn't travel, so a vehicle relying on it at the depot needs a roaming-enabled token for the road.
Drivers find charging through Spirii Go or your branded app, where the map covers your own sites alongside public and roaming chargers. A heavy-vehicle filter narrows it to sites that suit the vehicle, across truck with trailer, rigid truck, bus, and semi-tractor, so a driver isn't routed somewhere their vehicle can't physically use. What appears depends on the vehicle types each operator publishes for their sites. In Connect, the Charge Map shows the same coverage for planning a route. See [Network coverage](/capabilities/roaming/network-coverage).
Sessions on other networks land back in Connect against the token that started them, billed to the customer it belongs to, so on-road charging appears in the same records and exports as depot charging.
## Continuous optimisation
A depot is sized for a fleet, and the fleet changes. Adding vehicles pushes against the circuit before it pushes against the chargers, so revisit the load management design each time the fleet grows, ahead of the day a fuse trips. If the groundwork covers more bays than you built, adding chargers means mounting the units and bringing them online. If it doesn't, the yard has to be opened up again. Duty cycles shift with contracts, which moves the charging windows. And a depot whose utilisation drops is a candidate for opening hours, turning idle bays into revenue without giving up guaranteed access for your own trucks.
The monthly rhythm: check depot utilisation and uptime against the preceding period, pull an export where a figure looks wrong, review consumption per vehicle against what the routes should require, and act on whichever lever the data points at.
## Next steps
The shortest path: a private depot and drivers on the road.
Running a fully public charging site, if you open the depot commercially.
Earn from the flexibility in a depot charging between shifts.
Admit a partner fleet at a negotiated rate without changing your own pricing.