An electric vehicle charger is being unveiled in a Concord parking lot Wednesday and it’s gathering a lot of attention for a very odd reason: It’s really slow. 

“The reality is that cars are parked over 90% of the time. This is a great way to harness that concept of passive charging, to be topping off the battery” said Ross Bloom, founder of the Somerville, Mass.-based company Revvit, which made the unit being put into a Storrs Street parking lot as a test. “This is a huge opportunity to move away from the gas station mentality, to leverage the benefit of EVs that you can charge anywhere you’re parked.”

Most public EV chargers are the type known as Level 2 or Level 3. These do a good job of filling up the tank, so to speak – a Level 3 charger like Tesla’s Supercharger can add 200 miles of range in 15 minutes – but they’re expensive and hard to install because they require special, beefed-up power connections. New Hampshire, which unlike neighboring states does little to support  EV charging, has very few of these public chargers.

The Revvit system, on the other hand, is a Level 1 charger, the equivalent of plugging into a wall socket, so it can be put almost anywhere without much fuss or expense.

“This enables you to scale up, to reach a lot more folks with EV charging, rather than a limited infrastructure,” Ross said.

The trickle of electricity from a Level 1 charger increases an EV’s range by only a few miles every hour. That makes it useless for a quick fill-up but perfectly fine if the car is sitting in one spot for a long time. Many EV owners charge their car every night from a household socket, avoiding the cost of installing a Level 2 charger.

Ross envisions multiple Level 1 chargers being installed in areas where cars regularly sit for hours, such as at airports, ski areas and downtown parking garages, or by businesses in their employee lot. It will probably be used as a free amenity to lure customers or workers because it is cheap to install and uses a small amount of electricity, he said. 

“I think in general the places that we’re targeting are going to be thinking about something that they bake into the cost of the parking, to attract people,” he said. 

Not charging for use also makes the system much simpler to build and operate, with drivers not needing to use apps or QR codes. 

The Concord charger, in the parking lot behind the Bank of America at 124 Storrs Street, will be free to use. 

Ross said the Concord unit, like one near Loon Mountain Ski Area, is a prototype. The company is in the very early stages of “bootstrapped” financing with just two employees. “We’re using these pilots to help get the conversation going with investors,” he said.

Ross, who grew up in eastern Massachusetts, says he often comes to New Hampshire to go skiing. He credited CleanEnergy New Hampshire with connecting him with  Foxfire Property Management, which owns the parking area. 

Concord developer Steve Duprey, president of Foxfire, is slated to be at a ribbon cutting for the charger Wednesday at 12:30 p.m., 124 along with Ross, Concord Mayor Byron Champlin and others.

The Revvit follows the argument that public EV charging shouldn’t be thought of as the equivalent of gas stations – places that we visit only occasionally when we want to fill up – but the equivalent of old-fashioned watering troughs for horses.

Before cars existed watering troughs were all over the place, in front of businesses, at parks, along streets. Horses pulling carts or coaches weren’t expected to drink their fill at any one trough but to use many of them as their owners went about their daily business, quenching their thirst a bit at a time with the expectation that they could get a bit more water at their next stop.

Building lots of public chargers, even slow Level 1 chargers, would allow car owners to do the same, adding a few miles at each stop so they never run out of electricity.