Why an Ohme goes offline, and why it does not use Wi-Fi
An Ohme does not use your home Wi-Fi. Every Home Pro and ePod has a multi carrier SIM inside it and talks to Ohme’s servers over 4G, which is why there is no Wi-Fi setup step. It also means “offline” has three usual causes, and Ohme lists them itself:
- The 4G signal has dropped. Coverage in the area has dipped, or the charger sits somewhere the signal struggles to reach, a garage, behind a metal door, or a thick rear wall.
- A firmware update has just finished. The charger reboots afterwards and can look offline for a while.
- The breaker is off or has tripped. The charger’s own switch on the fuse board, or the separate isolator, has been knocked or has tripped.
Ohme’s own manual is honest about the first one. Where mobile signal at the property is unreliable, the smart features will be unreliable too, and Ohme does not take responsibility for the public mobile network.
What offline actually means for charging
Less than people fear. When you plug in, the charger checks Ohme’s cloud for a schedule. If it cannot reach the cloud, it does not refuse to charge. It charges the car straight away, at full rate, until the battery is full or you unplug. Offline, it is behaving like a dumb charger.
So an offline Ohme still gets you to work in the morning. What you lose is the smart part, charging in the cheap window, the app seeing the session, and any price cap. If your car is on a smart tariff you can end up paying peak rate for a full charge, which is the real cost of leaving it offline.
How to get an Ohme charger back online
Ohme’s published sequence, which we would follow before anything else:
- Unplug the charger from the car.
- Find the charger’s breaker. It is either a stand alone switch near the fuse board or a labelled switch inside it. Switch it off.
- Leave it off for fifteen minutes, so the charger fully powers down.
- Switch it back on. The charger reboots and reconnects, and will pick up any update it missed.
Then check it is back:
- In the Ohme app, My Charger should show Online with a green dot.
- On a Home Pro, the screen should no longer say “Connecting to the internet”, “Scanning cell towers” or “Trying to reconnect”.
- On an ePod, the rightmost light blinks orange while it is connecting, and the left part of the light bar goes solid green once it is online.
Note that the Ohme Go is unplugged after every use and Ohme says it should not need this. If a Go is offline, that is a call to Ohme.
How to tell whether the signal is good enough
An Ohme has no wifi and no network socket. It has a mobile SIM and nothing else, so the only question that matters is whether there is enough mobile signal at the wall the charger is fixed to.
There is a simple test. Stand where the charger is, turn wifi off on your phone, and try to play a YouTube video. If it plays without stalling, there is enough signal for the charger. If it struggles, the charger is living with exactly what you just experienced.
Where there is some signal but not much, a mobile signal booster at the property often steadies it, and that is usually cheaper than any work on the charger. Where there is genuinely no signal, a booster has nothing to amplify and will not help. At that point the honest answer is that the charger will keep running offline, which means it still charges the car but you lose the cheap window, and a unit that takes wifi or a wired connection would have been the better fit for that property.
When an Ohme keeps going offline
If the fifteen minute sequence works but the charger drops again in a day or two, on the units we look after the fault is usually not the charger, it is where it lives. When we attend an offline Ohme it is nearly always signal. Either the mobile coverage in that spot is poor, or the local mast has dropped off for a while, or the signal is there but too intermittent to keep the charger connected all day. A unit that only just gets a signal will keep losing it.
Where the charger was fixed to a wall with poor signal and there is a better position on the property, we can relocate it. That is usually half a day of work plus cable, depending on how far the new position is. We can also fit a signal booster, but that is equipment and labour on top, so it is worth weighing up before you spend. The honest question underneath both options is whether this charger is the right one for this property. A unit that takes wifi or a wired connection would not have this problem at all, and on a property with genuinely poor mobile coverage that is sometimes the better answer than spending money to prop up the signal. Ohme’s own page says a charger that keeps going offline is a Customer Care call, and inside the warranty that is the right first call. The honest options are moving nothing and accepting it charges dumb, or looking at whether the signal at that wall can be improved. That is a site question, not an Ohme fault, and it is one we can assess from a couple of photos.
If it never comes back at all, and the breaker is definitely on, a Home Pro can have its firmware restored from the front buttons without powering off, which Ohme lists as a fix for connectivity where a reboot has not worked. Our Ohme reset page covers the exact button sequence. If that fails too, the SIM or the modem may have a fault, and inside three years that is an Ohme warranty conversation. Outside it, we can test the unit and tell you whether it is worth keeping.
