Pod Point light colours and what each one means
One light bar does all the talking on a Solo, so colour and movement carry everything.
| Light | What it means | Is it a fault? |
|---|---|---|
| Solid blue | Standby, waiting for a car | No |
| Flashing blue and pink | Talking to Pod over your wifi | No |
| Solid green | Charging | No |
| Flashing green | Waiting on the car, or the car is full | Usually not |
| Solid yellow | Schedule set, waiting for the cheap window | No |
| Flashing yellow | Key lock on, or Auto Power Balancing holding the rate down | No |
| White | Lost its wifi connection | Not a charging fault |
| Red or flashing red | Stopped itself on a safety measure | Yes |
| No light at all | No power reaching the unit | Yes |
The two worth reading twice are white and flashing yellow, because both look like faults and neither is.
Flashing blue and pink, the one people misread
This is the colour we get asked about most, and it is not a fault. It means the charger is communicating with Pod over your wifi.
Where it confuses people is when it stays that way with a car plugged in. It should normally turn solid green once charging starts. If it sits flashing blue and pink instead, the usual causes are the car or the cable rather than the charger. On a Type 2 lead, an unlocked car can stop the handshake, so locking the car often starts the charge. On a Type 1, the latch may not be seated in the inlet.
There is a simple check worth doing before anything else. Listen for the click when the plug goes in. No click means the cable is not home, and no amount of resetting will fix that.
White light on a Pod Point charger
White means the charger has lost its connection. Nothing is broken.
What you lose is the smart side. Schedules stop running, charge data stops being recorded, and the unit falls back to charging as soon as you plug in. For most people the first sign is not the light at all, it is a much bigger electricity bill, because the car has been charging at peak rate instead of waiting for the cheap window.
Pod Point chargers connect over wifi and 2.4 GHz only. That matters, because a new router or a broadband upgrade will knock one offline and it will stay that way until somebody reconnects it. If your light went white around the time your broadband changed, that is your answer.
Flashing yellow, which is usually the house rather than the charger
Flashing yellow has two meanings and neither is a fault.
The first is the key lock being on, which is fixed by turning it anti clockwise. The second is more interesting. Auto Power Balancing has reached its limit, which means your house is drawing a lot of electricity and the charger has backed off to protect the main fuse. Put the oven, the immersion and the kettle on together while the car is charging and you can watch it happen.
It goes back to green on its own when the demand drops. If yours sits yellow most evenings, that is not a fault either, it is a sign your supply is closer to its limit than you might think, and it is worth a conversation before you add anything else electrical to the house.
The waiting light that is the law, not a fault
Every home charger sold in the UK has to apply a randomised delay before it starts charging, under regulation 11 of the Smart Charge Points Regulations. The delay is a random length up to ten minutes, it is on by default, and it applies each time the charger would start pushing power.
The reason is the grid. If every car on a street started the second a cheap rate began, they would all hit the network at once. A few random minutes each spreads that out.
To you it looks like a charger that is plugged in, showing a normal waiting light, and doing nothing. Give it ten minutes before you decide it is broken. If it starts on its own, nothing is wrong with it.
No light at all
No light means no power arriving, and the breaker is the first place to look rather than the charger. This is covered in full on our dead charger page, because the checks are different from every other colour on this list.
What the lights will not tell you
Worth being straight about the limits of a single light bar. It tells you the stage the charger has reached. It does not tell you why.
Green and charging can still be charging at half the rate it should. Yellow tells you Auto Power Balancing is active but not whether the clamp reading it is correct. And on older units the colours themselves changed between model generations, so a Solo fitted in 2016 does not necessarily behave like the guide for a Solo 3S.
That is why we ask for a short video and the model rather than a colour on its own. A colour narrows it down. It rarely settles it.
