Why a Pod Point charger goes completely dead
No light at all means no power arriving. That is worth separating from every other fault on these units, because a charger showing any colour has electricity and one showing nothing does not.
So the question is not what has gone wrong inside the charger. It is where the supply stops between your fuse board and the wall.
Check the breaker first
Go to the board before you do anything else.
Find the RCBO that feeds the charger, usually in a small white enclosure near the distribution board or the meter, with a green or yellow “EV Charger” sticker. Remember that an RCBO is the opposite way round to a light switch. Up is on, down is off.
If it is down, put it up. If it will not stay up, stop there and do not keep trying. A device that trips the moment you reset it is doing its job, and forcing it repeatedly is how you turn one fault into two.
What we check when we attend a dead Pod Point
This is the sequence, and it is worth knowing because it explains why we ask for a photo of the board rather than the charger.
We test for voltage on the incoming and the outgoing side of the breaker or RCBO first. That single test tells us whether the protective device itself has failed, which is far more common than people expect. From there we work towards the charger. If there is voltage arriving at the unit and it is still dark, the fault is inside the charger. If there is no voltage, we work back through any isolator to the main board.
Most dead chargers we attend are not the charger. They are the equipment upstream of it. The unit on the wall is usually the last thing at fault rather than the first.
The worn out breaker
This is the one we see most, and it comes from the best of intentions.
Every breaker is rated for a set number of operations. Each time it trips under load the contacts wear a little. A breaker that has tripped many times and been switched straight back on each time eventually gives up. It will not hold in, or it trips at nothing, or it holds but drops voltage under load so the charger behaves as though the supply is bad.
As bad as it sounds, that is a good position to be in. A replacement is quick, we carry spares, and once it is in we test the whole circuit. What we do not do is stop there, because a breaker that tripped that many times was tripping at something, and a new one fitted to an unfixed fault goes the same way.
Dead after a power cut, a meter change or new electrics
Chargers rarely die for no reason. Something usually happened.
The four events worth thinking about are a power cut, a smart meter fitted, a new consumer unit, and any electrical work in the house. All four involve somebody switching things off, and not everybody switches everything back on. An EV circuit in a separate enclosure is exactly the sort of thing that gets missed, because it does not look like part of the main board.
A meter change is worth a second thought even when the charger is showing a light rather than nothing, because the energy clamp often comes off during one and does not always go back correctly.
When the unit itself has died
If the supply is confirmed good at the wall and the charger stays dark, the unit has failed.
Age matters more with this brand than most. Pod was one of the earliest UK manufacturers, so there is a large population of Solos well past the five to ten year working life we would expect of a charger. Units installed in 2017 or earlier cannot pair with the Pod Point app at all, and hardware made before mid 2017 may not carry the neutral failure detection circuit later units have. That is a protection difference rather than a missing feature.
On an old unit, out of warranty and completely dead, our honest answer is usually to replace rather than repair. We would rather say that than sell a repair on something that has already given you its working life.
