Read the light before you touch anything
The light narrows this down faster than anything else you can do.
| Light | Where the problem is |
|---|---|
| Solid yellow | A schedule. The charger is waiting for your cheap window |
| Flashing green | The car, usually a timer or a full battery |
| Flashing blue and pink with a car plugged in | The cable or the car handshake |
| White | Wifi, so schedules have stopped running |
| Red | The charger has stopped itself on a safety measure |
| Nothing at all | No power arriving. Go to the fuse board |
The six causes, in the order we check them
1. A schedule is holding it back. Pod Point chargers charge in your cheap window by default, not the moment you plug in. Every home charger sold in the UK since 2022 has to ship with default off peak hours under the Smart Charge Points Regulations, so a charger that sits and waits at teatime is doing what the law asks of it. Check the schedule in the app before you assume anything is wrong.
2. The car is refusing the charge. A departure timer or charging schedule set in the car will fight the one set in the charger, and the car usually wins. So will a charge limit already reached. Turn the car side off and let the charger run it.
3. The cable is not properly home. Listen for the click. No click means no handshake, and the charger will sit flashing rather than charging. On a Type 2 lead an unlocked car can also stop it, so lock the car and try again. Check the pins for dirt and debris while the cable is out.
4. The wifi has dropped. A Solo that loses its connection falls back to charging as soon as you plug in, and schedules stop running. So an offline charger usually charges more, not less, and the first sign is the bill rather than the light. It is 2.4 GHz only, so a new router or a broadband upgrade will knock one off and it stays off until somebody reconnects it.
5. The energy clamp has been moved. The clamp at your meter is part of Auto Power Balancing, and if it has been disconnected, reversed, or clipped over the wrong cable, the charger goes into safety mode. This is the one that catches people out after a smart meter install, because nobody connects the two events.
6. The breaker has tripped. Go and look. It is the single most common thing behind a charger showing no light at all, and it takes ten seconds to check.
Why it worked yesterday and not today
Chargers rarely fail gradually. Something changes, and it is usually not the charger.
The changes we see most often are a smart meter fitted, a new consumer unit, a broadband or router upgrade, a car software update that switched a charging setting back on, or a tariff change that moved the cheap window. Any of those can stop a working charger overnight while the unit itself is in perfect health.
So the useful question is not what is wrong with the charger. It is what changed in the last fortnight. That question solves more of these than any diagnostic we own.
Plugged in but not charging
If the charger is lit and the car is plugged in and nothing is happening, the fault is nearly always at one of the two ends of the cable rather than in the unit on the wall.
Take the cable out at both ends and look at it properly. Look into the car inlet as well, in daylight. Grit, road salt and leaf matter collect in there, and the two small signal pins that carry the handshake only need to be dirty to stop working. Then put the cable back into the charger first and the car second, and listen for the click at both ends.
If that does not do it, try a different cable if you can borrow one. It is the cheapest test available and it separates the cable from everything else in one go.
When it is the charger
A Pod Point that stays dead after all of the above, with the breaker confirmed on and the clamp confirmed right, has a fault.
When we attend, we test for voltage on both sides of the breaker before touching the unit, because that tells us whether the protective device itself has failed rather than the charger. Then we work towards the charger and back through any isolator. Most of the calls we get about a Pod Point that will not work turn out to be something upstream of it.
Age is the honest part of the answer on this brand. Pod was one of the earliest UK manufacturers, so there are a lot of old Solos still on walls. Units installed in 2017 or earlier cannot pair with the app at all, and hardware from before mid 2017 may not carry the neutral failure detection circuit that later units have. On a unit of that age, out of warranty and failing repeatedly, replacing it is usually the better answer than repairing it, and we would rather tell you that than take money for a repair that will not last.
