Pod Point: An at-home EV charger

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I’d bought a Mazda MX-30 R-EV. It’s not a full EV, but a plug-in hybrid, albeit one that go 50 miles on battery alone and the petrol engine is just used as a generator.

As part of the sweetener from Mazda I was offered a home charger for half the usual price. Considering installing one of these generally adds to the value of your home, it would seem rude not to.

The Pod Point Solo 3 was the option available to me (there is a 3S but this is intended for those that have solar panels on their home) and it was installed quickly, cleanly and efficiently. But, a couple of months later, how am I getting on with it?

How you use the Pod Point

It’s a very unexciting unit – a mid-sized round, black plastic device, with a charging cable wrapped around it (I chose this version, rather than the one where you use your own cable). There are no controls on it, and there’s a single light in the centre.

The charger cable is wrapped around the Pod Point when not in use with the plug itself in a small, seperate holster. That holster looks pretty cheap (probably due to the shiny plastic used, as it’s actually quite sturdy), not helped by a large, exposed screw when the plug isn’t in it. It doesn’t do anything other than hold the plug, and that’s pulled in and out by a not-obvious-unless-you-know twisting motion.

Here is it, installed at my home…

Everything is controlled by their app, as the Pod Point device is connected via Wi-Fi. From here you can set charging schedules, or just switch it on and off manually, as well as put in your energy prices and watch it chart your usage and costs.

As part of the installation, a trip-switch is added close to your existing fuse board. From here you can re-power the Pod Point, if needed.

What’s the app like?

The app itself is fine, although some things are not obvious to find (try changing your energy costs). However, unlike a lot of hardware devices that are dependant on their apps, it doesn’t feel buggy in anyway and seems pretty solid.

One thing that is missing, is any kind of notification system. My car’s app, thankfully, notifies me when it’s charging, etc., but it would be nice to know from Pod Point as well.

The biggest issue, and this is probably not down to the app but the Pod Point itself, are the delays. You click, say, to start the charger and you have to wait whilst it issues the command and waits for a response. Even when both are on the same Wi-Fi network and next to each other, this takes just as long – why there is such a delay for the Pod Point to do anything, I don’t know, and feels unnecessary. At the very least, it’s frustrating.

The light on the Pod Point

I’m going to address this separately. As I mentioned before, there’s a status light in the middle of the Pod Point so you can see, at a glance, what it’s doing. Except it’s not very good. And for 2 reasons…

1. The LED is recessed behind the waterproof plastic housing, so it can only be effectively seen when looking close to straight on – it’s difficult to make out from a side angle.
2. It’s bright so, at night, must be a real annoyance for my neighbours opposite who will have it shining at them like some frustrated idiot bugging planes with a green laser pen. Any other device would automatically dim, but that’s not the case here. Considering you’re paying £1k for this (and I, honestly, can’t see why it costs as much as it does), putting in a simple light sensor shouldn’t have been beyond them

It’s alive!

I get cheap rate energy between midnight at 7am, so the first I did was set a schedule for these times. I could plug the charger into the car before I went to bed and it would come on at the alloted time.

Except, a couple of times it didn’t. It came on earlier.

It turns out that the Pod Point doesn’t store the schedules but they are held on the companies servers and requests to switch on the device are sent at the required times. To me, this tells me that the Pod Point hardware is nothing more than a dumb device – a charging cable and light, with a Wi-Fi connection to received requests to turn on and off, and nothing else.

The downside of this is that if the device looses connection with Wi-Fi, it may not turn on at the correct time. And it doesn’t know what that time is, so it panics and just switches on power there-and-then (Pod Point feels it’s better for this to happen and ensure you get a charge, rather than it not happen at all). That’s what happened a couple of times for me – it momentarily lost Wi-Fi, so charging started. If Wi-Fi is regained it doesn’t then stop, though – it keeps going,

So, both times I had to intervene, to save myself a pricey recharge of the battery.

The thing is, Pod Point accept that something outside your house is likely to have issues with Wi-Fi connection, and there are sections on their website about using a Wi-Fi extender, if needed, etc. So they know this may be a problem, yet their solution is pretty half-baked. And none of this is helped by the fact that, to cut costs even further, the Wi-Fi in the device is 2.4 GHz only.

I’ve a solution for now – my car also allows me to set charging schedules (when it will accept a charge, unlike the Pod Point which is when it will attempt to make a charge), so I’ve set that the same. So, if the Pod Point comes on early, my car now won’t accept the incoming charge until midnight.

And now it’s dead!

The second time it lost Wi-Fi and came on early, I did what I did previously – I disconnected the charging cable, waited for Wi-Fi to reconnect and then plugged it back in so that it would now charge correctly, overnight, on the schedule.

Except it did’t.

No messages on the Pod Point app to indicate a problem but no charging had occurred. I was going on a longish journey that day so wanted it charged up – I used the “charge now” option but that just said it was “paused” and clicking on the “info” button gave me a possible list of reasons, none of which seemed relevant.

It’s a good job the car isn’t a full EV, or I would have been truly stuck at this point, as the Pod Point was now not charging at all.

The fix, in the end, was to reset the Pod Point. That next night, it went on the scheduled charge, as it should have.

What Pod Point should be

It seems obvious to me that most of the cost of the Pod Point is the installation, as the device itself is so limited, hardware costs are certainly not a priority. And, yet, that’s where its failings exist.

So, let’s discuss what the Pod Point could do to resolve all of the issues that I’ve encountered.

1. When the schedule is changed on the app, it’s sent to the Pod Point device, which will then switch itself on and off. It connects back to confirm this and communicates back when charging starts/stops, etc. All of this means an always on Wi-Fi connection is no longer needed, and there should be no further issues with dropped Wi-Fi causing immediate charging.
2. The app provides notifications on what the Pod Point is doing
3. A much clearer light on the front, and one that automatically dims based on the light level

To be fair, that first one is the major one, and would clear up all the current issues that I have with it.

Summary