Walking out to a charger that isn’t charging is a genuinely irritating way to start or end a day, but before assuming the worst, it’s worth working through a few straightforward checks. Most faults have a fairly ordinary explanation, and knowing what’s safe to check yourself, and what to leave alone entirely, makes the whole thing a lot less stressful.
Start with the simple checks
Before assuming there’s a fault at all, check whether the car itself is actually set to charge. Scheduled or delayed charging settings in the vehicle can easily look like a charger fault when the car is simply waiting for a cheaper tariff window to begin. It’s also worth checking the app separately from the charger itself, a lost wifi connection or a router issue is a completely different problem to an actual electrical fault, and one you can usually sort out yourself without touching the charger at all.
If the car and app both check out, look at the charger’s status light. Most units use colour or flashing patterns to indicate whether they’re idle, charging, waiting, or in a fault state, though the exact meanings vary between manufacturers, so it’s worth knowing what normal looks like for your specific model before assuming a light you don’t recognise means something’s badly wrong. As a general rule across most brands, a steady colour usually means the unit is idle and ready, a slow pulse or flash typically means it’s actively charging or waiting for the car to signal it’s ready, and a fast flash or a change to red is the pattern that most commonly indicates a genuine fault worth investigating further.
It’s also worth ruling out something as simple as a scheduled charge window on the charger itself, separate from any scheduling set on the car. Several charger brands let you set your own charging times through their app, and it’s easy to forget a schedule was set weeks ago and assume the unit’s broken when it’s actually just waiting for the time you told it to start.
The one-reset rule
If your charger isn’t powering up at all, it’s worth checking your consumer unit for a tripped breaker. Resetting it once is generally fine. If it trips again immediately, stop there and call an electrician rather than resetting it repeatedly, since a breaker that won’t stay reset is telling you there’s a genuine fault, not a one-off blip.
There’s a specific, technical reason EV chargers trip RCDs more often than most other household equipment, and it’s worth understanding rather than just accepting as an annoyance. As explained in the IET’s Wiring Matters technical guidance on RCDs for electric vehicle supply equipment, the power electronics inside an EV charger can generate a small smooth DC component in the earth leakage current, which older Type AC RCDs, the kind most commonly fitted in UK homes before 2020, aren’t designed to reliably detect. Under BS 7671, this is exactly why EV charging circuits need either a Type B RCD, or a Type A RCD paired with the charger’s own built-in DC fault detection, rather than whatever RCD happened to already be protecting the rest of the house.
If your charger is tripping repeatedly and it was installed some time ago, or by someone who didn’t specifically account for this, it may simply be sharing protection with a device that was never designed to detect the kind of leakage current an EV charger produces. That’s a proper electrical fix, giving the charger its own correctly specified protection, not something to work around by resetting the same breaker every evening.
In practice, this usually means fitting a dedicated RCBO on its own circuit for the charger, of a type that either detects DC leakage directly or works alongside protection already built into the charger itself, rather than relying on a general-purpose RCD that’s also protecting other circuits in the house. If your charger is tripping and taking other circuits down with it, that’s a reasonably strong sign this is exactly the kind of protection mismatch worth asking an electrician to check.
Check the cable before you check anything else
Electrical Safety First’s guidance on electric vehicle safety recommends checking your charging cable regularly for damage, and stopping use immediately if you find any, arranging a replacement through a registered electrician rather than continuing to use a cable that’s showing wear, cracking, or exposed wiring. A damaged cable is one of the more common, and most avoidable, causes of an EV charger simply refusing to work properly, and it’s one of the easiest things to check yourself before assuming the fault lies deeper in the system.
Firmware and connectivity issues
Some faults genuinely are software rather than electrical. If your charger’s manufacturer specifically recommends power cycling the unit, turning it off at the isolator, waiting a short period, and turning it back on, that’s a reasonable step to try, provided you’re following the manufacturer’s own instructions rather than guessing. This is a different thing entirely to repeatedly resetting a tripped breaker, and it’s worth keeping the two clearly separate in your mind, one is a manufacturer-sanctioned reboot, the other is ignoring a genuine electrical warning sign.
Signs that mean stop immediately
Some signs shouldn’t be treated as a troubleshooting step at all. If you smell burning, see any scorch marks, or the breaker trips every single time you attempt to charge regardless of what else is going on, turn the charger off at the isolator or consumer unit and call a qualified electrician straight away, rather than attempting any further checks yourself.
Why the actual fix needs a qualified electrician
Once the cause is something electrical rather than a settings issue or a damaged cable, the fix, whether that’s fitting the correct RCD or RCBO type, replacing a faulty connection, or addressing a wiring issue, is genuinely electrician’s work. NICEIC’s guidance for householders is clear that this kind of work needs a registered, competent electrician, and it’s notifiable under Part P regardless of how straightforward the fix might look. GU Solutions is a NICEIC Approved Contractor and Domestic Installer, and we diagnose the actual cause properly rather than treating symptoms.
What to tell your electrician when you call
Before calling, it helps to have a few details ready: whether the breaker trips immediately or after some time charging, whether this has happened before or is a new problem, what the charger’s status light was showing, and roughly how old the installation is. This kind of detail helps narrow down the likely cause before anyone’s even arrived, and it’s a useful habit whether the fault turns out to be simple or something that needs a proper repair. If you can, note down anything else that was happening at the time, whether it was raining heavily, whether you’d just plugged in a different appliance nearby, or whether the fault only ever happens with a particular car if more than one vehicle uses the same charger. Small details like these can point an electrician toward the right cause a lot faster than “it just stopped working.”
Getting it fixed properly, not just reset
A charger that’s stopped working is annoying, but for homes across Basingstoke, Old Basing, Chineham, Oakley and Sherborne St John, most faults have a straightforward explanation once someone actually looks at what’s going on, rather than resetting the same breaker night after night and hoping it holds.
If your charger keeps tripping, won’t power up, or is showing a fault you can’t explain, GU Solutions is the first port of call. As NICEIC Approved Contractors and Domestic Installers, we’ll diagnose the real cause and fix it properly, not just get you charging again for one more night.
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