Reading charger status
Solid, dashed, grey and unknown — what the map is actually telling you about a charger.
4 minute read
Charger data across the UK is uneven. Some operators publish live status every few minutes; others publish a database that was last meaningfully updated a while ago. Most maps flatten all of that into one green dot.
We do not, because the difference matters when you are down to 8% and choosing where to go. A marker tells you two separate things: what the status is, and how much we trust it.
What the markers mean
Solid, with a halo — live
Straight from the operator’s own feed, checked within the last few minutes. The colour means what it says: green is free, amber is in use, red is out of service.
Dashed — estimated
From aggregated open data rather than the operator. The charger almost certainly exists and the connector types are usually right, but nobody is telling us whether it is free right now.
Grey and dashed — not confirmed
We have a status, but nothing has confirmed it in the last 24 hours. It gets no colour at all, because a colour would be a claim we cannot support.
Why old readings go grey rather than green
A three-day-old “available” is not evidence that a charger is free. It is evidence that it was free three days ago, which is nearly worthless and actively misleading in green.
Past seven days we stop guessing altogether and simply say unknown. Being told we do not know is more useful than being told something cheerful and wrong.
Where live data comes from
We read the operators’ own feeds directly, refreshing status every few minutes: char.gy, Ionity, BP Pulse, GeniePoint, Osprey, Clenergy and Charge Place Scotland, with wider coverage from Open Charge Map filling in the rest of the map.
Coverage grows as operators publish. Where a network does not offer a live feed, you will see dashed markers for it — that is the honest representation, not a gap in our data.
Looking at a site’s history
Any charger with enough history has an availability chart: how often its units have actually been working, hour by hour, over the past month. It is the quickest way to tell a site that is reliably fine from one that is fine right now but frequently is not.
This is the same history that most reliable planning uses when choosing your stops — see how charging stops are chosen.
Next: on the road.
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