Charging Etiquette, and What to Do When a Charger Fails

Charging bays are shared infrastructure with no attendant and no queue system, which means they run on convention. Most of the friction drivers experience with public charging is not technical — it is someone occupying a bay they have finished with, or not knowing what to do when a unit refuses to start.

The rules everyone has agreed on without writing down

Move the car when you are done. This is the whole of the law and the rest is commentary. A rapid bay is not a parking space, and a car sitting at 100% in one is the most common reason someone else is stuck. Most networks now apply overstay fees precisely because this happens so much.

Stop at 80% on rapid chargers when there is a queue. The taper means the last 20% takes as long as a good chunk of everything before it, while someone waits. If the site is empty, charge to whatever you like.

Do not unplug someone else's car. Most cars lock the cable while charging, so you often cannot anyway — but on cars that allow it, and on AC posts where people sometimes leave cables unlocked, the convention is firm. The exception: at some busy AC destination sites there is a local culture of unplugging completed cars, usually signposted. If it is not signposted, do not.

Do not block a bay with a petrol or diesel car. Known as ICEing, and unfortunately common in supermarket car parks. If you drive both, it costs nothing to park elsewhere.

Tidy the cable when you leave. Hang it back on the unit rather than dropping it on the ground. Cables left in puddles get damaged, and damaged cables take the unit out of service for everyone.

Do not park across two bays, even when the cable would reach more easily. On multi-bay sites this can take out two chargers with one car.

What the regulations actually entitle you to

The Public Charge Point Regulations put real obligations on operators, and knowing them is useful when something goes wrong.

Contactless payment must be accepted on new public charge points of 8kW and above, and on existing rapid units of 50kW and above. You should not need an app or an account to use a rapid charger.

Pricing must be clear before you start, displayed in pence per kilowatt-hour, so you can see what a session will cost rather than discovering it afterwards.

A free 24/7 helpline number must be displayed on the unit. Not a premium number, not office hours.

Rapid networks must meet a 99% reliability standard across their estate, measured and reported annually.

Payment roaming must be offered, so third-party services can provide access across networks.

The practical upshot: if a charger takes payment and delivers nothing, you are not at the mercy of an app. There is a number on the unit and someone has to answer it.

When the charger will not start

Work through this in order. It resolves the large majority of failures, and most of them are not actually the charger.

1. Reseat the connector. Unplug fully, wait a few seconds, push it back in firmly. DC connectors in particular need a deliberate shove to seat properly, and a partially seated plug fails the handshake. This alone fixes a startling share of problems.

2. Check the car is ready. Not in a charging schedule that has not started yet, not limited by a charge-current setting from a previous session, not at a state of charge limit you set and forgot. Scheduled charging is a very common self-inflicted fault at public chargers.

3. Try the other connector or the adjacent bay. Dual-headed units fail one side at a time; multi-bay sites fail one bay at a time.

4. Try a different payment method. If contactless fails, try the app; if the app fails, try contactless. Payment authorisation is a frequent failure point and is often independent of the charging hardware.

5. Ring the helpline on the unit. Have the charge point's ID number ready — it is printed on the unit. Operators can reset a charger remotely and frequently do, often within a couple of minutes while you stand there. This step is skipped far more often than it should be.

6. Move on to your backup. Which you identified before you left, and can reach because you arrived with 20% in the battery.

If you were charged but got no electricity

Contactless payments at charge points are usually taken as a pre-authorisation — a hold on the card, released if no energy is delivered. It can take a few days to drop off, which looks alarming on a banking app but generally resolves itself.

If an actual charge has been taken for a session that failed, contact the operator with the date, time, site and charge point ID. Refunds for failed sessions are routine and networks process them without much argument. If one does not, a card chargeback is available as a backstop.

Report the fault, for the next driver

When a unit is genuinely broken, tell the operator via the helpline or their app, even if you have already moved on. Faults are frequently invisible to the operator until a driver reports them — remote monitoring catches a lot but not everything, and a unit that appears online can still be failing to deliver.

If the charge point's details are wrong on this site — wrong connectors, wrong location, removed entirely — please let us know. Our data comes from OpenChargeMap, a community-maintained open database, and corrections flow back to everyone who uses it, not just to us.