Overview
The car is connected. No power flows. The ticket says the charger is broken. Most of the time it is not. One read of the charger answers the ticket, and two fields carry the answer.activeControlMode names the control regime that holds the charger. notChargingReason names what stops the current. Read them in that order. A charger under a strategy is usually correct and quiet, not broken.
These are the fields that close the ticket.
Step 1: Read the charger
One GET carries every field the triage needs.isConnected is true and isCharging is false, so a car sits on the cable and takes nothing. This charger reports no activeControlMode at all, so no strategy explains the pause and notChargingReason is the answer. It reads authorization. Tell the driver to approve the session. Do not send an engineer.
Step 2: Check the control regime first
ReadactiveControlMode before anything else. A charger that runs a strategy picks its own hours, so a quiet charger is often a charger that does its job.
Under auto.charge_tariff the charger waits for the cheap hours of the tariff the home owner configured. Under auto.charge_surplus_only it waits for surplus from the solar array, and it pauses whenever that surplus runs out. Under auto.charge_surplus_first it takes the surplus first, then draws the remainder from the grid.
auto.charge_tariff and holds for a cheap hour. This is the strategy at work. Show the driver “waiting for off-peak”, never “not charging”, and never raise a fault.
activeControlMode is absent on a charger that does not report its regime, as in Step 1. Absence is not a value, so test that the key exists before you read it. If no strategy explains the pause, go to notChargingReason.
Step 3: Read the reason
notChargingReason takes six values. Each one sends you to a different place.
Two of these are easy to read wrongly, and both change the answer you give.
vehicle points at the car, not at the charger. The charger reports that the car declined the charge or finished it. The hardware on the wall is healthy, so a charger swap fixes nothing. Send the driver to the car and to the car’s charge limit.
An absent reason is not unknown. unknown means the charger reports a pause whose cause it does not name. You can honestly tell the driver the charge is on hold. An absent key means the brand reports no reason at all, so you know nothing and must claim nothing. One is a hold you can report. The other is silence.
Step 4: Turn the read into an answer
Branch on the control regime, then on the reason. Handle the absent key before you read the value.authorization and schedule both clear in the brand’s app, and the driver clears them in seconds. vehicle clears at the car. load_management clears by itself when site capacity frees. charger is the only value that can need an engineer, and it is the rarest of the six.
At push time
Triage runs after the fact. The same vocabulary reaches you earlier, at the moment you send a command. An acceptedPOST /ev-charger/{deviceId} returns 202, and the response can carry a warnings array beside the action. Each entry names one condition the charger reported when you submitted the command.
vehicle_not_connected means no car is plugged in. awaiting_authorization means the charge waits for approval in the manufacturer’s app.
A warning is not a rejection. The command is accepted and armed, and it applies the moment the condition clears, so plugging the car in starts the charge you already asked for. The warning tells you only that the charge will not start yet, which is what you show the driver instead of a spinner that never resolves.
The property is absent when nothing blocks the command, so read its absence as no known obstacle at submission time. Warnings describe an immediate push. A push carrying start is armed against a state the charger cannot report yet, so it carries none.
What next
Smart charging modes
The strategies behind an
activeControlMode that starts with auto..EV charger cheat sheet
The whole charger surface in one page.
Device state
Why a reading is absent instead of zero.