What we check before a charger goes on the map

A charging map has one job: to be right when it matters. Nobody checks a map on a full battery. They check it at the end of a long drive, in the dark, with a number on the dashboard they do not like. A station that is not there, or not working, is worse than no map at all.

So here is exactly what happens between somebody telling us about a charger and you seeing it.

Nothing publishes itself

Every submission through Add a charging station lands in a queue. There is no auto-publish, no trusted-submitter shortcut, and no threshold of reports that pushes something live on its own. A person looks at all of it.

Submitted is not the same as verified

Anything submitted by the public goes onto the map marked Unverified, regardless of how confident the submitter was. It stays that way until somebody from our side has either phoned the operator or stood in front of the unit.

Verified stations carry a tick and the month they were checked. A badge that does not say when it was earned is decoration, so ours always does.

Home hosts are marked differently on purpose

Home hosts, meaning people renting out a socket at their own house, appear on the same map but with their own pin colour and label. A driveway socket and a 240 kW motorway unit are not the same proposition, and the map should never let you confuse the two at a glance.

Home hosts also never publish an exact address. The pin is approximate by design; the real address comes from the host, on WhatsApp, when they choose to give it.

What we still get wrong

Chargers break. Operators change pricing without telling anybody. Units go offline during load shedding and come back on a generator at a different rate. We cannot see any of that in real time, and we are not going to claim otherwise.

If a station on our map is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That is the whole arrangement.