Charge Anytime says my car is AWAY when its on my drive - how do I resolve?

Mine is doing exactly the same tonight, saying the car isn’t at home when it is.

It was okay earlier on, I’ve emailed but not sure how long they take to respond hopefully not too long 

Hey @CarlBNotts 

If you’ve already set the location in app, and you need to re-set your location on the app, please contact the team at chargeanytime@ovoenergy.com. 

Using Charge Anytime at home on 2 Sep 2025 with Kia Niro and for some reason it thought I was charging ‘away from home’. This never happened before. However, after 30 mins, while looking at this thread, it changed to ‘charging at home’ without any intervention. Maybe wait if it happens to you.

There is a technical issue here in that when your car measures its location with GPS it will have an error in the location that depends on where the active GPS satellites actually are. In simple terms this means the dot that represents where your car is has wandered outside of the ‘home circle’ drawn to represent your home location. This normally fixes itself in time when the position error decreases and your car is back inside the home circle. There are two things that  can be done to help.

1. When you define the location of your car put the centre of the circle at the place where the car is parked. Don't just centre it on the house. The position, shape and location of the house may be misrepresented in the graphic that is presented to you depending upon which mapset is chosen.
2. The team/group/progammers who define the radius of the home circle could make it slighly bigger to allow for map misrepresentations and GPS positioning errors bearing in mind some locations have a very poor view of the sky. Overhead satellites are not good at determining lateral positions due to the geometry of the calculation that has to be performed and fewer satellites available to get an average position and reduce positioning errors. Making the home circle a bit larger will not compromise the validity of the ‘charging at home’ status but it will reduce complaints of the car not being at home when it is.

Peter

Here’s a good illustration of what poor satellite positioning (bad DOP - Dilution of Precision) can do to the error in the reporting of the car’s position. Parking right next to your house could block out half the satellites the car can see. Parking between two houses will put the car in a ‘concrete canyon’ where the car can see very few satellites and there could be large errors the reported position, possibly outside of the ‘home circle’ for some of the time.
 

For further reading go to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigation)

Stop when you get to the maths!

Peter

Thanks for this ​@Peter E - very helpful indeed, and interesting to see a visual explaining the difference that positioning can make.

​@rich31 just to et you know I’ve added the EVC badge to your profile - you should see your Forum account has been updated now. Have you been in touch with the Charge Anytime team yet? You’ll see in the Forum post below that they’ve reset other members’ location pins to fix this issue you’re having:

Thanks Ben. Had not contacted Charge Anytime team as the issue resolved itself and the ‘charging away’ issue had never happened before. I had read the posts about resetting location and Peter has given excellent explanation as to why it happens so I will do so… thanks again.

That’s great to hear, thanks for letting me know ​@rich31. Always nice to see the Forum doing its job! Thanks as always ​@Peter E.