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Is anyone else still having issues now? As I still can’t login to CYC I presume a problem still persists
Their server is still down. RFID Access has improved so I don't know if they have remotely pushed whitelists out to some of the chargers in the past couple of days but the app still isn't working and I've met a couple who only had the app and would have been stranded if it wasn't for me sticking around and letting them grab a charge from my card since they still apparently aren't answering calls either.
 
IMO this falls into the category of why the Rapid network across the country should just be nationalised and centralised.
Failovers would all be in place for things like this and it should be at the least now a legal requirement that if signal or backend systems fail, you have to go to freevend.

if the network went to freevend while it was down do you think they would fix it a bit quicker? Hell yeah as they'd be losing revenue straight away.

I hope they at least have the decency for Polar Plus members to cancel this months subscription cost, but doubt it.
 
Looks like i got lucky with this as we were driving home from Edinburgh on Saturday, and the wife was pissed as we ended up stopping four times... Sheriffhall chargers were completely dead, drove to Straiton, ETron and Tesla plugged in and abandoned, drove to Hermiston gait, Leaf charging, decided not to wait, finally got plugged in at Ingliston and noticed the charger was in "free vend" mode but didnt really think anything of it, and charged up.
Had that last charger not worked due to the CPS network being dead she'd have been fuming :eek:
 
I suspect BPCHARGERMASTER will not get a contact renewal from Transport Scotland
You think they will actually notice or care ? :rolleyes:It hasn't even made news outside this forum and a few known EV drivers on twitter as far as I've seen...

Whereas the headline "all petrol stations in Scotland closed for 2 days" might make the 6 o'clock news... ;)
 
Instavolt only do rapids. But the Chargepoint brand that they're a part of could be a safe bet. They're big over in the US and I have had a pretty positive experience with them both there, and the few they have in the UK too.

One of the rumors I have heard is that they're in talks with the people behind Geniepoint. I personally wouldn't have a problem with that as they're pretty good at keeping their network going from what I've seen, though I'm sure some wouldn't like having to top up an account.
The problem with CPS isn't really the back end though. Yes CYC screwed up massively on this occasion but loss of comms at the back end is rarely the issue.

The majority of issues I've had with CPS have been the charger hardware itself - which is maintained largely by local councils (who would stay the same if the back end authenticator changed away from CYC) or not maintained as the case more often is, or comms issues from the charger to the back end network - but this is typically a comms problem with the charger itself (eg loss of 3G signal) which again, would not be helped by changing back end authentication to someone like Chargepoint. If the charger can't get a 3G signal it doesn't matter who it's trying to connect to.

So while it's tempting to cheer for CYC to be replaced by someone else as the back end, I'm not sure that it really solves anything. It certainly doesn't solve the problem of councils who can't or won't maintain the hardware or poor 3G signal in some of the more remote areas.

If transport Scotland wants to continue to offer a unified Scotland wide charging network they really need to get more hands on and not just leave it up to the individual councils to do (or not do) anything. With a couple of notable exceptions (Dundee and Ayrshire) the councils just don't seem to care.
 
The problem is the contract was so poor to begin with.
CYC/Polar didnt care about maintaining the kit if they didn't get some money for it.

Newer contracts are sticking them to taking onboard the Maintenance in some areas and obviously some costs for this come from the new charges coming into force.

Lax contracts have led to this but CYC should have still stayed ontop of repairs. Even cleaning the units is a thing they couldn't be bothered to do or an annual service on each one....
 
The problem with CPS isn't really the back end though. Yes CYC screwed up massively on this occasion but loss of comms at the back end is rarely the issue.

The majority of issues I've had with CPS have been the charger hardware itself - which is maintained largely by local councils (who would stay the same if the back end authenticator changed away from CYC) or not maintained as the case more often is, or comms issues from the charger to the back end network - but this is typically a comms problem with the charger itself (eg loss of 3G signal) which again, would not be helped by changing back end authentication to someone like Chargepoint. If the charger can't get a 3G signal it doesn't matter who it's trying to connect to.

So while it's tempting to cheer for CYC to be replaced by someone else as the back end, I'm not sure that it really solves anything. It certainly doesn't solve the problem of councils who can't or won't maintain the hardware or poor 3G signal in some of the more remote areas.

If transport Scotland wants to continue to offer a unified Scotland wide charging network they really need to get more hands on and not just leave it up to the individual councils to do (or not do) anything. With a couple of notable exceptions (Dundee and Ayrshire) the councils just don't seem to care.
Agreed. The big issue with CYC and their brands is that it is down to the owners to maintain the chargers. My desire to see another network get involved would really be in the hope that it also came with their maintenance services rather than leaving it to the council to not bother.

Even on the back end of things though, I would still like to see another network responsible for it. The CYC App is terrible and it's rare that they bother to answer phone calls. That alone would make it worth the switch.
 
I generally find the CPS are great and well maintained, yes there a CCS outlet with broken pins that took 4 months to fix but in my limited experience that the exception.
If you look at the great work that Angus, Dundee, Aberdeenshire council do and speak to staff that are central to these efforts, the outcome is amazingly good.
For a back office outage to result in the majority of the chargers down, no upto date whitelist nor a free vend is pis£ poor and undermines the efforts of a lot of committed and hardworking staff.
 
Agreed. The big issue with CYC and their brands is that it is down to the owners to maintain the chargers. My desire to see another network get involved would really be in the hope that it also came with their maintenance services rather than leaving it to the council to not bother.
While it might have seemed like a good idea to begin with, I think the "we're just the back end services and point of contact" model of CYC has fundamentally turned out to be a failure. Too much blame shifting is possible when the point of contact (CYC/CPS) is not the same entity responsible for maintaining chargers. (Councils, individual private businesses)

End users report faults to CPS/CYC, however CPS/CYC can then report faulty chargers to the owners until they're blue in the face and often nothing is done as the owner of the charger doesn't care. It makes CPS/CYC look bad to the end user, and users also aren't satisfied by the "but the charger is owned and maintained by <insert council here>" as they'll just see it as blame shifting. (Which technically it is)
Even on the back end of things though, I would still like to see another network responsible for it. The CYC App is terrible and it's rare that they bother to answer phone calls. That alone would make it worth the switch.
Yes, good point the CYC app is pretty rubbish, I don't use it, I use the RFID card. Or at least I did when I last used CPS chargers - which was a long time ago as I've used Instavolt almost exclusively since then!

So a new back end might lead to a better app, and maybe better phone support, however I'm just pointing out that a new back end isn't going to solve the hardware maintenance issues and connectivity issues to individual chargers with flaky 3G connections. Those have their roots in the funding model of Transport Scotland who gave pots of money to Councils to install chargers and apparently didn't allocate ongoing money for maintenance (or the council spent it on something else) and didn't have some sort of SLA agreement with the councils.

A new back end would maybe help with the app and phone support but would not be a panacea. The Scottish government created this "monster", they need to reign it in and get it back under control again as it has gone down the tubes in the 3 years since I started EV driving.
 
While it might have seemed like a good idea to begin with, I think the "we're just the back end services and point of contact" model of CYC has fundamentally turned out to be a failure. Too much blame shifting is possible when the point of contact (CYC/CPS) is not the same entity responsible for maintaining chargers. (Councils, individual private businesses)

End users report faults to CPS/CYC, however CPS/CYC can then report faulty chargers to the owners until they're blue in the face and often nothing is done as the owner of the charger doesn't care. It makes CPS/CYC look bad to the end user, and users also aren't satisfied by the "but the charger is owned and maintained by <insert council here>" as they'll just see it as blame shifting. (Which technically it is)

Yes, good point the CYC app is pretty rubbish, I don't use it, I use the RFID card. Or at least I did when I last used CPS chargers - which was a long time ago as I've used Instavolt almost exclusively since then!

So a new back end might lead to a better app, and maybe better phone support, however I'm just pointing out that a new back end isn't going to solve the hardware maintenance issues and connectivity issues to individual chargers with flaky 3G connections. Those have their roots in the funding model of Transport Scotland who gave pots of money to Councils to install chargers and apparently didn't allocate ongoing money for maintenance (or the council spent it on something else) and didn't have some sort of SLA agreement with the councils.

A new back end would maybe help with the app and phone support but would not be a panacea. The Scottish government created this "monster", they need to reign it in and get it back under control again as it has gone down the tubes in the 3 years since I started EV driving.
I think Central Belt and Other parts of Scotland are not the same thing. I could go on and on about the great totally drama free charges I've had from CPS networked devices, IMHO the concept is good.
 
I generally find the CPS are great and well maintained, yes there a CCS outlet with broken pins that took 4 months to fix but in my limited experience that the exception.
If you look at the great work that Angus, Dundee, Aberdeenshire council do and speak to staff that are central to these efforts, the outcome is amazingly good.
For a back office outage to result in the majority of the chargers down, no upto date whitelist nor a free vend is pis£ poor and undermines the efforts of a lot of committed and hardworking staff.
Depends entirely where you drive. If you drive in Dundee, Ayrshire and the areas you've mentioned it's probably pretty good. But try up north or over on the West Coast and its a nightmare. Check Zap Map and Plugshare to see if you can make it to Oban, Tobermory, etc in a short range EV...

I looked a while ago when I still had the Ion and came to the conclusion that such a journey from Lanarkshire to these western coast isles was basically impossible as there was a single string of individual chargers I would have to follow and nearly all of them were broken or offline (some for months) and the ones that weren't were single units in remote locations that should they let me down would strand me. So the attempted journey was abandoned and the ICE was taken...

Now I have a Leaf and double the range I could probably manage the journey but it would still be fraught with having to dodge all the dodgy chargers and queue for the single charger at each site... CPS really is not up to snuff in remote areas unless you have a really long range EV that allows you to skip 2 or even 3 charging stops with comfort to find the one that actually works. Sorry if I sound negative but I've been let down too often by remote CPS chargers.
 
I think Central Belt and Other parts of Scotland are not the same thing. I could go on and on about the great totally drama free charges I've had from CPS networked devices, IMHO the concept is good.
The central belt is not a problem - forget about CPS, there are plenty of Instavolts. :D

We've done trips to the Ayr/Troon/Irvine area several times using only Instavolt - no hassles at all. But go further north and you run out of Instavolts and have to rely on CPS. Then it becomes fun...
 
All seemed to be running fine again yesterday using an RFID card. Generally I find CPS pretty good. Been using them across central belt (most regulay from Troon to Edinburgh or Edinburgh to Bathgate) and have always been able to get a good charge. The LAs are really stepping up too with CPS charging hubs in Kilmarnock, Falkirk, Dundee and wallyford all being set up recently. These big installs all have new kit and are likely to be well maintained. Can't afford to have nationwide outages like on Saturday though.
 
wallyford
What's the deal at Wallyford now? I used to plug in to the rapid there on a pretty much weekly basis prior to COVID-19. The last time I passed through the rapid charger was completely removed and the remaining 22kW AC Posts were all blocked off. If there's a new hub now I'm not seeing it on Zap Map and have since just been avoiding the place recently. Would be good if it's true and there is a new charging hub to come soon.
 
All seemed to be running fine again yesterday using an RFID card. Generally I find CPS pretty good. Been using them across central belt (most regulay from Troon to Edinburgh or Edinburgh to Bathgate) and have always been able to get a good charge. The LAs are really stepping up too with CPS charging hubs in Kilmarnock, Falkirk, Dundee and wallyford all being set up recently. These big installs all have new kit and are likely to be well maintained. Can't afford to have nationwide outages like on Saturday though.
Tenders are out for a new Hun at Forfar too. I think it includes the maintenance provision👍
 
What's the deal at Wallyford now? I used to plug in to the rapid there on a pretty much weekly basis prior to COVID-19. The last time I passed through the rapid charger was completely removed and the remaining 22kW AC Posts were all blocked off. If there's a new hub now I'm not seeing it on Zap Map and have since just been avoiding the place recently. Would be good if it's true and there is a new charging hub to come soon.


It's on the way!
 
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