Step by step
Choose a place
Share your location or search for a place. Place search only starts at three characters and does not query on every keystroke – this protects the Nominatim service and your data. The search radius ranges from 1 to 50 km.
Set your vehicle
Connector type (CCS, CHAdeMO, Type 2, Tesla or any), DC yes/no and minimum power in kW. These are hard filters: charge points that do not fit are dropped before anything is rated.
Describe your break
What kind of place must it be (say, a bakery), how far may the walk be, do you travel with kids or a dog, do you want green space, shopping or good food? Optionally enter a planned time so that opening hours are checked.
Search and compare
ChargeBreak fetches charge points and surroundings, computes real walking routes and rates the places that meet all mandatory conditions. The best three are highlighted, more are listed below.
What a result contains
Every result is built so that you can verify it – not just believe it.
Two separate numbers
Pause-Score from 0 to 100 and confidence from 0 to 1. You see both individually.
The charge point
Connector, power, number of sockets. Status reads “unknown – no live data” as long as no source with a timestamp exists.
Walks
Walking time per place in minutes, next to it “routed” or “estimated”.
Opening hours
Open at the planned time, closed or unknown. Unknown never counts as open.
Reasoning
A table shows how many points each of the ten criteria contributed – unknown criteria are marked separately.
Source and timestamp
Data source with licence and the time of the original fetch – separately for charging data and surroundings.
When something is missing, we say so
- A source is busy: you see a notice with a countdown. Retrying is possible once it expires.
- One charging source fails: the result comes from the remaining sources and carries the notice “Partial data”.
- All charging sources fail: you get an error with the reason per source – no substitute data, no example places.
- Surroundings data missing: if a place cannot prove a mandatory condition it is excluded. Without a mandatory condition the affected criteria count as unknown (zero points).
- Data is stale: if the source is unreachable we deliver the last state – clearly marked “stale”, with freshness halved in the confidence.
Limits of the current version
These points are part of being honest:
- The search works around a place, not as route planning. Reachability uses the straight line to the starting point, not the detour on your route.
- There is no live occupancy of charge points.
- There are no user ratings of places; the criterion currently always counts as unknown.
- Public holidays and complex opening-hours expressions are not evaluated (then “unknown”).
- Out of consideration for the public services, at most the 15 nearest matching charge points are examined per search.