Charging

Live charging & the Charge cockpit

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When you plug in, the Charge tab becomes a live cockpit that watches your battery fill and tells you when it'll be ready. It turns "how long is this going to take?" into a number you can actually plan around.

Starting a charge session

The cockpit is manual by design — Flow never auto-flips into charging mode on its own. When you plug in:

  1. Open the Charge tab.
  2. Tap I'm charging.

Flow starts tracking the session. Entry is a deliberate tap so the cockpit never surprises you or misreads a brief current blip as "charging."

The charge ring

The hero of the cockpit is the charge ring — a big, glanceable dial that fills as your battery does. Its color follows the same safety ramp used across Flow:

  • Full and healthy at the top of the range,
  • shifting through amber as you plan around a partial charge,
  • and reading low when there's not much in the pack yet.

The ring is built to read across a parking lot while your wheel charges.

Time to full — two numbers

The cockpit shows dual estimates: time to 80% and time to 100%.

Why two? Lithium packs charge fastest up to about 80%, then taper as they top off — the last 20% takes proportionally longer. For most rides you don't need a full charge to reach the next stop, so the 80% number is often the one that matters. Flow shows both, plus the clock time each will be reached, so you can decide whether to wait for a full pack or unplug early and roll.

Live rate — and Flow's honesty about it

If your wheel reports charging current over Bluetooth, Flow shows the live charge rate and uses it to sharpen the time-to-full estimate as conditions change.

Not every wheel exposes trustworthy charge-current data, though — on some models the current sensor sits on the motor path and reads near zero while charging. Flow won't pretend. Until it has confirmed that your wheel's power reading tracks real charging, the cockpit shows a conservative percent-per-hour rate instead of watts, and the ring uses a steady nominal width rather than a live one. Once the reading is proven trustworthy for your wheel, it switches to showing real watts.

This "prove it before we show it" approach means the numbers you see are ones Flow actually stands behind.

Tips

  • Keep the phone with the wheel if you want the live rate — the cockpit reads charge data over Bluetooth, so it needs to stay in range.
  • Use the 80% estimate for planning most stops; save the full top-off for the end of the day or before a long, charger-free leg.
  • Estimates are a planning tool, not a lab measurement. Real charge time varies with temperature, how empty the pack was, and your charger.