LUBA charging stations: stuck or corroded contact pins block charging

The symptom

Two different owners hit the same underlying part failing for two different reasons, both presenting as a charging failure with the station otherwise showing normal lights:

Heat-deformed contact housing. The charging station's positive contact pin wasn't springing back out after the mower undocked on a LUBA 2 AWD X 5000X — visibly deformed plastic around the contact, "as if it had gotten warm." Freeing it with pliers restored charging immediately¹. The owner's dealer described this as a known, if uncommon, failure ("about 1 in 200 stations," per the dealer — not an official Mammotion figure, so treat it as anecdotal rather than confirmed). This pattern has reportedly also shown up in hotter climates internationally¹ — a secondhand claim, not independently verified here.

Ant infestation. A LUBA 1-5000 owner's mower repeatedly backed out of the dock mid-charge, correcting its position and retrying until the battery died. After ruling out uneven ground (a shim under the front wheels fixed a separate, unrelated misalignment earlier in the same thread), the owner opened the station and found ants had nested inside — wet sand carried in by the ants had shorted the contacts². A replacement station and ant-repellent granulate around the base was the fix.

No single cause confirmed. These are two distinct mechanisms (heat deformation vs. insect infestation) hitting the same physical component, not one firmware-linked defect: treat this as "the contact pins are a known weak point," not "there's one specific fix."