Charging Fault when using low cost mode

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merkurmaniac

Member
Joined
Oct 15, 2017
Messages
12
This has happened a few times now... I like to charge at night for environmental reasons. I live about 5 miles from the largest coal fired powerplant in Texas. They have to shut down their coal trains each night, as wind power is so cheap at night, that it knocks them out, price-wise. I like to charge from 1am to 5 am so I am more likely charging from wind rather than coal. Anyways...

This morning, I go to unplug it, and the charger door LED is flashing red. Damnit. I hop in and the display reads something like "unable to charge, note range and contact dealer." 44 miles electric range, so it didn't charge at all. Probably the 3rd time or so that it has done this. Sux. I may be using a bit of gasoline to get home today. Urggghhhh.

A prior time it had this fault was a much bigger pain. It tripped my EVSE, I guess. A clipper creek 40A unit that had the two bottom red lights flashing. The car wouldn't unlock the charging cable, and I eventually had to dig out the manual and find the little blue cord to pull. I had to shut power to reboot the EVSE. For days afterwards, I had the little cord with the timer showing on the dash, even though it was set to "charge immediately". I finally got it to go away, by deleting the departure times. Its seems like it is getting wonky with the "tarif charging", or whatever BMW like to call it. I did some coding a while back, but fairly simple stuff.

I hate to think that I am going to have to take it into BMW just a month after buying it. How common is it to have faults with the "charge later" mode ?

2015 I3 Rex, btw.
 
It is possible your problem is with the EVSE and not with the car. We have had similar problems with our Clipper Creek 40A unit. We are on our third unit in three years (very good customer service and free replacement so I can't complain too much about that). The problem is that over time the contactors will develop carbon deposits. When this happens it will throw an error (blinking red fault light on the EVSE) and not charge the car. You need to power cycle it to clear the error but it comes back eventually.

If it happens again check to see if the power fault and charging fault lights are blinking. They will blink a certain number of times and then repeat. Mine was a 2 blink pattern which is the contactor error. Customer support is good and they send out a new unit with a pre-paid return label to send back the old one.
 
Thanks for the replies. I did call them and they seemed to think it was the EVSE and not the car. I was asked to note the blinking of the LEDs next time there was a fault. Sounds just like yours. If I could clean the contractor, I'd not mind trying that as mailing the heavy thing seems like a waste. I imagine that they'd prefer I not mess with it.

Thanks for the info, tho, guys.

Richard
 
If it happens again and they won't do a warranty replacement then I'm probably going to replace the contactor. The contactors themselves tend to be sealed units and cannot be repaired or cleaned as far as I know. I haven't opened up the EVSE to see which one they are using but most run in the $30 range.
 
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