How does the low cost charging differentiate between chargers?

[helmethair3000]

Currently, at my house, I'm set up with time of use rates for my electricity. Which basically means that my best electrical rate to charge my I3 is from 8pm at night to 10 am in the morning. I set up my I3 with low cost charging for those times and to have the departure time be 8 am every morning. Now, while the car won't charge until up to the departure time (usually about a couple hours before my departure time, the car also won't charge any other time outside of my low cost charging window that I've set.

This is great, but when my wife takes the I3 to work, she plugs it in to the charging stations at her job. It automatically knows to charge the car to full then, and this is definitely far outside of the low cost charging time. How does the I3 differentiate between chargers? How does it know that it's not charging at my house and that it's okay to charge when it's not at home? Is the low cost charging GPS based?

-drew

 

[jadnashuanh]

Are you using a L2 at home and a L1 unit at work? Are you using a departure time at work? Low-cost charging will only operate if you have a departure time set. Others have complained that those two functions should not be connected, but at this time, they are. With no departure time set, plug it in, and it will charge.

There may be something else going on, but I do not know of it.

 

[Gif]

My understanding of the settings is pretty straightforward. If you tell it to charge immediately, it will. If you tell it to do low cost charging it will only charge between those periods as long as a departure time is set. It doesn't matter whether I attach an L1 or L2 to the car, this charging regime is always the same.

I have a low cost window set and a default departure time. If I pull into a public L2 or L1 then I always have to remember to switch the car to "charge immediately". BMW recognised this which is the reason why when you turn off readiness, the last thing the idrive screen shows you is the "change settings" screen for charging options. I think they knew that people would want to be swapping between charge immediately and low cost charging depending on where they were parking up and what they were attaching to.

The point about switching between low cost and immediate charging is pretty simple. The car does whatever you have told it to do the last time you set the parameter and it won't change that until you tell it to do something different either in car or via the app. There is no GPS functionality that I have found in this regard. Anyway, how would it know that home was home and how would it know that you didn't want low cost charging anyway regardless of where you were plugged in?

Have to be honest, I have never tried a fast / CCS charger so I am not sure if this overrides the low cost charging window, I guess it would be logical if it did as that's the whole point of fast charging. What type of charger is at work?

One thought just occurred to me. Are the charge settings "key fob" dependent? Does your wife have her own fob and is it changing them back to "charge immediately" which is why the car charges at work when she takes it?

 

[engineear]

I have an L2 charger at home. My cheapest rate is from 11pm-5am. My Siemens charger has 4 delay start times in 2 hour increments. I usually go out a little after 9pm, set the delay to start in 2 hours and I'm done. It charges to full and shuts off. If I forgot to plug in early and it's after 11pm I just plug in and go back inside.
I have used the "Fast charger" a number of times and it fills about 80% in 30 minutes. Works great!