Public charging problem

[fenlander]

I tried to use a public charging station over the weekend, an Electrobay 305:

http://www.elektromotive.com/pages/products/index.html

Blue BMW supplied cable, car set to charge at Max, but the charging station just sat there saying 'The car is not drawing any power'. Which is true, it wasn't.

Checked the settings and everything seemed ok, off-peak charging disabled etc.

Everything only seemed to spring to life when I set the charging rate to Reduced in the car, for some reason it didn't appear happy to negotiate a charge when set to Max.

I thought that charging stations and the car were supposed to negotiate the rate, so even if the charging station couldn't do 7kW then they'd agree on less, but it appears there may be some kind of compatibility issue.

Has anyone else seen similar?

 

[BrianStanier]

Presumably the car can connect and charge with the supplied EVSE brick which will signal that its only 10A? If so the car end is probably OK. As has been noted on the DIY EVSE project some commercial units don't implement the J1772 protocol properly or fully.

 

[RichardD]

Yes, same problem at a PodPoint bay, the error message was "Awaiting Vehicle Ready" - then nothing happens and it times out. Called my dealer and PodPoint for help but nobody knew how to resolve. Will try reducing charge rate to see if that helps...thanks.

 

[MikeS]

Did you try lifting the cable up at the car end until it started charging? As this has been raised previously as a cause of this issue.

 

[jadnashuanh]

I wonder if this is a regional difference in that North America decided on a different plug and protocol, verses what's the standard in the EU. The latch on the J1772 plugs seems to pretty much require the connector to be fully engaged and all pins connected properly. I have only seen pictures of the EU plug, so have not actually used one. So far, I've not run into that situation in the USA, but haven't used all that many EVSE yet.