r/evcharging

My ev charger stopped charging and was giving an error so I unplug and replugged it into the wall while it was still connected to the car.. did I F it up?

Edit: car and charger are both fine. I'll be sure to unplug from the car first always

So I installed this device hardwired and all has been great. I already invested in gen 2 vue on 3 panels across my property years ago so just seemed like a no brainer decision.

So I setup solar excess sunrise to sunset and it has worked amazingly well. I also set smart saver schedule so if solar for whatever reason is not good the car will charge at night when I get special pricing which emporia found my SMUD rates. So far all is perfectly working.

Here is the problem I get hit by a train tomorrow or I’m traveling for work and my wife needs to charge in the middle of the day no solar no smart schedule she doesn’t care she wants it to charge right now, WHAT IS THE PAYH OF LEAST RESISTANCE. Now I have tried pushing the charge now button in app and that does work but then it somehow screws up solar excess from working anymore, at least that day. I’ve never waited long enough to see if it resets the following day and maybe it does. So I go in app and uncheck solar excess get out of app to save then go back in app and re enable then it will fix it.

Seems like I am doing something wrong can anyone help me to understand is there an easier way. What if wife doesn’t want to open an app can she plug in middle of day and force a charge through her car or pushing button on charge cord 5 times lol??

Just seemed to be missing the final piece to make this setup perfect for me the solar guy and wife the I need to charge now. As you can tell we are new to EV’s so we are getting the hang of it.

Thank you all in advance for schooling me up.

Respectfully

I am wondering if there are any studies Nationally or locally comparing the fire safety of internal combustion engine vehicles and electric vehicles and ev chargers in general and in large garages in particular.
Our condo HOA is requiring residents to maintain an insurance policy ranging from $500K-$1 Million for installing EV chargers in shared parking garage.
Looking for data to make a case for informed decisions.
Thank you.

EDIT: Clarified the query is from a resident’s perspective.

Last weekend did my first road trip in my EV - and I am very puzzled by something I saw while charging.

According to Electrify America's "how to use" site, "Though there are two connectors on select Electrify America chargers, only one connector can be used at a time."

But many of the units seemed to have two CCS handles - but why? If only 1 can be used at a time, what is the point of 2 of the same plug?

This is an interesting one, because it's actually the first time I've actually gotten nervous about range on a trip, and nearly had to add a dedicated charging stop due to multiple failed charges.

Route was similar to the last trip, Colorado Springs to Grand Lake, to Estes Park, back to grand lake, but adding Mount Blue Sky to the mix before returning to the Springs.

Day 1: Due to some math errors on my part, we left at 90% charge instead of 100%. First stop, Idaho Falls. There were open chargers, but Tesla, so short cords wouldn't reach. There's like 3 other fast chargers in the town, but we didn't really need to charge, so just grabbed coffee and moved on. Arriving at out overnight, there was a convenient 120v plug, so got some charge there.

Day 2: Drive through Rocky Mountain national park. Estes Park has free level 2 charging at the public parking garage, so added some extra there. It's a fairly show charger even for level 2 though so not a TON of charge, but hey, free juice is free juice. Back over the mountain and into Grand Lake for some time on a boat. The Marina theoretically has a L2 charger, but it's been under repair for a while, so not available. No worries. After the lake, I was going to stop at the DCFC in town, but one cabinet was down for maintenance, the other had someone charging. There was an event going that had the area more crowded than we wanted to deal with, so we bailed and headed back for overnight 2 and L1 charging.

Day 3: At this point, we were around 40% charge, and still wanted to do Mount Blue Sky. We had enough charge to do that, but I've always been paranoid about running out of gas/charge. Wife wanted to stop at a donut place we found for breakfast, and there was a charger a few blocks down that had just opened, so we grabbed our stuff and swung in there to give it a shot. Well, there were two Autel branded ones, but even though they were listed as active on plugshare, they didn't appear in the app to actually activate them, leading to a third failed charge for the trip. At this point I had a choice, actually add a dedicated charging stop to the trip, or trust that charge remaining estimate was accurate for the Mount Blue Sky drive and stop being so neurotic about charge. I decided to just do the drive and charge on out next rest stop. Got up to the top with 10% remaining (estimate was 9%) got some great wildlife shots, then went backs down. Our usual coffee stop at Idaho Falls went off without a hitch, 20 minute stop (coffee place is good, but a bit slow) put us at 65%, plenty to get home.

Trip totals:

Miles: 530

Speed: varied, 75 for parts of the highway, down to 35 for mountain passes.

Trip efficiency 4.5 mi/kwh average (!) I'm not sure how my trip efficiency ended up so high. There was a fair bit of highway, and while the heat wave here seems to have broken, there was still AC in play.

Total charge cost: ~$20

Time spent charging: With the failed charge stops, I probably spent about 10 minutes mucking with it. Everything else was just normal rest stops. This probably makes it the first trip where charging added more time than gas would have.

EDIT: 2025 Equinox for those asking

I'll be a new PHEV owner soon, and looking into EVSE installs.

I basically have a choice: either install the EVSE outside where it gets direct sunlight for 12 hours a day, or inside and struggle with wiring.

Questions:

a) If I install an EVSE inside a vented metal box, is that actually going to help in terms of temperatures? Sure it keeps the direct light off the device, but it's still going to be hot (100+ F). I imagine looping the cable into the box every time I charge it will be a huge annoyance - are there boxes that are good for this?

b) If I keep the charger in a garage, then I need some way to pass the cable through the wall. While the under-door protectors seem fine for the short term, I'd like a classier install that is also code compliant and also serviceable when standards change. Is there any way I can run a cable through a conduit from the EVSE to a port on the exterior wall? I wouldn't feel so bad letting the cable cook outside.

Hi, I live in a townhouse community and do not have a way to install a home charger. Is it a real pain in the rear to have to go to a charging spot every time the car needs to be charged? I have not bought a Tesla yet. Thanks.

Is it normal for orders to sit for more than two weeks without being fulfilled with OpenEvse? I created a ticket with support and haven’t gotten a response to it for almost 6 days.

I have the chargepoint homeflex hardwired in my garage that had been working well for over a year. The wifi suddenly went out and never reconnected despite hours of customer assistance. They sent me a new charger replacement, I installed it and it worked immediately. I set up the overnight charging schedule, it charged my car....and then started blinking yellow and now won't connect to wifi again.

This new charger lasted literally 3 days. And their solution is to send me ANOTHER replacement charger. I'm over this company and am looking for alternative EV chargers at this point. Does anyone have suggestions on what to purchase that would still use the same hardwiring as the Chargepoint? I just don't want to have to bring an electrician out again (exchanging out the Chargepoint was easy but I can't do anything complicated or too technical).

Thanks!

After a significant delay from my utility, I got a dedicated 100A service to my garage for charging my Ioniq 9. I went to update the max current setting by setting the rotary dip switch to position 5 for 48A charging. The Autel app seems to have a bug that is preventing me from being able to set the max current to 48A and is stuck with 40A as the max. I tried setting the dial to other positions and noticed that the app is not reading the physical setting correctly and therefore is unable to set the max current correctly.

The reason I believe this is not a hardware issue but rather a firmware/software is the app gets stuck showing 32A at times and can’t manually set to 40 when the switch is set to position 4 for 40a which was previously working great. If I ask their built in AI chatbot I’m able to ask it to set the charger higher than 32 to 40 it will happily do so. But then if I ask it to set to 48A it says it’s unable to do so, throws an error and then essentially freezes.

Has anyone else run into issues with this?