Clipper Creek Charging Problems

I just got a Clipper Creek L2 charger yesterday. It charges the i for a few minutes, stops, sometimes starts again. Over night, it did not fully charge the car. Yesterday evening, in about 45 minutes, it added 12 miles to the range reserve gauge. I'm not doing anything fancy; just plug the EVSE into the car and occasionally check the status with the remote.

The EVSE is on a brand new dedicated 240V circuit. New wire pulled all the way from my distribution box to the garage.

The charger is brand new from Clipper Creek.

The car was built in January 2012. I purchased it as a new car last month.

Ideas?

Thanks,
-- Art Z.

azemon said:

just plug the EVSE into the car and occasionally check the status with the remote.

Click to expand...

My bold, but it caught my eye. There are issues with some level 2 EVSEs where using the remote affects charging.

Try plugging your car in, sit in it with the doors CLOSED, and watch the gauge cluster as you turn on the remote. Tell us what you see, and whether or not the car keeps charging.

Yes, it's very likely you're messing up the charge process by fiddling with the remote - Happens all too frequently

The remote is not very user friendly and you can be doing things with it that you didn't intend to be doing - You can accidently invoke the 'Delay Charge' protocol without realizing it and the car will remember that and it won't manually charge properly until you figure out what you did and how to remove it

Unless you care to take the time (and the frustrations that go with it) to learn all the various nuances associated with the remote, it's best left in a drawer

Don

PV1,

I did as you asked. The behavior is repeatable and seems to be something weird related to the remote. Here is what I see:

Plug in the EVSE.
Car shows charging.
EVSE shows charging.

Press top button on remote to check status.
Remote shows charging + battery status.
After a few seconds, car shows electric motor unit warning light + flashing charging light.
After a few more seconds, all car lights go off (not charging) and EVSE charging light goes off.

Press top button on remote to check status.
Remote shows battery status only (not charging).
Car starts to charge and shows charging light.
EVSE shows charging.

Additional presses of the remote's top button consistently cycle the car between charging and not-charging, with the remote display always out of sync. I.e., if the remote says that the car is charging then the car is actually not charging, and vice versa.

Is this something that can/will be fixed by a firmware update to the car?

Thanks,
-- Art Z.

That's what I thought. There was a software update to the car for clipper creek EVSE compatibility a while back. I'd check with your dealer to see if the update was performed on your car.

I took mine in for service, software updates, and the brake pump recall a while back. I don't have a Clipper Creek EVSE anywhere near (everybody either has Eaton or Aerovironment/Nissan units), so I can't test to see if it works any better.

It's not only Clipper Creek units that cause this issue. The remote in general doesn't like level 2. However, it's nearly flawless with level 1.

That's good to know, PV1. I can live without the remote. It is kind of fun being able to push a button and check the charge level of the battery but I haven't found a use for it beyond that.

Thank you.

-- Art Z.

The relay on my Clipper Creek EVSE is LOUD. I can hear it inside the house from the garage. This actually helped me understand how to use my remote successfully with the CC:

Turn on the power of the remote. The EVSE relay engages for about 5-10 seconds, then disengages. Any remote commands sent during the time the EVSE is engaged will fail. If I wait a few seconds before sending a command (e.g., turning on the heat), it succeeds every time.

-Aaron-

Back in October I picked up one of the $300 L1 12A Clipper Creek EVSEs. Ref: http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1805

This Clipper Creek has replaced my EVSEUpgraded Mitsu for my L1 charging. My charge rate roughly yields six bars for five hours of charging, whereas the original Mitsu L1 8A EVSE yielded roughly four bars for five hours of charging. No problems, and the Remote likes it.

Now, I use my Remote just about every night to time the car's charging, starting the charge at some point in the night to yield about 13-14 bars and stop charging just before one of us takes the car in the morning. No problem.

The other day we were going to take a longer trip so I timed the Remote to allow the car to fully charge to 16 bars and programmed in another hour so that the battery could happily balance. When I went into the garage just before leaving home, I heard the Clipper Creek relay cycling, a couple of clicks (IIRC) about every 10-15 seconds. The car was fully charged. Rushed back to the house to check TED and found that it showed the nicely-decreasing charge rate and shutoff which had occurred 20 minutes earlier. The good news is that TED did not show any current spikes as though the car's charger was trying to start up again. Didn't have time to investigate further as we needed to unplug and leave. The same thing had happened a few weeks ago, but at that time I was also in a hurry and didn't note all the surrounding conditions.

FWIW, I've included a snapshot of the TED display. The blue line is the Clipper Creek power draw which shows the car pulling a steady 1.383kW at a little over 120v and then dropping down normally as the battery balances. The green line is my PV solar starting its daily charging, the orange line is a charging experiment using some old PV panels, and the red line is 120v line voltage. The blue line looks pretty normal except for a slight jog as it turns off at the end.




Just a curiosity at this point, but perhaps worth noting and paying attention to. I don't like clicking relays when nothing is supposed to be happening.

My bad, as I just realized that I had not had the Clipper Creek Recall (SC-13-001 February 2013) performed on my i-MiEV. Ignore the above post, and I'll do an update after I get the Recall done.