Blink charger problems

[TomT]

It appears that most everyone got that email...

For what it is worth, I have never had any but the most minor of problems with my Blink (it is on WiFi and I use a timer only in the car, set to 80% and for a 24 hour overlap) but as of the version 1.6 firmware even those minor ones have disappeared and it has been rock steady. With the display timeout, etc. that was added, I'm now a completely happy camper.

I also got an email from Blink reminding me to update my firmware... for an EVSE that hopefully will be installed sometime this August! Makes me feel like they really know their users well. :roll: :roll: :roll:

Glenn

 

[walterbays]

I got that email too, although my Blink had long since updated its firmware by itself. The email did tell me that this was the release which supposedly added screen brightness control and blanking. I had assumed that when they added those features they would be enabled by default. Not so. You have to go into settings->display to set your brightness level and blanking timeout period. Those work fine now.

I'm not having any troubles with my Blink now. Of course I only rely on it to charge the car. I use the Leaf's timers, which for me have been reliable, rather than setting any timers on the Blink which are reportedly buggy. And I can kind of get charging kWh from the Blink. Ignoring all its fancy and information poor graphs, and ignoring its occasional reporting of "last charge," I try to read off the total kWh for the month every day so I can try to correlate those with what is reported for the utility and by Carwings.

I haven't found any good way to track time-of-use for the electricity, which is ironic since influencing time-of-use behavior was one of the key goals of the EV Project. Blink tells you only about its last activation which most likely is not the main charging event of the day. And as far as I can tell SDG&E put the utility meters in backwards: with a time-of-use readout for the house which is on non-TOU net metering, and no time-of-use readout for the EVSE which is on a TOU rate plan. (As it happens, except for a brief test all my charging has been in super off-peak.)

 

[Nekota]

...

I haven't found any good way to track time-of-use for the electricity, which is ironic since influencing time-of-use behavior was one of the key goals of the EV Project. Blink tells you only about its last activation which most likely is not the main charging event of the day. And as far as I can tell SDG&E put the utility meters in backwards: with a time-of-use readout for the house which is on non-TOU net metering, and no time-of-use readout for the EVSE which is on a TOU rate plan. (As it happens, except for a brief test all my charging has been in super off-peak.)

I don't have a Blink EVSE but I do have the Nissan EVSE and setup a Current Cost meter to record the time of use electricity for the house Line1, Line2 and the EVSE on Line3. The EVSE is installed on a separate 40A breaker and I put the third current sensing clamp in one leg of the 240VAC line. Since there is no neutral I placed 2 turns of the 240VAC line through the current sensing clamp to multiply the current value by 2 and report the correct power level for the Current Cost transmitter. This may be an effective way to monitor the EVSE TOU information you are looking for.

 

[davewill]

I haven't found any good way to track time-of-use for the electricity, which is ironic since influencing time-of-use behavior was one of the key goals of the EV Project.

You can enter all the TOU rates into the Blink and it will track $ in the monthly stats...but don't do it using the Blink's touchscreen, or the web interface, use the BlinkNetwork.com site, it's much easier.

 

[lonndoggie]

You can enter all the TOU rates into the Blink and it will track $ in the monthly stats...but don't do it using the Blink's touchscreen, or the web interface, use the BlinkNetwork.com site, it's much easier.

You know, I used the BlinkNetwork.com site to enter all the rates, too. The status of each of the 12 rates I entered eventually went to "downloaded" status (meaning to the EVSE, I assume)...but they've never shown up on the Blink itself. Go to rates and it asks you to start filling them in.

The Blink NOC guys have been trying to push the rate data to my Blink, and failing to do so as well (although they're always sure they succeeded, but then I burst their balloon).

Davewill, are you seeing the rate data you entered on the Blink?

See what I did there..."On the blink"...the Blink is on the blink...oh, I crack me up! :lol:

 

[patrick0101]

I had two problems today.

1) I had the Blink set to start charging at 3AM. I got an email from the car at 2:30 AM saying that it had completed the charge. Maybe electrons were sent back in time :lol:

2) The Blink forgot its IP address. I tried to access it via the HTTP interface and it was not found. I went to the Blink and it failed the network test and the dev-info screen showed an IP of 0.0.0.0. I reconfigured the network settings and has the same trouble. A power-cycle fixed this.

 

[LEAFer]

This just happened about a half hour ago: We were in the house when I heard the garage door go up. I believe something with the Blink caused this because we've never had that happen before. And when we came home today, after the garage door went up, I saw the Blink come on all by itself from 'sleep' mode. Also, there was a 'hum' on our phone line most of the day during calls. Anyone else experience anything like this? Of course I called their 24/7 cs.

Did the " 'hum' on our phone line " occur during the time the LEAF was charging ? And did it / does it stop when you stop charging ? If either answer is yes, please consider posting this strange behaviour here.

 

[jcesare]

This just happened about a half hour ago: We were in the house when I heard the garage door go up. I believe something with the Blink caused this because we've never had that happen before. And when we came home today, after the garage door went up, I saw the Blink come on all by itself from 'sleep' mode. Also, there was a 'hum' on our phone line most of the day during calls. Anyone else experience anything like this? Of course I called their 24/7 cs.

This happens all the time in San Diego when the Navy conducts Electronic Warfare training.

 

[patrick0101]

I went to Fry's in Wilsonville Ore last weekend and decided to stop in at the Blink station that was recently unveiled. This is what I found:

There are two stations there. I plugged into the other one and called the 888 number. I assume that it is back up and running now.

 

[camasleaf]

I went to Fry's in Wilsonville Ore last weekend and decided to stop in at the Blink station that was recently unveiled. This is what I found:

There are two stations there. I plugged into the other one and called the 888 number. I assume that it is back up and running now.

Are these stations in the Fry's parking lot? I did not see them a week ago.

 

[DarkStar]

I went to Fry's in Wilsonville Ore last weekend and decided to stop in at the Blink station that was recently unveiled. This is what I found:

There are two stations there. I plugged into the other one and called the 888 number. I assume that it is back up and running now.

Are these stations in the Fry's parking lot? I did not see them a week ago.

They're at the Wilsonville City Hall building next door.

 

[opencar]

anyone know if charger is required to have connectivity to blink network in order for charger to function? i've used it w/o problems for 3 wks but yesterday had an interrupted overnite charge & noticed that there is no blink network connectivity. connection to the LAN on Wifi is all green. much thanks for any insight.

 

[DarkStar]

anyone know if charger is required to have connectivity to blink network in order for charger to function? i've used it w/o problems for 3 wks but yesterday had an interrupted overnite charge & noticed that there is no blink network connectivity. connection to the LAN on Wifi is all green. much thanks for any insight.

No connectivity is not required for the Blink to function. The Blink is known for it's awful wifi connectivity and will probably be sporadic at best. I decided to install an ethernet to wifi adapter to keep mine online since I couldn't run a dedicated ethernet cable...

 

[patrick0101]

Are these stations in the Fry's parking lot? I did not see them a week ago.

No, they are a few blocks away at the town-hall. You should able to see them if you update the charging station locations near destination (with Wilsonville as your destination).

 

[DarkStar]

Are these stations in the Fry's parking lot? I did not see them a week ago.

No, they are a few blocks away at the town-hall. You should able to see them if you update the charging station locations near destination (with Wilsonville as your destination).

They won't show up until you plug into them and save the location... Nissan hasn't added them to their map yet...

 

[LEAFfan]

They won't show up until you plug into them and save the location... Nissan hasn't added them to their map yet...

You don't have to save each location if you have put your charge station 'save' setting on 'autosave'.

 

[DarkStar]

They won't show up until you plug into them and save the location... Nissan hasn't added them to their map yet...

You don't have to save each location if you have put your charge station 'save' setting on 'autosave'.

You still have to plug in though, that's what I was saying...

 

[walterbays]

You can enter all the TOU rates into the Blink and it will track $ in the monthly stats...but don't do it using the Blink's touchscreen, or the web interface, use the BlinkNetwork.com site, it's much easier.

What monthly stats?

All I see on blinknetwork.com is from my "Dashboard" that my last charge was 1.0E-4 kwh, corresponding probably to the event of my unplugging the J1772. Usually it does tell me the kWh of my actual charging event, but not today. Also I can get tons of CO2 eliminated, barrels of oil and gallons of fuel saved, and dollars saved, as a line graph from when I got my car to today. They all look the same: uninteresting lines slanting upwards without enough scale or detail to be useful for anything. If I had a lot of spare time I could "mouse-over" each point and transcribe the data points day by day. Even with that laborious method I couldn't directly get kWh, though I could back it out from dollars saved if I knew what assumptions they were using for ICE MPG and gasoline cost. There is a link for "My Reports" which are always empty, nor does there appear to be any place to define reports.

The most useful stats seem to be from the Blink unit itself, which tells me the total kWh used so far this month, and last month.

I had expected that all this data would have been available in Carwings, and just as I can download the car's idea of how many kWh it has consumed day by day, I could also download how many kWh it received at each charging event. Ideally it would have both its idea of how many kWh went into the battery, and also the EVSE's idea of how many kWh left the J1772 plug. Ideally it would record some sort of station ID of the charging station. But at least it should record the start and end time of the charging session, and how many kWh the car saw.

That way, for example, you would be able to use your Carwings data to show your employer each month how many kWh you used to reimburse the money, without the employer having to buy an expensive EVSE with RFID authorization. Frankly I think the employer should, and probably would, skip the reimbursement after a few months of noticing that the amount is trivial and not worth tracking. But I also think it would often take real data for an employer to make that determination.

[Edit:] With so much useful and seemingly easy to collect data overlooked, I wonder how much information the EV Project will actually get from our cars and Blinks. I would have thought that both the EV Project and Nissan would have erred on the side of collecting more data than they need, and I'd be happy for them both to have it if it could in any way make the EV transition more successful.

 

[davewill]

You can enter all the TOU rates into the Blink and it will track $ in the monthly stats...but don't do it using the Blink's touchscreen, or the web interface, use the BlinkNetwork.com site, it's much easier.

What monthly stats?
...
The most useful stats seem to be from the Blink unit itself, which tells me the total kWh used so far this month, and last month...

Those are the ones I was referring to. If you have the rates entered, it also tells you how much you've spent.

[Edit:] With so much useful and seemingly easy to collect data overlooked, I wonder how much information the EV Project will actually get from our cars and Blinks. I would have thought that both the EV Project and Nissan would have erred on the side of collecting more data than they need, and I'd be happy for them both to have it if it could in any way make the EV transition more successful.

Couldn't agree more.

BTW, I you go to "My Chargers" and choose "manage" you can get detailed charging history, including power consumed in 15 minute intervals during each charge cycle. It's got issues...it seems to run on east coast time for instance, but the data is there and Blink can make their "My Reports" screen do something quite useful if they half try. It's a shame that they can't/won't fix Carwings, because between not having miles driven, and possible charging outside their network, there are limits to what Blink can do as far as data tracking goes.

 

[walterbays]

go to "My Chargers" and choose "manage" you can get detailed charging history, including power consumed in 15 minute intervals during each charge cycle. It's got issues...it seems to run on east coast time for instance, but the data is there and Blink can make their "My Reports" screen do something quite useful if they half try.

This is great, thank you!! True the times and the format are a bit strange, and there is no option to download the data. But with a little bit of screen scraping script I imagine we can get some useful reports from this.

It's a shame that they can't/won't fix Carwings, because between not having miles driven, and possible charging outside their network, there are limits to what Blink can do as far as data tracking goes.

Carwings does have miles driven, just nothing relating to charging.