Is there an issue with the Blink Chargers?

[TomT]

In 8 months of use, my Blink has never failed to charge the car. Not once. I'm on WiFi, FYI.

I did have a red screen of death once during this time but I can't really blame that on the blink as it was caused by a an arcing feeder in the neighborhood power fault that caused all kinds of serious electrical problems for a few hours.

 

[CWO4Mann]

Carwings already has some of the functionality that the Blink provides. DOE should have worked with Nissan, maybe provide some extra money for development of the energy logging functions, then all this networking and "smart" functionality would have been not needed. The right place for this is in the car, where the charger is, not on the wall.

This would also enable more accurate statistics, such as when charging elsewhere.

-Phil

Sounds too logical to be something a Government would do. Seems to me that having the Leaf come with a WiFi internal capability would be the thing .. Just pull into the garage and it connects to your home system. BlueTooth also if there isn't a big distance to your PC.

Dave

 

[kovalb]

I have the timer set to start at midnight during weeknights, and to charge right away on weekends; I never had any problem with it failing to charge. When first installed I had to do manual re-boots many times. ECOtality replaced the SD card and installed a power line adapter to transfer the data instead of the wi-fi, which they admitted to me has a very weak internal antenna. The only issue I have now is the unit reboots itself for no apparent reason randomly. Does anyone else have that issue? Any fixes?

 

[pawsouth]

The Blink charger basically just works. When first installed the wifi didn't work because the 802.11g has less distance than the 802.11n so my iPhone could see the wifi but Blink could not. I extended my network to the otherside of the wall from the charger and it started working. Except when my neighbor uses their old style cordless phone then the Blink wifi can't find the network, but Blink will still charge. It will continue to charge even thru a wifi blackout and even thru it's daily self reboots. The Blink iPhone app is a joke. I can have the app open start a charge and a message says charging has started. Then if I ask for a status it says it is unplugged even though it is charging.

Ecotality is collecting my data but it is not telling the who story. True I charge every night at home but I also charge while out most days. In the leaf I have it set to 80% from 10AM to 10AM so anytime I plug in it will charge. Two days a week I charge it to 100% because there is no available charger on the other end and I get back with5-10 miles left.

 

[linkim]

When first installed I had to do manual re-boots many times. ECOtality replaced the SD card and installed a power line adapter to transfer the data instead of the wi-fi, which they admitted to me has a very weak internal antenna. The only issue I have now is the unit reboots itself for no apparent reason randomly. Does anyone else have that issue? Any fixes?

I had the SD card replaced recently and still have a problem with the Blink. The last three times I charged, I had to reboot it because I kept seeing the "Self fault error" message. I called Blink but no response back with a fix. They are doing an update to the firmware, so CS told me, but he didn't know when it will be completed. I mentioned the issue I have with deciphering the graphics on the log and the date of the charging events. He couldn't explain how to change the dates. I can only view charging events from the date when I purchased the LEAF to about 25 days later. Can't figure how to change to view more recent charging events.

 

[LEAFfan]

The only issue I have now is the unit reboots itself for no apparent reason randomly. Does anyone else have that issue? Any fixes?

No fixes yet, but I'm sure they're working on it. The reason it reboots (mine too) is to avoid the old '502' error. But sometimes I have to unplug it to finish the reboot or it just stays lit and says, "please wait". I've had my Blink for over 4 months and it has NEVER failed to charge my LEAF despite all the other issues it has. I do believe it's important though to be UL certified and that's the only problem with some other EVSEs.

 

[highcountryrider]

Sadly, UL is more about money than safety.

 

[CWO4Mann]

I keep watching the System Log for my Blink and this is what it looks like almost ALL of the time. Not sure what is going on with it.

 

[mpm3710]

My problem maybe a coincidence. I was rearranging my furniture in the office in my house and had to unplug the router to move it. I plugged it back in after about an hour and went about my day. However, my Leaf was not plugged in so I wasn't tracking if the Blink charger was working. I went for a few days before I needed to plug in the Leaf. However, I like to collect the data off the charger via network on my laptop (tracking kWh usage) I was unable to connect to the charger. I went out to the garage and notice that the charger was not responding so I had to recycle it. It was up stating for me to plug in to charge as usual, but the network test keeps failing. To this day I still can not get the charger to connect to the router. However it does charge my car. Like I said I don't know if all of this is just a coincidence and I never had a problem charging the car, but I didn't try before recycling the charger so I can't prove that the charger wouldn't have charged my Leaf during the time I powered off the router. My router works fine, it always has for our computers and satellite DVR. But why I can no longer connect to the charger is beyond me. I had called Blink about it and they had me reconfigure the Blink network again but it kept failing. They said they would send a field engineer out but that was a month ago and haven't ever been contacted.

Update 12/3/11, Blink stated that they were going to update their servers between 5am to 5pm. and said that it would not affect the ability to charge your car. However my Leaf was plugged in last night and found out around noon today when I went to unplug the car to go somewhere and found that it was still at 27 mile range before I plugged in last night. So it looks to be that my charger was not working and I recycled it. It came up fine and was able to charge the Leaf. However it still can not connect to my router which is up and running fine. My final analysis? I don't know what the heck is going on, I had no problems with the Blink charger for 5 months straight after installation up until the first week of November when I could no longer connect to the Network and had intermittent charger down time. I think Blink made some bad changes and that is why they are updating their servers today. Who knows?

 

[wsbca]

Update 12/3/11, Blink stated that they were going to update their servers between 5am to 5pm. and said that it would not affect the ability to charge your car. However my Leaf was plugged in last night and found out around noon today when I went to unplug the car to go somewhere and found that it was still at 27 mile range before I plugged in last night. So it looks to be that my charger was not working and I recycled it. It came up fine and was able to charge the Leaf.

Same exact thing happened to me last night as noted in the other thread - 100% successful charging for 11 months, and last night it failed. Seeing now that I'm not the only one, it can't be a coincidence...something external (from the server, or due to a strange response or non-response from the server) bolluxed the units themselves, before the announced server downtime, even though in the past a lack of connnectivity didn't prevent charging. Not good.

 

[highcountryrider]

Might not be anything to worry about. The system log for my Mac/OS X
looks a bit like that all the time as well, but the system runs just fine.

I keep watching the System Log for my Blink and this is what it looks like almost ALL of the time. Not sure what is going on with it.

 

[CWO4Mann]

Might not be anything to worry about. The system log for my Mac/OS X
looks a bit like that all the time as well, but the system runs just fine.

I keep watching the System Log for my Blink and this is what it looks like almost ALL of the time. Not sure what is going on with it.

You are probably correct and thanks for the reply. My Linux process sometimes has a lot of killall and process not found messages. I just wish there was a method to pipe the continuous output of the Blink unit to a file. I imagine that I would have to root the Blink firmware to do that and I'm not ready to try that yet.

Cheers,

Dave
Linux user since 1998

 

[mark13]

The charger screen does not change,it seems to be broken but as long as it does a full charge in 4 hours I dont want anyone touching it