EVSE charges 3.3kw cars, but faults on 6.6kw cars

Hi all!

New to Leafs and ownership of EVs in general. MY wife and daughter have both recently moved into Leafs. The wife's Leaf is a 2012 SL and it has the ChadeMo and 3.3kw charger. My daughter's is a 2013 SV with only the 6.6kw charger.

I originally installed an Eaton EVSE at our home that is capable of 7.2kw. It worked great and always charged the 3.3kw car. When my daughter bought hers I told her I would help her get an L2 EVSE for her house just cause I'm a good dad that way. In a bonehead Ebay move I thought I had ordered her the same L2 Eaton that we have, but it is only a 16 amp model.

When we installed the Ebay Eaton EVSE it charged the 2012 SL 3.3 kw car just fine, but the next day my daughter called and told me it would not charge her 6.6kw car- it would just go into 'fault' mode.

I swapped her EVSEs as we didn't need the higher capability. However, when she comes to visit she cannot use our L2 to charge as it faults with her '13. I thought that there was some kind of 'handshake' communication that takes place between the EVSE and the car which would tell the car that it could only pull 3.3kw (or whatever 16 amps comes to ) when it was hooked to that EVSE?? Is her car the issue, or is it the Eaton EVSE?


Thanks,
Corey

Most likely it is the Eaton that is causing the problem. Is it faulting due to overcurrent?

91040 said:

Most likely it is the Eaton that is causing the problem. Is it faulting due to overcurrent?

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Is doesn't specify the fault.

That would be too easy! :lol:

Can you check the pilot signal on the Eaton?

91040 said:

Can you check the pilot signal on the Eaton?

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Is there instructions on how to do that?

Call Eaton, tell them what is happening. They will probably be helpful in resolving your problem, it may be something simple.

Charles

The Leaf follows the J1772 specs. A 16A EVSE should charge just fine but just more slowly. It might be that the pilot signal is wrong but that is not likely. Hopefully your Ebay purchase is still under warranty.

If you are in Orange County near Disneyland I would be happy to check out the EVSE. I can read the pilot and I can check it under load.

When you say "it faults" do you mean there's a fault indicator on the EVSE or in the Leaf? Does this happen immediately upon plugging in, or does charging start for a while first? If it does start charging, can you measure the current it's pulling before the fault? If her Leaf has a timer set and plugs in will that cause the fault as well? Do you have access to any other EVs with higher-power chargers that you can test the unit with, just to rule out the possibility that the Leaf is causing the problem?

I second the suggestion to put Eaton's customer service to the test, but who knows if the unit's still under any sort of warranty or whether the previous owner messed with it in some way (I hope it was cheap!) You can also try to extract a little more information from whatever error indicators you see. From the manual, assuming I guessed the right unit, here's the troubleshooting table:
If you're lucky maybe it's just the "dirty connector" error and a little cleaning could fix it.

Wow. Great responses.

I have not answered any of the questions yet, because my daughter has not been over since I asked about this.

When it happened I did not pay enough attention to the Fault, especially its blinking speed. What a horrible way to interface with a frustrated user. Upon her return I will try it again. I can say that it does fault nearly immediately. A call to Eaton will be in order once I do a little more diagnosis.

Thanks a bunch. I will update this when I know more.

*It should be mentioned that this was a used EVSE that is several years old. It was pretty inexpensive (had it worked as planned) option, but I'm now wishing we had just had her cord EVSE modded.

Daughter was over last night. The fault is the "Pilot signal error from a dirty connector or damaged cable or from a dirty vehicle inlet."

I cleaned the connectors with a can of De-Oxit with no change.

It actually does not make sense for 2 reasons; the charger works on 2 other cars with 3.3kw chargers AND her car charges fine with any other EVSE.

The above makes me wonder if this Eaton is so old that it had no firmware provisions for dealing with higher charge rate cars? Does that make sense? Its like the EVSE cannot communicate correctly with the newer car.

The pilot rate signal has been part of the spec since day one so it should make no difference. I think Eaton will be the one with the answer...

Roostre said:

The above makes me wonder if this Eaton is so old that it had no firmware provisions for dealing with higher charge rate cars? Does that make sense? Its like the EVSE cannot communicate correctly with the newer car.

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Yes, I suspect you are correct.

Oh How I hate calling large corporations...

With that error I presume it means charging never starts, so the higher charger capacity is irrelevant. The J1772 protocol is mostly a one-way affair - the EVSE communicates what it can do and the car takes as much as it can; at no point does the car communicate back what it wants to take.

So you could try to get an oscilloscope to measure the pilot and dive deeper or just call Eaton and hope for good customer service. I'd suggest opening up the EVSE and making sure the pilot wire's well-connected, but given that it works with at least some cars something as obvious as that seems unlikely.

fooljoe said:

With that error I presume it means charging never starts, so the higher charger capacity is irrelevant. The J1772 protocol is mostly a one-way affair - the EVSE communicates what it can do and the car takes as much as it can; at no point does the car communicate back what it wants to take.

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So perhaps the EVSE is reporting greater capacity than it actually has, and freaking out when a car tries to draw more than the EVSE can really do. (It wouldn't matter with the 3.3kW cars, because they'd still draw under that limit.)

That makes sense. There are commercial Eaton EVSEs that fault when trying to charge with a Brusa but work fine at 3.3kW. Have seen similar behavior with some Blinks.

There have been similar problems with Eaton charging stations reported previously...

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=12467

The 2013 may have a bad PDM module, this would surface at a higher charge rate and could be random.

wmcbrine said:

fooljoe said:

With that error I presume it means charging never starts, so the higher charger capacity is irrelevant. The J1772 protocol is mostly a one-way affair - the EVSE communicates what it can do and the car takes as much as it can; at no point does the car communicate back what it wants to take.

Click to expand...

So perhaps the EVSE is reporting greater capacity than it actually has, and freaking out when a car tries to draw more than the EVSE can really do. (It wouldn't matter with the 3.3kW cars, because they'd still draw under that limit.)

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No, that's what we initially thought might be the case but is disproved by the error state that's reported. The unit has an error state for an overcurrent event like you're describing but that's not the error that Roostre reported.