Cannot charge at some Chademo stations

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owenhowlett

New member
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
3
A couple of months ago I noticed I could no longer charge at one of my local Chademo stations. It had been working fine and then one day I just got "could not connect to EV". There are two other Chademos I use and they still work fine. Then this morning I couldn't charge at the new Electrify America Chademo station (brand new, I hadn't been there before). Anyone have insight into this? I have a 2015 Leaf.
 
owenhowlett said:
A couple of months ago I noticed I could no longer charge at one of my local Chademo stations. It had been working fine and then one day I just got "could not connect to EV". There are two other Chademos I use and they still work fine. Then this morning I couldn't charge at the new Electrify America Chademo station (brand new, I hadn't been there before). Anyone have insight into this? I have a 2015 Leaf.

A couple of questions for you:

Have you checked PlugShare to see if other people have been having connection problems? If you don't have the PlugShare app on your phone, I strongly recommend you get it for checking the status of chargers. And make sure to enter your failed charging attempt, since that may be helpful for other people. If you don't want to use an app, there is also www.plugshare.com

Also, some chargers will sometimes fault like that if you have anything plugged in to the USB port. Recently I could not get a Webasto (formerly Aerovironment) charger to work after several tries, and finally called their tech support number. The tech who answered actually knew a lot about EVs and the charger, and told me to remove my USB thumb drive that I had plugged in with my music library. The charger worked on my next try after that.
 
Astros said:
The tech who answered actually knew a lot about EVs and the charger, and told me to remove my USB thumb drive that I had plugged in with my music library. The charger worked on my next try after that.
I'm struggling to understand how the two are related. Timed-out ?
 
I have had a few incidents of communication failure between the car and the charger. In one case, I was able to get the EVgo charger to activate by checking the latches on the CHAdeMO plug and freeing one that was stuck partially depressed. There have also been times when I could not charge and someone else was able to charge while I studied/cleared error codes. I suspect that the connectors for the control/communication lines in the port are worn from 295 quick charges over the past 4 years.
 
SageBrush said:
I'm struggling to understand how the two are related. Timed-out ?

According to the tech, having even a USB thumb drive plugged in can draw a tiny current, and that can be enough for the car and charger to think that it is on. If the car is turned on, it can't start charging (though you can turn it on after charging starts).
 
Astros said:
SageBrush said:
I'm struggling to understand how the two are related. Timed-out ?

According to the tech, having even a USB thumb drive plugged in can draw a tiny current, and that can be enough for the car and charger to think that it is on. If the car is turned on, it can't start charging (though you can turn it on after charging starts).
I'm skeptical, but I'm glad to read of a solution.
 
I'd suspect that having something plugged into a USB port would set some part of the car to an 'active' state and that would indicate to the car that it cannot start charging. I can't imagine the amount of current draw would be sufficient to indicate the car was 'on' but anything is possible with software I guess.
 
It looks like this week's prize goes to Astros!! I had an iPhone charging cord plugged into the USB outlet (no phone attached), and when I took the charging cord out, the EV charger worked just fine! I'm going to try this again just to be sure. And if it's a consistent finding I'm going to call the folks at the charging network to let them know.


Astros said:
owenhowlett said:
A couple of months ago I noticed I could no longer charge at one of my local Chademo stations. It had been working fine and then one day I just got "could not connect to EV". There are two other Chademos I use and they still work fine. Then this morning I couldn't charge at the new Electrify America Chademo station (brand new, I hadn't been there before). Anyone have insight into this? I have a 2015 Leaf.

A couple of questions for you:

Have you checked PlugShare to see if other people have been having connection problems? If you don't have the PlugShare app on your phone, I strongly recommend you get it for checking the status of chargers. And make sure to enter your failed charging attempt, since that may be helpful for other people. If you don't want to use an app, there is also http://www.plugshare.com

Also, some chargers will sometimes fault like that if you have anything plugged in to the USB port. Recently I could not get a Webasto (formerly Aerovironment) charger to work after several tries, and finally called their tech support number. The tech who answered actually knew a lot about EVs and the charger, and told me to remove my USB thumb drive that I had plugged in with my music library. The charger worked on my next try after that.
 
I once plugged in to a Chademo (Fortum charge and drive in Norway) and it couldn't communicate with the car. I called customer service, and he told me to try and turn off ECO mode before switching the car off. It worked for me (2016 model). He said it was a Leaf specialty.
 
Astros said:
According to the tech, having even a USB thumb drive plugged in can draw a tiny current, and that can be enough for the car and charger to think that it is on. If the car is turned on, it can't start charging (though you can turn it on after charging starts).

If anything qualifies as a Forum "sticky", this would be it. Amazing!
 
I’m glad that helped you. It certainly doesn’t happen with every charger, because I often leave a usb thumb drive or a phone cable plugged in, and 90% of the time there’s no problem. I’ve only run into it at chargers off my usual path, so I haven’t been able to check if I can reproduce the problem on a different day.
 
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