ttweed said:
I have never had a single problem with my Blink unit or any failure to charge my car in 7 months and 8500 miles of driving, and the software updates have been transparent to me and made no difference whatsoever in the unit's basic functionality over that time. I have also found the customer reporting on their website useful at times, though not vital, by any means. I'm quite happy to be a "beta-tester" for them, since I received this EVSE for free, saving me $2000 out of pocket on
TT
Normally, I don't pile on to points already made, but the above statement is so much at odds with the atrocious performance of the Blink unit I've had that I couldn't let it pass. I've been keeping a small diary of the unit's antics since its installation at the end of September. There are twenty entries in it so far, which averages out to about one every three or four days. Three or four of the entries just report mild anomalies, like the unit being unable to tell when the car is attached and/or removed, but the rest of them resulted in "failure to charge". Luckily, I can squeeze two roundtrip commutes out of one 80% charge, so only the single pair of successive-day failures impacted my working schedule.
Its behavior seems to have improved since the on-site servicing the installer did a couple weeks ago; there have only been three failure-to-charge incidents since then. But hey, the powerline Ethernet modem set they installed to work around the Blink designer's inability to get whatever off-the-shelf wireless modules they bought to work at least put the Blink back onto the Internet so I got the firmware update. And it hasn't been confused as to whether the car was plugged in or not since the repair (which also exchanged its SD memory card).
And in fairness, I can say that the failures-to-charge all now seem to be caused by the same thing: an alleged "Power Fault". There's a small chance, I suppose, that the LEAF's charger generates a transient when it starts up (about half the time, the LEAF's display shows a yellow exclamation point "system warning" indicator on the next startup following one of these Blink incidents), but my tendency is to suspect the system that is already plainly deficient in other ways. And in any case, I object to the Blink's failure to implement a retry mechanism. It's willing to reconnect and deliver charging current if I "touch the display screen anywhere", but I find that this is inconvenient when the startup "Power Fault" occurred at 3:30 AM (when the LEAF's charging timer kicked in). So why not automatically retry after allowing two or three minutes for a human to intercede if they're within hearing of the Blink's plaintive beeping?
After these twenty or so charging failures, I've taken the Forum's advice, and reconfigured the LEAF timers to allow charging to begin at cord-attach time, any time of the day (I still like the idea of terminating charge at 80%), and I'll just give up on trying to make things easy for the power company by deferring charging 'till the wee smalls.
Envious congratulations to ttweed for having one of the few (or maybe the only) correctly-functioning Blink units. Hmm. I don't know how to set up one of these "show of hands" Forum polls, but I'd be curious to see how many Blink users have problems, on a percentage basis. If problems are indeed rare, then why wouldn't the supplier be willing to swap one of the thousands of perfect units for my one bad apple?
My Blink worked for many months then developed issues but it still is a functional nightmare and the interface remains a modern electronic joke. I use my EVSE upgrade because it works and the cord is longer.
