Value Charge at Home working oddly/wrong.

[ElSupreme]

So we have had the FFE for a week now. Looking at the charging sophistication on the FFE versus my Tesla I was quite excited to try it out. And with June hitting, and the week coming along my power rates are going UP, and need to charge between 11pm and 7am.

I setup my home location as a default value charge. Added in all my power company informaiton. And plugged in the car last night. Myfordmobile.com showed my finish time of charging at 9:30am, and going to the first 1/4 at 6:30 am. Which is weird. Well sure enough the car didn't charge last night (or didn't charge much) and kicked in fully charging at ~6:40am.

Why did it do this. It says charging started at 11:01pm? I have a 32A EVSE (that gets over 240VAC under load) so power supply isn't a problem. My Model S can suck every single bit of charge coming from that plug, so it isn't the EVSE. Am I just going to have to manually enter my TOU rates and hope it sticks to that?


Also is there a way to see how much power the FFE is sucking from the plug? My Model S does that and it seemed somewhat useless, but with the FFE I can barely tell it is actively charging.

 

[jmueller065]

I tried to use my power company info and didn't have much luck so I've been manually setting the value charge times ever since (been a year now).
Doing it manually works pretty reliably. In addition program the same times for the weekend as the week--sometimes the car gets confused and thinks its tomorrow or yesterday which messes with the times if you have weekend times set different.

 

[Erik]

I've had similar hiccups. I also have a 240v 30a EVSE.

Off-peak during the "Winter" months was 10PM-4PM. The software had a REALLY hard time if off-peak was set to be both before and after mid-night. It would either...
1) Not charge at all during the window
2) Say it would charge but take something like 14 hours
3) Just charge at the wrong time (during peak or randomly, IE 3:54AM)
4) On power-down, the dash would say it'd charge at 10PM, then immediately change to something like 6AM.

It didn't make sense, and seemed random.
Weirdly enough, sometimes after leaving it configured that way for 24 hours, it'd just figure itself out, and work properly... until I changed a Go Time then it'd screw up in all the same ways again for another 24 hours. :|

"Summer" rates just started, and with Off-Peak starting at midnight, it seems happier. It might even work correctly the first time (will find out today).


tl;dr
Try manually setting the Value Charge so the lowest rate has the largest "chunk" starting at 12AM and going until peak hours. Cram the other four bars at higher values within the peak hours. That seems to work most consistently.
Also, I am not aware of a mechanism in the car to see how much power the car is drawing.

 

[unplugged]

Yes, I second J Mueller about the power company info. Just set it manually. And, in doing that, the strong suggestion is that you don't use midnight (or before) to begin your charging time and just be safe starting from 1 or 2 a.m. That way, you don't get involved in the FFE forgetting what day it is.

 

[ElSupreme]

Yes, I second J Mueller about the power company info. Just set it manually. And, in doing that, the strong suggestion is that you don't use midnight (or before) to begin your charging time and just be safe starting from 1 or 2 a.m. That way, you don't get involved in the FFE forgetting what day it is.

I setup my charging starting at midnight, but starting at 3am (easily done before 7am) probably makes the most sense. I can start the Model S at 11:05pm, and it will be charged before FFE starts up almost every day (that way I don't draw 70A continuous for my cars out of my 150A main service). Not to mention the FFE will stay at lower SOC over most of the night.

Thanks for the help. My TOU $0.0125 (not a typo, less than 2cents a kWh) / kWh rates are between 11pm and 7am every day.

 

[jmueller065]

Well here is something my car did last night that was kind of funky:
Got home from my last trip and plugged into my Level 2 as usual. Shortly after that my son informed me that the car was "making a funny noise". Checking in on the car it was in a full charge cycle at about 85% done. (My car is set to value charge starting at 1am every day.) I hopped in hit the start button and checked the charge configuration screen (the "leafy" button on the bottom right of the MFT screen).
That screen showed my next go time of monday morning and my current value charge time as being right then with a big yellow warning stating "Charge not 100% at next go time" What? 3 days later it won't be charged up? I must have drove through some strange smoke because clearly my car was high!

(Bugs like this have been very infrequent with my car..I find them more humorous than troubling LOL.)

 

[unplugged]

(Bugs like this have been very infrequent with my car..I find them more humorous than troubling LOL.)

Nail on the head. After more than a year of just plugging the FFE in and letting it charge at the set time of 2 a.m., the FFE "forgot" to charge one night. Fortunately, it didn't matter, but I checked the Value Charge time, the EVSE connection, and all my settings and couldn't find a reason for it. The FFE has never forgot to charge since. Just weird.

 

[hybridbear]

(Bugs like this have been very infrequent with my car..I find them more humorous than troubling LOL.)

Nail on the head. After more than a year of just plugging the FFE in and letting it charge at the set time of 2 a.m., the FFE "forgot" to charge one night. Fortunately, it didn't matter, but I checked the Value Charge time, the EVSE connection, and all my settings and couldn't find a reason for it. The FFE has never forgot to charge since. Just weird.

My parents haven't had any issues with their C-Max Energi forgetting to charge overnight, but there have been 3 or 4 times when the next Go Time isn't until the next day and for some reason the car decides to charge immediately when plugged in, instead of waiting until the middle of the night. They don't have TOU rates so it's not a cost issue, it's more a grid efficiency and lessening pollution issue for why they choose to charge in the middle of the night. It will be the same for us if/when we get a Focus Electric.

 

[unplugged]

...for some reason the car decides to charge immediately when plugged in, instead of waiting until the middle of the night.

For a time, I had a problem with using my travel level 2 charging unit at my parent's house and then coming losing the Value Charge settings when I got back home. I found that if I kept watch on the info center on the dash, I could confirm that the Value Charge was set when I turned the car off. If it was not set, I would switch it with the steering wheel control back to Value Charge. Now, I just confirm the Value Charge setting each time I turn the FFE off when coming back from a "foreign" charging station. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it stays where I set it. Another strange bug.