A peek at the Leaf's Charger

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TEG said:
Will the ad-on charger follow the charge schedule of the on-board timer?
For instance, if you set to charge to 80%, stopping at 5AM, will both chargers stop charging at 5AM? ( I would assume so, but just checking. )

Bzz, sorry, wrong. What the LEAF really does when you ask to stop at 5AM is typically stop anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours before your target time. If you need more charge it could end up starting 2 hours before super-off peak TOU begins and ending 2 hours before it ends, a most unpleasant scenario. The miscalculation is proportional to the amount of charge needed so if you're only charging for 2 hours the offset isn't important but when you live in Virginia with a 4-hour window (I know you Californians get a 5-hour window but we only get 4) a 4:45 charge as is typical with my 70-mi per day 100% commute the offset could be as much as 90 minutes and so the timer will typically start (if set to the ToU SOP end of 5am) at 22:45 the previous night and finish at 03:30, by far not ideal. But if I just fake it and tell it finish by 06:30 (which would get it to finish about the right time under that scenario) and for some reason have a small charge required the night before I may end up charging 100% on-peak because peak begins at 6am (we're really tight on the ToU here in Virginia).

Point being with the 3.3kW charger I'm constantly doing very weird algebraic permutations of my charge timer to get it to finish before at least Off-Peak ended at 06:00. With that 6.7kW it's nothing but start at 01:00 (start of SOP) and by 05:00 and I'd always get a full charge by 05:00! Sigh.

TonyWilliams said:
When would you need the 6.7kW charger on a timer? For overnight, for either 80% or 100%, just use 3.3kW. For midday, hit the override and charge at 6.7kW.

See my comment above.
 
Since Phil hasn't piped up about details, I'll report what he told me. Any mis-information is probably my fault, not Phil's.

His charger is hooked into the CAN bus, listening to the BMS. The BMS turn charging on and off and also regulates the charge rate (power). Through most of the charge cycle, the BMS is requesting much more than the standard on-board charger can supply. The add-on takes the value supplied the the BMS, subtracts the 3.3KW supplied by the OBC, and supplies the remaining demand, up to its own limit.

As the battery nears full, the BMS tapers the requested power down to, and below the OBC's 3.3KW. As this happens, the add-on charger automatically tapers down and then turns off.

In addition, I believe he's monitoring the J1772 pilot signal and subtracting off the 16A draw from the OBC to limit the add-on so that both chargers together obey the pilot signal limit.

It's really clever and, IMHO, done right.
 
The dashboard shows times to complete charge. It shows one value for 120V and another (shorter) time for 240V. I wonder if that time estimate will always assume 16A for 240V, or if adding another 3.4kW makes that number be less? Also, if you pick an end-time only for charge timer, it starts charging early enough to make sure to get to the target in time, also probably assuming 16A@240V (or 12A if it sees 120V available.)
I wonder if it would start "way early" with the add-on charger because it would be charging twice as fast, but the "time needed" caculation didn't take into account the double speed charging available.

Maybe just minor concerns of little consequence, but I am curious just how "fully integrated" it will be.
 
hgoudey said:
Brusa, Swiss made. I'm not sure of the exact model, but it is something close to, if not exactly, this.

Shame that company doesn't make anything bigger than a 3.8kW unit. Seems to me although it may more than double the price it'd still be interesting to look at a 6.7kW to bring the LEAF up to 10kW. Sound like it'd never request more than that so a 15kW unit wouldn't do any better than 6.7kW but just curious about possibilities, that's all. I would love a 2 hour charge at home!
 
TEG said:
The dashboard shows times to complete charge. It shows one value for 120V and another (shorter) time for 240V. I wonder if that time estimate will always assume 16A for 240V, or if adding another 3.4kW makes that number be less? Also, if you pick an end-time only for charge timer, it starts charging early enough to make sure to get to the target in time, also probably assuming 16A@240V (or 12A if it sees 120V available.)
I wonder if it would start "way early" with the add-on charger because it would be charging twice as fast, but the "time needed" caculation didn't take into account the double speed charging available.

Maybe just minor concerns of little consequence, but I am curious just how "fully integrated" it will be.
Just a guess, but I doubt Phil could control the estimate, so it will be off by a factor of about 2 and your end-only charge timer will trigger way early.
 
Phil told me at National Plug-in day that the LEAF itself has no clue the extra charger exists... so charge time estimates on the dash, timer, etc. won't change. No big deal.
 
grommet said:
Phil told me at National Plug-in day that the LEAF itself has no clue the extra charger exists... so charge time estimates on the dash, timer, etc. won't change. No big deal.

I suspect the BCM or what ever measures the current for coulomb counting see's the increase in current and reports it as amps. But I'm not surprised the charging time is hardwired to the 'expected' 3.3KW LEAF charger.
 
Nekota said:
grommet said:
Phil told me at National Plug-in day that the LEAF itself has no clue the extra charger exists... so charge time estimates on the dash, timer, etc. won't change. No big deal.
I suspect the BCM or what ever measures the current for coulomb counting see's the increase in current and reports it as amps. But I'm not surprised the charging time is hardwired to the 'expected' 3.3KW LEAF charger.
Not completely hardwired, because the timer is aware of the capacity of the EVSE. The 120v aspect is obvious, but I'm sure it must also be taking the EVSE's amperage into its calculation. I have Phil's 12A upgrade, and use an end-only timer. If the timer assumed 3.84kW (the 16A max at 240v, enough for the charger output to be 3.3kW) and my EVSE could only give it 2.88kW, I wouldn't reach 80% by the cutoff time. But I always do, with lots of time to spare.

Anyone want to bet there is a CAN signal the timer is watching for that tells it what the charger capacity is?

Ray
 
planet4ever said:
Nekota said:
grommet said:
Phil told me at National Plug-in day that the LEAF itself has no clue the extra charger exists... so charge time estimates on the dash, timer, etc. won't change. No big deal.
I suspect the BCM or what ever measures the current for coulomb counting see's the increase in current and reports it as amps. But I'm not surprised the charging time is hardwired to the 'expected' 3.3KW LEAF charger.
Not completely hardwired, because the timer is aware of the capacity of the EVSE. The 120v aspect is obvious, but I'm sure it must also be taking the EVSE's amperage into its calculation. I have Phil's 12A upgrade, and use an end-only timer. If the timer assumed 3.84kW (the 16A max at 240v, enough for the charger output to be 3.3kW) and my EVSE could only give it 2.88kW, I wouldn't reach 80% by the cutoff time. But I always do, with lots of time to spare.

Anyone want to bet there is a CAN signal the timer is watching for that tells it what the charger capacity is?

Ray
When you connect the car with a charge timer set, it turns on the EVSE for a few seconds to check the voltage. I expect that it also reads the amperage specified by the pilot signal. This it will limit to 16A (or 12A at 120V). I doubt that it actually starts a short charge and measures the power output by the charger. There's no need - it knows that the OBC will only generate 3.3KW; why go to the effort of measuring it?
 
abasile said:
DoxyLover said:
From what Phil told me at the Green Drive Expo, it's more like $4K! Most of that is the charger he buys, which is very high end.
Ouch! No wonder it's better than the charger that comes with the car. I have to hand it to Phil for only selling quality products, though. We can hope that prices drop with time.

Perhaps this is old news, but I noticed a Nissan Parts Dealer selling the stock onboard charger for $1375. That's getting to be an interesting price for a buddy charging setup like Phil has worked out with the Brusa, which runs about 3x more expensive. Of course, one has to deal with the water cooling instead of air cooling and the Nichicon package may not be as easy to shoe horn in somewhere. Any other reasons not to consider retrofitting with a second stock charger to get up to 6.6kW?

Howdy
 
hgoudey said:
Nissan Parts Dealer selling the stock onboard charger for $1375... Any other reasons not to consider retrofitting with a second stock charger to get up to 6.6kW?

The Tesla 40 amp (10kW @ 250v) charger in my Rav4 is available from Toyota for $3700.
 
hgoudey said:
Perhaps this is old news, but I noticed a Nissan Parts Dealer selling the stock onboard charger for $1375. That's getting to be an interesting price for a buddy charging setup like Phil has worked out with the Brusa, which runs about 3x more expensive. Of course, one has to deal with the water cooling instead of air cooling and the Nichicon package may not be as easy to shoe horn in somewhere. Any other reasons not to consider retrofitting with a second stock charger to get up to 6.6kW?
I considered this a long time ago. It's huge, so you're absolutely right, it would be difficult to mount. Then there is the integration issue, it's designed to operate by itself on the CAN bus, so if you hook two up, it's going to cause all kinds of DTC's to be set in the Leaf, and neither charger will work. It would require a custom interface board be made, and possibly some modifications made to it's control system. It may even be necessary to totally remove it's controller and replace it with a custom one. Either way, it's an astronomical amount of reverse engineering and then (forward) engineering.

-Phil
 
TonyWilliams said:
The Tesla 40 amp (10kW @ 250v) charger in my Rav4 is available from Toyota for $3700.
This is much more appealing. Here's the spec label:
pic


The specs are perfect for the Leaf, and it's not much larger than the Nichicon in the Leaf. Though it's still going to take a lot of integration work and an external control board. (Unless Tesla decides to release the source code.) :geek:

-Phil
 
Ingineer said:
TonyWilliams said:
The Tesla 40 amp (10kW @ 250v) charger in my Rav4 is available from Toyota for $3700.
This is much more appealing....

The specs are perfect for the Leaf, and it's not much larger than the Nichicon in the Leaf. Though it's still going to take a lot of integration work and an external control board. (Unless Tesla decides to release the source code.) :geek:

-Phil

It is a thing of beauty, isn't it? I'm shocked at the price. I fully expected something "crazy".
 
Wow, the BRUSA seems like a really awesome charger. Thanks for posting that.

It's specifically designed for EVs.

I've found the manual of a predecessor of the same series:
http://www.brusa.biz/fileadmin/Diverses/Download/Manuals/NLG5xx_179_ab_Nr25.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The cool thing is that it includes a booster mode where it tracks the current drawn by any 3rd party on-board charger and then matches its output to that. It also generates a new pilot signal for the on-board charger.

So the manual suggests that you just need to loop it into J1772 inlet. It needs L1, L2( or N), ground and the pilot and connect it to 400V EV battery and the 12V battery. And the unit will do the rest.

No additional circuit or connection to the CAN is required!

The company also sells you the connectors for the units complete with cables.

So you still need to find and crimp the proper Nissan 400V and AC connectors and most likely an new J1772 inlet with thicker wires.

Instant 6.6 kW charger, but at a price.
 
BetterLeaf said:
Wow, the BRUSA seems like a really awesome charger. Thanks for posting that.

It's specifically designed for EVs.

I've found the manual of a predecessor of the same series:
http://www.brusa.biz/fileadmin/Diverses/Download/Manuals/NLG5xx_179_ab_Nr25.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I'll keep an eye on this but I'm curious what lines are cut vs. tapped in wiring it in and look forward to some Guinea pig's pictures showing step by step the installation process.

Jeffrey.
 
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