2018 Nissan Leaf does not charge at Eaton POW-R-STATION

Flyct said:

Thankfully my home installed Eaton EVSE had no problem charging my 2015 Leaf, my 2018 Leaf or my current 2019 Leaf Plus.

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That is a nice looking setup.

Fortunately the Eaton chargers at my local train station work with my car (2018 SL).

Eaton is now out of the manufacturing of EV chargers.

One of the 3 chargers is out of service, broken.

Does this mean that that unit will never get repaired or do local service people have parts?

My company has a small number of Eaton chargers across various locations. Being brand new to the Leaf, I figured the first charger I'd try to use would be that Eaton charger. Didn't work; I was going to call them after confirming that I could charge using chargers from other providers, but I guess I'm saving some time by not calling them at all if they're now out of the business. I have to thank this thread for saving me some time.

I do have other options, and I guess it's not unexpected to have kinks like this as EVs are still relatively new. Still a bit disappointing, and I hope it's not off-putting to people looking to get into EVs...

I'm guessing it will take a good, long while before the Eaton chargers are completely replaced. I wonder if there's something Nissan can do on their end to make it work?

My town of Tarrytown New York has three Eaton charges. One of them is broken, and the town has no plans to repair. I spoke to the town administrator and he told me that they were going to renovate the chargers at the train station. They must be aware that Eaton is not repairing their chargers.

I find it astounding that a large company like Eaton can just abandon a product, and continue trading in other products. And no one in America seems to find that odd, as if it's a company's right to stop supporting a product when it suits them.

It's bad enough when a company goes bankrupt, but for a going concern, I find that very strange behaviour. Won't you be less likely to buy another Eaton product, knowing their track record on EVSEs? I'm not an American, my apologies if I misunderstand how things work there.

coulomb said:

I find it astounding that a large company like Eaton can just abandon a product, and continue trading in other products. And no one in America seems to find that odd, as if it's a company's right to stop supporting a product when it suits them.

It's bad enough when a company goes bankrupt, but for a going concern, I find that very strange behaviour. Won't you be less likely to buy another Eaton product, knowing their track record on EVSEs? I'm not an American, my apologies if I misunderstand how things work there.

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Based on this old article, from when Eaton left the EVSE market, Eaton continued to offer support on the EVSEs:

"Eaton says they will continue to provide technical support through their resource center, and will continue to honor warranty claims 18 months from shipment or 12 post-installation - whichever comes first."
https://insideevs.com/news/326391/eaton-leaves-the-commercial-ev-charging-station-game/

Companies may drop a product, but they typically continue to provide some type of support for that product for a specific duration.

It is unusual that Eaton claimed to have the "most robust, flexible" EVSE on the market, yet they bailed on it. They were probably testing the waters, trying a new market, but realized that they were not successfull with it. Sometimes large companies take on too many markets, and that can lead to large losses for them.

Eaton has a good track record on other various products for the commercial market, so I think that they will continue to do well with that.

henrydehoja said:

"Eaton says they will continue to provide technical support through their resource center..."

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Ah, ok, I seem to have gotten the wrong impression. But I still wonder if "technical support" has much real value some 4 years after they announced this, whether you can still get spare parts, etc.

We had about a dozen of their EVSEs. When they started to fail our facilities folks quickly found Eaton wasn't interested in out of warranty items. We just moved on and bought other brands.

The guy at my work in charge of the EVSEs told me last year that Eaton no longer will upgrade the EVSEs my work bought. They were around 8 years old at that point, so I don't know about the warranty status. But the solution is to replace them with different brands - Clipper Creek seems to be a favorite. The Eaton EVSEs located in the location I work are schedule to be changed out by the end of November.

That said, I've been able to get one of the two working Eatons to consistently play nice with my car, although it sometimes takes several attempts by doing a "hard reset" of the unit. I can never get the second one to work with my car.

In my region, many of the free public stations are Eaton brand from 8-10 years ago. Apparently Eaton made deals with local governments in the area to provide cheap EVSEs at the time which is why there are so many. Then they bailed on the entire product line.

You can get more info on it from this on-going thread:
https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=25488&start=60

I'm going to merge this topic with the existing one later.

Should they be merged?

Eaton has at least two different varieties (by exterior styling) of level 2 EVSEs + a bunch of DC fast chargers. I'd imagine they're all in the same boat of non-support.

I've used the ones at https://www.plugshare.com/location/15000 a bunch of times w/my '13 Leaf. I have to press the reset button after it faults almost immediately when starting to charge and repeat that a few times until it gets going. From that point on, Leaf charges fine and doesn't stop prematurely.

The second topic seemed to be a natural continuation of the first, and the first isn't huge, so I have merged them. It's easier to find useful information when it's all in one topic.

^^^
A recently created thread got merged into this one.

Somewhat ironically, one of the very early CHAdeMO chargers in US was an Eaton one at Mitsubishi Motors in So Cal. These are from mid-2011.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mitsubishi-electric-and-mitsubishi-motors-debut-solar-powered-vehicle-charging-station-125162704.html
Too bad the images at https://web.archive.org/web/20150604071411/https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=4691 are broken, like the current version.
https://mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=125917#p125917 work but it sounds like even in 2011, the Eaton L2 EVSEs had some Leaf compat problems.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/chademo-make-model-review-%E2%80%94-using-with-a-tesla.42176/page-9#post-972951 from 2015 talked about the 4 different "strengths" of Eaton CHAdeMO chargers, from 20 to 50 kW.

For those of you who can get the Eaton chargers to work, how many times are you pressing the reset button, and is there anything else that you're doing?

I tried the charger again today, having read a Plugshare user's suggestion from a few months (maybe years) ago. With the charger connected, I turned the car on and then reset the charger again. Amazingly to me, the charger didn't stop and report a fault. The car seemed to be drawing power from the charger, but in the state of being on, it wasn't charging the battery. Within perhaps 3-4 seconds of powering the car off, the charger reported a fault that I couldn't clear even after 3-4 resets. I repeated that test with the same result occurring a second time.

I'm sure there are a wide variety of chargers from this company, and perhaps the one I'm trying to use really won't work no matter how many times I push that reset button... but if some of you are pushing it 20+ times and finally getting it to charge, I'm not opposed to trying a bit more before giving up entirely!