Nissan/AV L2 EVSE not charging

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garygid said:
Generally, I believe that the electrical codes only allow a Residence to have ONE single ground (usually 8 feet deep), and all the house grounds must be tied back to that one point.
You're only allowed to have one Neutral-Ground connection, and all the grounding electrodes have to be interconnected, but you can install a supplementary electrode anywhere you want and connect it to the EGC.

In terms of 8 feet deep, if you are using a ground rod, it does have to be 8 feet deep, but one ground rod can't be your only grounding electrode. [Unless you want to go to the trouble to prove that one rod gives a ground resistance of 25 ohms or less, which will take a lot longer than driving a second ground rod.]

Cheers, Wayne
 
wwhitney said:
OK, I agree that if you or your neighbor's panel has a direct L1-G fault, and its N-G bond is missing so no breakers trip, then you could get local earth at your car elevated above remote earth by on the order of 60V. Then if you are walking barefoot in a puddle and touch some unpainted metal on the car chassis, you could get a lethal shock.

I would count that as a hard to achieve scenario. Moreover, the resistance of the tires doesn't enter into this scenario, and local grounding isn't really going to help. The resistance to ground of a local ground rod will still be sufficiently large to cause a step potential in the vicinity of the ground rod that could shock you. Earthing is pretty useless for shock prevention at 120V.

I don't agree with your conclusions, but at this point it's just silly discourse, so I'm going to agree to disagree and leave it at that. =)

-Phil
 
All this ground rod business reminds me of a "local ground" horror story. When I lived in Michigan, the local codes stipulated an unattached garage must have a local ground (not sure if this is the case everywhere), but definitely relevant to our discussions!

This resident had ~$400 electric bills all the time, even when mild usage was occurring. A quick check of his panel with a clamp-on current meter revealed a 40A "garage" breaker which had around 35A of load on one leg. Upon investigation of the unattached garage, it was found to be largely empty and had nothing capable of that kind of load. There was a small 40A subpanel installed, with only 3 breakers in it, one for lights and 2 for outlets. A deeper inspection revealed the original contractor had made quite a few significant errors:

1. They had ran plastic conduit from the house main panel to the garage but had only included three #8 wires, all black in color, with no ends taped. (violation)

2. There was no separate ground conductor installed in violation of code.

3. The subpanel had it's bonding screw installed, which is not permitted for subpanels.

4. The neutral and one of the hots feeding the panel were swapped, such that the L1 hot was connected to the neutral bar and the neutral fed one leg of the panel. This energized the panel and ground rod with 120V relative to the "true" ground. (and the house)

The breakers were installed such that 2 were on the L1 buss bar (connected to neutral), one for lights, and one for the outlets, of which the garage door opener was connected to. The third breaker was on the L2 bar, and it was thus at 240V over the neutral bar! Luckily only unused outlets were connected to this breaker.

This discovery unveiled a giant resistor formed by the earth that was consuming over 4kw for months on end! (and probably a lot of dead worms)

Had any of the 4 errors not occurred, the problem wouldn't have existed, or would have been discovered right away.
 
Ingineer said:
This discovery unveiled a giant resistor formed by the earth that was consuming over 4kw for months on end! (and probably a lot of dead worms)
On the up side, he never had to shovel a path in the snow from house to garage! :lol:

If that electrician was license, he shouldn't be. A huge electrical bill is probably the best outcome from all that. Yikes.
=Smidge=
 
Ingineer said:
All this ground rod business reminds me of a "local ground" horror story. [. . .] This resident had ~$400 electric bills all the time, even when mild usage was occurring. A quick check of his panel with a clamp-on current meter revealed a 40A "garage" breaker which had around 35A of load on one leg.
That is an impressive story, and everyone is fortunate that no one was killed. However, one thing I don't understand. If 35A was flowing from 120V potential difference, then the resistance is a bit under 4 ohms. I would be amazed if that represented an earth path, you'd need to have electrodes at the garage and at the house with ground resistances of only 2 ohms each. Was there some other metallic path between the two structures?

Thanks,
Wayne
 
Ingineer said:
I don't agree with your conclusions, but at this point it's just silly discourse, so I'm going to agree to disagree and leave it at that. =)
Well, I'm very much interested in knowing if some of my conclusions are incorrect (particularly "earthing is useless for shock prevention at 120V AC"), but I understand if you want to drop it. Perhaps this is not the appropriate forum. Thanks for the discussion.

Cheers, Wayne
 
Good news, everybody! The replacement charger arrived and I installed it. Everything is working just fine now...
 
Arg! Well, the charger is working, but my very first night I got a nuisance trip. It wasn't a big deal because the car was mostly charged at the time, but still. WTF? :x

This morning I got up and tried to check my status with the iPhone app this morning and noticed it said 40 minutes to full charge, which I thought was odd because it wasn't that low last night. I tried to restart charging, which failed. I also tried to start the climate control, which also failed. Went down and looked in the garage and the trouble light was on the EVSE. I unplugged and replugged and it was fine. I've seen other threads discuss nuisance trips, but none of those scenarios really seem to apply here. The car was in my garage, it hadn't been raining so it wasn't wet. Any ideas? I guess I'll just see if it happens again.

I have all notifications turned off because I generally don't care (I really don't want to be woken up by a text at 2am when charging finished), but I would like to be notified if charging is interrupted for some reason. I don't see any notifications specifically for that, or am I missing something?

Thanks!
 
This is not good!

Sorry to hear the AV is being such a "nuisance"!

Do you have a 240V outlet in your garage? Maybe we can get your L1 EVSE modified soon so you can test that and see if it trips. Given your experience so far with the AV, I would want something else!
 
I do have both a 30A dryer plug (unused) and a NEMA 6-50 that my AV EVSE is plugged in to. though the 6-50 is up high at my garage's "future box". I'd need an extension cord the plug it in there.

While I'd love to get my L1 converted, it's hardly critical. I'm curious to see if this is a repeatable event. :?
 
Ingineer said:
This is not good!

Sorry to hear the AV is being such a "nuisance"!

Do you have a 240V outlet in your garage? Maybe we can get your L1 EVSE modified soon so you can test that and see if it trips. Given your experience so far with the AV, I would want something else!


That's funny because the first thing I thought of was that it sounds more like "someone" isn't fully capable of installing the EVSE and instead of implying that he has had two bad chargers, maybe he can take responsibility for not knowing what he's doing as he plays electrician and screws up both EVSEs when he installs them. But who am I to expect that? Ha ha ha! :lol: :lol: :lol:
 
AskDrStupid said:
That's funny because the first thing I thought of was that it sounds more like "someone" isn't fully capable of installing the EVSE and instead of implying that he has had two bad chargers, maybe he can take responsibility for not knowing what he's doing as he plays electrician and screws up both EVSEs when he installs them. But who am I to expect that? Ha ha ha! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Ouch. I don't care how many smiley faces you put, that's just rude. Combining your nickname with the fact that this is your first post almost makes me wonder if you're a rep from AV monitoring this thread and trying to salvage your reputation by dissing me...

If not, have you ever installed one of these? It's really very simple, there's not much you could screw up. Besides which, I did have a licensed electrician install it the first time, even though I could have handled it myself. I even got a permit and had it inspected afterwards. The only thing I did the second time was hang the new one on the wall and screw down three wires. Wow, that was rough.
 
For what it's worth, it seems to have worked just fine last night. Maybe there was a power hiccup the night before...
 
bowthom: I use preconditioning every morning, and haven't had a problem. I hit the stop button on the EVSE and disconnect it, which also shuts down the preconditioning. I climb in, and startup occurs w/o a problem. The preconditioning has definitely not timed out; I gave the system a leaving time ten minutes later than I actually go, in order to reduce the amount of power consumed by preconditioning. Before that adjustment, it was kicking on 25 minutes before I left. Too warm for me, and too much wasted energy.

So, no. Preconditioning has never prevented my starting the car.

-Karl
 
Hello,
My car will start OK.
My question is that the car will not charge & precondition at the same time if PreC was on the timer. I'm thinking it won't because it thinks it may draw too much current.
I was only doing it cuz' I wanted to top off as much as possible before leaving again.

On edit: I just started charging and preconditioning without the timer and it is doing both.
 
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