Portable meter

No, not what you're thinking.

We have a bunch of Blink charging stations at my work campus, and one of my co-workers has been having trouble with charging his Honda Fit with them. I mentioned that I'd seen some voltage drops reported on the Tesla. So we spent the evening running around all the chargers and measuring the voltage and current at full (30A 208V theoretically possible) delivery. Well, most of them delivered 30A, but also mostly at around 199-201V. Note that even on multiple chargers in the same structure, the BGC was the only car actually charging at the time. However one of the chargers only delivered 191V, and often the car only showed 29A. We suspect that there's some bad wiring in or near the charger, since it seems to be throwing away about 450W. That's a small space heater!

So, anyway, it turns out that Tesla makes a very nice portable meter, for testing J1772 systems! None of the other EVs we knew about had any similar capability.

A bit expensive for the functionality, though.

FlasherZ said:

Perhaps they went a bit light on the wire size, or the distance is long? How far is it to the nearest building?

Click to expand...

Funnily enough, the one that is worst is on the ground floor of the parking structure, just across a narrow access lane (can't even call it a road) from the biggest building on the campus, with lots of computer rooms and stuff only about 30 (linear) yards away. Two of the good ones are on the 4th floor, at the other end, of the same structure! I'm guessing bad connections either inside the charger or where the power lines split.