Charging Stopped Notification

[aesculus]

For the last several months I have often received a notification from the Tesla mobile app that my car has stopped charging. Its a bit random but usually within the first few minutes of charging. I have a Gen 2 WC and it has been installed for over 6 years. I have had it running at 72 amps and lowered it to 60 amps and it still behaves the same way.

The alert says to check the car for messages but there are never any posted under service. And the charging starts within a minute or two at the same high rate and usually completes without an issue.

Anyone have any thoughts?

A view of my Powerwall-Dashboard at midnight when charging is scheduled to start and the short blip around 00:09 for two minutes while it resets.

 

[Lasttoy]

R u still on original 12v battery? U might to get new one. Mine was doing that.

 

[aesculus]

R u still on original 12v battery? U might to get new one. Mine was doing that.

Not the original, but mine is 4 years old. I have been waiting for it to alert me for a long time.

Thanks for posting this and will certainly keep that in the back of my mind for testing after a battery swap.

 

[aesculus]

Well I had Tesla come out and proactively replace the 12v battery (it was 4 years old on a recommended 5 year lifespan). No change in charging behavior. Still got the notices.

I tried a 14-50 at 40 amps and did not get the error.

I also tried the WC at 40 amps (it can go up to 72 amps) and did not get the error.

I did check the lugs on the WC to the circuit breaker and they would not budge so not a loose connection there. Had to order a T-20 Secure wrench to be able to open the WC case and check those connections today. Doubt that is the problem though as I only get the one error within the first 15 minutes or so and then it usually charges without incident from that point.

Over the next several weeks I will keep increasing the amps (5 amps/charge) to see if I can find the breaking point.

Right now I suspect the WC is slightly broken but doubt I will replace it until it fails to charge reliably.

 

[aesculus]

Well my experiments indicate that anything over 50 amps and I get the one restart for free. After that all is well.

This has also confusing because the same notices come when the car ends a "maintenance" charge to top off the 2-3% it looses after a few days of non use.

My torque wrench arrived yesterday so I will open up the case to check the tightness of the lugs. Don't expect a problem because the error only happens once per charge. I suspect that the charger has a bug it in but I don't think it can be repaired (parts?).

 

[aesculus]

Quick Update: Two weeks ago I had the car in for some warranty work: Pyro Fuse and eMMC chip replacement. The SC tested the car on their WC (assumed after the repair work) and found no issues charging from 50% to 75%. Since then I have had 5 charging sessions, with 3 being over 45 minutes, and have not had one error.

It might be to early to claim victory that the eMMC chip replacement fixed this issue, but it sure seems like it. I will post here if I do encounter the error again.

 

[aesculus]

Quick update. The problem has reoccurred, but perhaps not as frequently as before. Took it in for the SC to check this along with the fact that I have had difficulty getting the charger cable to lock at many superchargers. The response was that I was "holding it wrong". That I needed to firmly push in the charger cable and then wait for the light to turn blue and lock it. They tested that theory and claimed it solved the problem for them.

Over the next few weeks I tried numerous other superchargers and even the same charger multiple times. Results varied dramatically. Sometimes even when the charger went to flashing green if I let loose of the cable it would stop and go to white. Also I could wiggle the charger cable and get the charger to change its state from green to white or blue to white. Interestingly the lighter weight, 250 kW charger cables did not seem to have an issue.

So I took it back to the SC and asked again to have it reviewed. The tech said he had a special charger cable that did not charge but he could review the status of the connections. After a few tests he determined my cars charge plug had an internal, random connection issue and was causing the anomalies. So they have ordered a new charge port and I will take the car in for a swap in a week or so.

I will repost here again with the results then.

PS: Another, possibly related symptom emerged during the last week I reported to the SC WRT charging too. After my home charging finished, the car would automatically just turn on the charger port for about 5-10 seconds every 15 minutes. This would go on until my scheduled charging period expired. I tested this by removing the charger cable and monitoring my grid usage which showed no tiny spikes. Then plugged the charger cable in again and the car immediately started charging again, but for like 10 seconds. I rebooted the MCU and this seems to have curtailed the issue for now, but its possibly related to the plug issue above.

 

[aesculus]

UPDATE: I have not had the high power home charger interruption since the last post. And the intermittent charging spikes during the night have disappeared after a reboot. During the last service the SC replaced the charger port with a new one that has eliminated my plug in issues and even seemed to increase my max charging power by a few watts. (108 > 112)

They were going to replace my seat bottom on the drivers side because they detected an issue with the occupancy sensor. They thought that might be the cause of the singular outage during high power home charging. It seems to work fine to me and also I don't see how occupancy of the drivers seat has anything to do with the charging state since I can get in and out of the car all day long with no changes in the charging status. So I canceled that repair. We'll see if I made the wrong decision over the next several months but as of now, all charging is working as good as new.