Charging active when Amps below Min Workable Current

[vscfreire]

Hi,
I don't want to charge when Min Workable Current is below 5 Amps, so I set that option and set Min current to 0 Amps. The car effectively doesn't charge, because it sets the charging to 0 Amps, but it stays in Charging mode, which uses more energy than being in Sleep/Charging Stopped. Shouldn't this be the default? If Current is bellow Min Workable Current, shouldn't the Charging be stopped?
Thanks

[flashg1]

Hey @vscfreire

I don't want to charge when Min Workable Current is below 5 Amps

May I ask the reason why?

What kind of charger do you have? Do you have a single phase or 3 phase charger? Which API are you using?

Not sure if you have read the design page.

It is by design to switch on and off the charger only once per charge session to avoid wearing out the electrical contactor. There has been suggestion to only switch off after long period of low solar to minimise number of times switching on/off charger. I will need to think about how to incorporate that into the current logic.

Let me know if you are interested in testing a beta version that turns off charger if there is not enough solar.

[flashg1]

Please try v0.5.0 with following new feature,

Added "Power monitor duration" to turn off charger if average power in duration drops below "Min workable current". Requires "Min workable current" to be a non-zero value.

[vscfreire]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for getting back to me, not only in this discussion but also with an implemented feature. I will test it next week.

To give a bit more context to the community, my request comes from a charging-efficiency point of view. When a Tesla is actively awake, for example while waiting to charge, all of its systems consume around 1 A at 240 V, which is about 240 W. If it stays like that for 4 hours in a day, just waiting at 0 A, that means about 1 kWh is wasted. If, on that same day, we are only able to charge 2 kWh, then my charging efficiency is at most 50%, or even 0% if it takes another 4 hours to charge those 2 kWh. So in the end, it was just a waste of time and energy.

[vscfreire]

Hi,

Just to give feedback that this is has been working as expected. Thanks.

The only thing that could be optimized is that when it reaches solar elevation activation value it wakes the car to charge 0 Amps even if the actual rolling average power is below the workable current (this probably happens for other charging triggers). After the monitor duration time it then stops charging at 0 Amps again as expected. If we could avoid this flapping, with would be nice.

[flashg1]

Thank you for the feedback.

After the monitor duration time it then stops charging at 0 Amps again as expected. If we could avoid this flapping, with would be nice.

This will be hard to do since you can have multiple chargers sharing the available power, and you won't know the actual allocation and calculate the moving average until the charger is started.

Will keep this in mind if I can think of a better solution.