Urlingford and Portlaoise out

jerryg

Whats the story on the fast ccs chargers in Urlingford and Portlaoise?
Are they both still out as on ESB website going down there today fingers crossed Ballacolla is working!

cros13

I was at Ballacolla yesterday. It's working OK, but the metal plate that holds the CCS plug is bending down and the connector keeps filling with rainwater. just give it a good shake out and it will work. The backplate of the plug is well sealed so the water isn't getting into the plug or cable. I tried to bend it back up but I fear it's weakened.

Urlingford CCS has been down since last summer

Portlaoise has been reported as working intermittently but the last time I tried it it tripped at about 10amps.

jerryg

Thanks Cross i3
I had my first ccs charge in Naas and then on to Urlingford and surrounds back to Ballacolla and home to Dunshaughlin with 25% left motorway speeds @110 t0 120 all is well in i3 land delighted with my Bev purchase.

BoatMad

The failure to fix key chargers on motorways at Portlaoise and both sides of the M1 at Lusk is unfathomable

KCross

What would the most common fault be with these Rapids?

There does seem to be a lot of red X's on the map at the moment. Are they this unreliable in every other country?

BoatMad

KCross wrote: »

What would the most common fault be with these Rapids?

There does seem to be a lot of red X's on the map at the moment. Are they this unreliable in every other country?

according to ecars, they have very unreliable software in some cases, that crashes

in other cases vandalism

in a few cases there has been site power and installation issues

its still a poor show though

cros13

The major ones I've encountered are issues with the DC breakers tripping low (efacec and DBT) and the biggest issue of all is a efacec/CCS-specific issue where the CCS comms board locks up and only comes back up after a hard restart of the rapid charger. That requires a site visit as a remote reboot doesn't cut power to that board, so when it happens CCS is usually down for weeks at that site. The efacecs also have issues with the RFID readers coming loose and sliding down inside the cabinet. The chademo 0.9 rapids all have issues with fragile cables and plugs and also water ingress into the cables and plugs. The ABBs are bulletproof.

Another issue I've had repeatedly is eCars ignoring fault reports for CCS because they see a successful chademo rapid charge after the report. At least last time I checked, their management system didn't differentiate between the two plugs and just recorded a successful DC charge.
I now make a habit of calling again the next day to make sure the Carra engineer hasn't just marked it as user error.
It took me 6 months and more than 20 calls to eCars to get them to mark Urlingford as down for CCS on the map.

And apparently I've since learned that they only bothered to fix Urlingford after all this time because the RFID reader acted up and chademo users were reporting issues. I'm still going to go out of my way this weekend to go there and check whether they actually fixed CCS or ESB just marked it as such on the map.

stesaurus

cros13 wrote: »

The major ones I've encountered are issues with the DC breakers tripping low (efacec and DBT) and the biggest issue of all is a efacec/CCS-specific issue where the CCS comms board locks up and only comes back up after a hard restart of the rapid charger. That requires a site visit as a remote reboot doesn't cut power to that board, so when it happens CCS is usually down for weeks at that site. The efacecs also have issues with the RFID readers coming loose and sliding down inside the cabinet. The chademo 0.9 rapids all have issues with fragile cables and plugs and also water ingress into the cables and plugs. The ABBs are bulletproof.

Another issue I've had repeatedly is eCars ignoring fault reports for CCS because they see a successful chademo rapid charge after the report. At least last time I checked, their management system didn't differentiate between the two plugs and just recorded a successful DC charge.
I now make a habit of calling again the next day to make sure the Carra engineer hasn't just marked it as user error.
It took me 6 months and more than 20 calls to eCars to get them to mark Urlingford as down for CCS on the map.

And apparently I've since learned that they only bothered to fix Urlingford after all this time because the RFID reader acted up and chademo users were reporting issues. I'm still going to go out of my way this weekend to go there and check whether they actually fixed CCS or ESB just marked it as such on the map.

It's the same issue at Wicklow. It's down for CCS since Xmas but anytime we called they ignored it as Chademo was working.
They treated my wife like an idiot and tried to blame her for not being able to use a charger correctly. They even tried to say they had someone test it in an i3 and it worked which was bs. It finally took a video clip of it failing to work with our i3 to convince them to send an engineer and mark it down for CCS.
They've since gotten back to her to say there's a part on order to fix it and then tried to explain away their ineptitude with "usually it is user error". No real apology. Amateur hour :rolleyes:

cros13

Bad news... Urlingford CCS is still down, engineer just marked it as back up.

And today is the 14 month anniversary of when I reported it down.
I brought the charger a little cupcake to celebrate.