So, I was on a trip W/bound on the M25/M4 today and had Chademo'ed 40 miles after leaving home with a full charge to 80% at Nissans HQ at Maple Cross, no issues. Got to Reading Services and had to get round to the E/b side as W/b Chademo was U/s, got the manager out to kindly open the access barrier, connected as usual to ecotricity's Chademo and got a ground fault error. Tried again, same thing. 5 miles remaining. What to do? Managed to get thru to ecotricity's help line who suggested going to Nissan in Reading but the post code (correct) takes you to the wrong place and twice round a busy dual carriageway before finding it (bear right at the BP and it's next to Audi). They were helpful and let me charge BUT despite it starting up ok, it kicked me out with a 'can receiving error'. Tried the button to resume and it did but kept on giving the same error after 10-30 seconds of charging. Thinking I'm well stuck now with no miles at all, I spoke to the management again who said it was working fine for their Leaf, that morning. So tried ringing Peugeot who could only offer the AA. Went back to the charger and tried again and it charged for about one minute and then gave same error. Noticed that each time i did this the car was charging a percent or two. By the time AA turned up (saying they thought it was a flat ICE battery and therefore no help at all) I was at 50% having been at Nissan for an hour.
Then, after another few resets it continued without error. Believe this is due to the much lower current being drawn by now (50A compared with 120A when empty). So AA cleared off, I continued charging normally to 80% and then again to 85%, then drove on to Membury Services. Charged perfectly normally on the Chademo there. By now raining significantly. Off to Leigh Delamere services. Guess what, again after initially starting to charge, the ecotricity chademo kicked me out again with a ground fault error again. By now it was raining quite hard. Ecotricity help line not answering anymore. Gave up trying to get where I was going, another 60 miles, and decided to divert to sister - 15 miles away but only 10 miles range! Managed to get to other side of services (nightmare) and, would you Adam and Eve it, Chademo works perfectly normally. Quick 10 mins fast charging and off to sisters in time for dinner. So, convinced problem is not with car as surely it would either charge normally or not at all (?) but equally convinced chargers should have a canopy to keep rain out of 300+V, 120A connections and that they should get fixed quicker! Not very impressed and realistically unlikely to trust ecotricity fast charge network again for a long time. Anyone else had any similar experiences? MW _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
