Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric This is the first really cold day of the year, and our Tesla charged to 80% overnight and stopped.
Since then, I pre-conditioned the car earlier today and thought I would take it out, but noticed it wasn't drawing any current from the UMC, so decided to check further.
I turned the car on (opened door, sat down, pressed brake) and clicked the start charging button on the big screen, but no current was drawn. I then changed the setting to disable timed charging hoping the car would start immediately, but it did not.
Called Tesla Toronto service center, and they said the battery would need to heat before charging, but I had already pre-conditioned via the phone app, and sat in the car for many minutes, no voltage shown on the charging screen, just 24A like usual, but strangely, 0 volts. The car does not show any evidence it is heating the battery in preparation for charging.
I unplugged the charging cord from the car, blew in it (sometimes that fixes charging issues). Didn't help, when I plug it in, the charge ring glows blue, and will not change to green.
Right now, the car is 69% SOC, down from 80% that it charged to last night.
Meanwhile, I took my Smart ED to the movies, and it worked perfectly, and is charging right now, no issues.
I'm going out to reboot it and see if that helps.
Any experience/advice would be appreciated.
�
Feb 13, 2016
Xenoilphobe Did you check the fuse panel to make sure the circuit breaker did open? (I apologize - I don't know your tech skill level -I am assume the charge port was already open)�
Feb 13, 2016
Saghost Are you in range mode?
I don't know that it would lock things up to the extent you're describing, but I've read that one of the effects of range mode is that it won't trigger the battery heater when you remote start the car.
Walter�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Fuse panel is fine, UMC has green light, Tesla charge screen shows 24A is detected, my other car is charging off the same panel on a different breaker, Tesla charge port door is open, glowing blue on connection, range mode is disabled (I've only used it once since purchase).�
Feb 13, 2016
Xenoilphobe Ok - step 2 - did you get some q-tips and clean the charge port (both male and female ends) - turn off power a panel when you do the male end.
Next hard reboot main screen and keep the door open so the car knows its on - and reseat the charging cable until you hear a the relay "click". Also adjust the slider to max battery charge..�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Did quips, and hard reboot, still same.
Took out for short 10 minute drive, saw blue snow flake early and it went away.
Tried to charge again, no dice.
Set to 100%, no difference.�
Feb 13, 2016
CA_Fabien Do you have the green ring around the connector on the car? It should draw power even when pre-conditionning the battery. If the ring is orange or with no light you may have a defective UMC. Ours failed last winter. Some water may have damaged the connector. We just did an exchanger of the UMC at the service center.
You may try to recharge at a regular J1772 L2 charger with the adaptor to check if the problem is coming from the car or from the UMC.�
Feb 13, 2016
Todd Burch Since it glows blue even when the plug is connected, it seems like the car is not seeing that the UMC is connected.
Have you verified there's no ice or frost buildup on the portion of the connection that carries the pilot signal? If it's not making a connection, no current will go across to charge the car, obviously.
Have you tried powering off the car via the touchscreen, letting it sit for a few minutes, then trying again?
Have you tried rebooting the touchscreen and instrument cluster?
You can also try resetting some fuses in the car, such as the BMS fuse. Make sure to wait about 30 seconds after removal before re-inserting.�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Ok, well, the ring changes from blue to green for less than a second, and then back to blue.
I've seen amber/yellow before in the summer, and a q-tip cleaning fix it then, but doesn't now.
Tried my Smart ED J1772 charger a few minutes ago (before you suggested ;-), and no, it doesn't work either.
The dash indicates it can read the charging amperage, 24A for the UMC + 10-30 adaptor, and 12A for the Smart ED J1772 OEM charger.
This means something, in that it can sense the current available and do basic negotiation with the EVSE's.
The problem is the voltage only "blips" to 1 volt for less than a second, and back to 0.
I'm warming the UMC in the house beside the fireplace, not sure if that will help, as I KNOW my Smart ED EVSE is working perfectly, as my Smart ED was charging when I disconnected the EVSE to try it on the Tesla, but what the heck, I'm out of troubleshooting options.
On the phone to Tesla again (third time today).�
Feb 13, 2016
CA_Fabien If you have the same problem with the J1772 connector, it is probably on the car side. It the car is outside, you may try to heat the car's connector with a hair dryer to remove potential ice from the connector. I had this kind of issue with our Leaf once. A small bit of ice was it the way. The hair dryer did the trick.�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Went through troubleshooting with Tesla service.
No obvious fault codes. He said it could be the internal charger in the car failing.
When prompted that supercharging may work, I remarked that a one way trip to Tesla Lawrence supercharger uses 20% SOC on a cold night like this. It's -23C out, so if the charging failed, I don't want to drive home and end up with only 30% SOC remaining and then have little juice left for the battery heater overnight.
It's a 3 day weekend, and we are pretty much locked to driving close to home now until Tuesday morning when Tesla may be able to work on the car. Bummer.
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My car is parked "inside". The quotes are because the garage is a 1920's outbuilding with no insulation. The charge port was cleaned with q-tip, no frost. UMC just got a 1 hour warming up inside the house beside the fire, that didn't help either.�
Feb 13, 2016
Xenoilphobe If you lived near me I would let you try my CHADeMo - not sure if it uses the onboard on not.. does it?�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Rebooted, twice today, included hard reboot with brake pedal depressed.
Haven't pulled fuses, and given that I've spent hours in -20C troubleshooting, I'm done for the night.
Anyone have a quick link to fuse box location and fuse # for internal charger? Might do that tomorrow...
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Similar to supercharging, CHAdeMO does not use internal charger for the high current pins. May use some of the internal charger for negotiation of low voltage pins though, but not sure. I've used/borrowed to test a CHAdeMO adaptor once (it worked), and have a local charge point (10 mins away), but don't have the adaptor (on my must buy list now...).�
Feb 13, 2016
wk057 If the car is showing the reading from the UMC's pilot signal (24A) then the master charger is powered and responding as it should. Does it ever command the UMC's relay to close? You'd hear a click and the lights on the UMC would start to move like normal. If not, then the charger is never even telling the UMC to unleash the AC power.
In any case, -20 is pretty harsh. It takes a LONG time for the battery to warm up. To raise the temp about 25C takes 45 minutes to an hour at full battery heater power. I'm not 100% sure what the cut off is, but I know it will charge at -10C. My guess is that the car is acting normally (not throwing any real errors) because of the cold. Driving does slowly warm the pack, but it takes ~30 miles of highway driving to raise it ~10C. With range mode off at ~80% the car's thermal management should have been keeping the pack above 0-5C, also. (-10C in range mode)
Overall, if you're still in warranty (charger is not covered by the 8 year unlimited miles battery warranty) then you should probably just let Tesla deal with it for you. Your car is essentially unusable without being able to charge it, so, it should be a priority.
As for supercharging, if it's a thermal problem (pack too cold) then supercharging would not work either. If it's a charger issue, then supercharging/chademo might work. Since the charger is reporting the J1772 pilot current then at least the brain seems to be working and can probably signal the supercharger properly.�
Feb 13, 2016
SmartElectric Purchased CPO. Have lots of warranty left. Tesla will fix this, they've been great on our other major issue (cabin heater not working to start the winter ).�
Feb 13, 2016
S4WRXTTCS This is precisely why they need to show more information regarding the battery. The temperature, and whether the charge it accepts is being limited by it.
They also need to allow someone to preheat just the battery without the cabin.�
Feb 13, 2016
Todd Burch If this were a hardware problem, you'd expect an error code to be shown onscreen or at least in the logs.
If it were due to cold, you'd think the screen would indicate as such.
I don't have it handy, but if you check the manual on the car there are some fuse diagrams. The fuse box is under the plastic panel toward the rear of the frunk area, right under the hood. The BMS fuse is listed there. You might start with that one and the touchscreen.
I removed the BMS fuse once, and plugged it back in too soon (probably after a 5 second wait). The end result is that a fan went on in the car and stayed on. I took the fuse back out, waited 30 seconds, then put it back in, and all was fixed. Moral of the story: If you're pulling fuses, make sure you wait more than just a few seconds to allow any capacitive energy to burn off and clear any "memory" before resetting.�
Feb 13, 2016
Electricfan Cover the car with an electric blanket? Worth a shot maybe. My family used to have a Pontiac that wouldn't start, and we'd cover it with an electric blanket.�
Feb 13, 2016
AWDtsla Maybe if you glue it to the bottom of the pack... There's doesn't seem to be much (any?) insulation.�
Feb 13, 2016
Electricfan That would be better. I was just thinking that it would be like a hat on a person - lots of heat escapes your body through your head. If you put an electric blanket on the top of the car maybe more heat would be trapped in the car and it would help the car heat its battery. Like I said, its just a shot. What have they got to lose??�
Feb 13, 2016
Xenoilphobe Pull # 44
�
Feb 14, 2016
jerry33 Totally bypasses the onboard charger. Of course, you also need the CHAdeMO adapter.
- - - Updated - - -
At least on my car, glowing blue indicates the car sees the UMC, but that the scheduling says it's not time to charge yet. If it doesn't see/connect to the UMC, it will either not glow at all or turn orange or red.�
Feb 14, 2016
mrElbe My car with dual chargers is sitting in the driveway at -32 C degrees and charges fine with the HPWC. Since it is timed for 3am, when I plug it in, the green shows for a second or two and then the timer takes over. My stab in the dark is that the UMC is on the fritz.�
Feb 14, 2016
Todd Burch You're absolutely right, brain fart on my part. If scheduled charging is on, you expect to see blue when plugging in. My bad.�
Feb 14, 2016
SmartElectric The battery heater is working, which is clear to Tesla when they reviewed logs. Plus, the car has dropped to 50% SOC from 80% only 24 hours ago.
The car won't charge from either UMC or J1772 charger cords in my garage.
Fellow Tesla owner near me is able to charge, this is not a fundamental problem on all cars in the cold, it's only just happened to my car yesterday.
Am going to hope it doesn't drop too low in charge before Tesla service is back on Tuesday....�
Feb 14, 2016
wk057 The battery heater running is rough. You can save a little juice by putting it in range mode (which will limit pack heating) and energy saver mode with always connected unchecked. If you have a 12V battery tender, can't hurt to throw that on there to mitigate 12V draw and save a couple %.�
Feb 14, 2016
SmartElectric Another hour outside in the cold yielded no joy.
Heated the charge port with blow dryer, no charge.
Pulled fuse 44 and waited a few minutes, heard various clicking sounds (relays) from the car, put fuse back in, same result.
Hard rebooted (foot on brake, double press on thumbscrolls) didn't change anything.
Jay from Toronto service emailed me back, my wife will drop the car off Tuesday morning.
Thanks everyone, but it seems to me like a charge port relay or built in charger (in the car) is failing.
- - - Updated - - -
Well, the car is showing the blue snowflake, so it's certainly in "self preservation" mode with respect to heating the battery...
I already turned energy saving on, and disabled always connected yesterday.
I do have a 12V charger, but am hesitant to use it...not sure why I feel that way, but I'm not confident plugging it onto the Tesla, even though I've done so on other vehicles I've owned (but loved less LOL!).
Car may get down to 30% by the time Tuesday morning hits, at which point, that is sufficient to go the 30 km to the Tesla SC in Toronto. My wife is going to find that stressful, she never drives the car with less than half a charge, but it might be an opportunity for her to overcome that range concern. Boy the more I think about it, it's really not ideal to have her driving it down to Toronto, considering the circumstances, I might just do it myself. Ok, made up my mind while typing, this one is on me. Thanks for listening folks, I'll report back on what Tesla finds.�
Feb 14, 2016
Todd Burch I think you probably wanted to pull fuse 53 in box 2, not 44.�
Feb 14, 2016
William13 I have a similar problem. The connection on your car is likely suboptimal. My car charges with supercharger and portable plugs fine but not with my HPWC.
Please try multiple reinsertion a and torquing / pushing the charger handle up or POWs or left or right. Hold it steady with pressure while the charging starts. After 60 seconds of green the voltage should be high enough to release.
I need a new HPWC cord. Lots of work to replace for someone else and part of a day off work for me. Thus I haven't fixed it yet.
Good luck. It may be your car or the plug.�
Feb 14, 2016
SmartElectric Why pull the fuse to the BMS (battery management system) ?
It's working, it's keeping the car battery warm in this extremely cold...
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I have a UMC and a J1772 charger, neither works, both have same effect, namely, nothing.
Tried pushing the charge cord in fully, tried q-tip cleaning, tried warming the charge port, using J1772 connector, etc.
It's possible the charge port is acting up, but unlikely, because the car charged on Friday overnight, and I never unplugged it, and when I used the app on Saturday morning to pre-condition, it wouldn't draw any charge from the UMC, which is not what usually happens, that's when I knew there was a problem.
Almost certain it's the actual charger in the car itself.�
Feb 14, 2016
Todd Burch Since the BMS is intimately involved with charging, it couldn't hurt...�
Feb 15, 2016
tliving Went to a Tesla store event the other night and tried to charge using their HPWC there. It wouldn't latch on my car. Stayed orange. I tried several times, then asked the Tesla people for help and they couldn't get it to work either. We unplugged one of their other cars and plugged the other HPWC into my car and it latched immediately. Seems the HPWC cable was too cold/frozen up. Nothing obvious on the connector end but could be warming that cable will help.�
Feb 15, 2016
JayRo Your Battery is toooooo COLD to accept a charge. Just like when you start up in the cold and the Regen is de-activated because the battery can't or it's not good for it to accept charge when this COLD. If you go for a drive 45-60 min your regen orange line should drop and allow regen hence allow for charging from shore power.
I just saw this exact thing from my app on the same days in question. I went up north to friends and parked my car at the Mississauga shop for safe keeping while my wife picked me up in her SUV (I work near there). They where going to bring it in overnight to sleep inside but must of forgot as I saw it outside overnight on my app. In the morning after being outside all night at -25c they brought in to charge in up since I was not picking it up till LATE that night. I thought it was weird that it was now plugged into shore power and Amps where at like 20 of 50 but zero KM/HR where being added. It took about 1.5 hours and the car was on heat inside and that temp was rising until the battery started to accept charge/range. Even after 3 hours or so it was only charging at 20km/hr when I usually get 50km/hr in normal circomstances.
On another note I then got my car late that evening and went to work a short drive away. Pre heated for 35 minutes prior to picking it up, drove 5 minutes and plugged into 12amp shore. I usually get 6km/hr on that plug and ALL night it only drew 3km/hr and my regen line was half way down. So cold battery = less charge rate dump.
When I drive 1hr to work from home and plug into 12amp right away with will charge at 6km/hr no matter of temp and hold that charge rate all the time.
LONG story short. I think it is normal. It is pretty much a fail safe of the battery not to charge when in extreme cold. The battery must be warmed up to accept charge. Go for a drive and that amount of amperage will allow it to warm up and then accept charge when returned to shore power.
You probably had the time charge set as I read from your post and it charged full (90%) and stopped. It then did not kick back on because of timed delay charge setting. Then became extremely cold REAL fast at those temps and tooooo COLD to start charging when you asked it to, without driving it and allowing the battery to heat up to acceptable level to accept a charge. YES probably an issue that Tesla should look into to overide set time charges when the temps drop below such to no allow for this type of so called "temp bricking".
Good luck hope this help, it's what I have deducted from my experiences and what I read on your post. I hope everything checks out and all is good in Tesla Land. If so this should 100% be addressed for us eskimos.
Oh and LOVE the Tesla best thing going hands down!!!!�
Feb 15, 2016
FlasherZ I'm going to say that the problem appears to be in your UMC, or perhaps the onboard charger. The former is more likely than the latter, but both are possible.
You say that the car shows the 24A pilot current that's present on the UMC, but shows 0V when the car attempts to charge. This means that the pilot pin is working ok, however the connection is broke to the main power pins. Is that correct - the dash always shows 0V?
When you plug in, the port should turn green, you should hear the "click" in the UMC, then you should see a voltage appear on the dash. If it stays at 0V, it means there's something wrong with your UMC or the power pin connections to the charger in the car.�
Feb 15, 2016
ArtInCT Do you happen to know of another Tesla S owner who may be able to run over with their UMC to try it out and perhaps eliminate the UMC as a culprit?
All right... who else is in the Great Toronto area???�
Feb 15, 2016
SmartElectric As was stated multiple times upthread.
. The issue is 100% absolutely not the UMC only, as the EVSE that charges my other electric car (a Smart ED) did not work on the Tesla either.
. I brought the UMC into the house and warmed it up, no difference.
. Blew very hot air on the charge port, nope, no better.
. Went for a drive until regen came back, nope, no better.
. A fellow Tesla owner only a few km away has no problems charging his car in -20C. It's not a fundamental issue with a Tesla Model S.
The problem is almost certainly about the built in charging system, as the car still won't charge today, and it's warmed up to -3C.
A cold battery will not prevent the car from accepting current to run cabin and battery heater. Our car simply will not draw current from the charge port from either UMC or a totally working (on my Smart ED) EVSE.
The "battery is too cold to accept charge" is not a factual explanation, my other EV accepted charge on the same day, the Tesla would not, are you suggesting my $15K Smart car is superior in battery management to the Tesla, um, that makes no sense. I've watched Bjorn Nyland videos on youtube, you will see a Tesla charged in -20C over many winters.�
Feb 15, 2016
FlasherZ Then it's your onboard charge system or a bad connection for the power pins at the charge port, if it constantly shows 0V even when plugged into a good piece of EVSE despite being able to see the 24A pilot. Good luck.
(My apologies for not seeing it earlier.)�
Feb 15, 2016
iffatall This type of behavior is also normal when the car already has more charge than the set limit. I assume you have double checked the charge limit.
Blue ring implies the port is detecting the UMC and is locking it just fine. Also, if the connection is not right, shouldn't the ring go yellow/red?�
Feb 15, 2016
SmartElectric Recap from up thread to answer new posts :
Charge port was cleaned with q-tip, no joy.
No colors outside of blue, I hear the click for the solenoid and no green.
Voltage only blips shortly to 1volt and back to zero right after.
Charge limit is max.�
Feb 15, 2016
Kalud Blue chargeport can also means scheduled charging, but I'm pretty you ruled that out already.
As you and others have said before, charging at any cold temp works fine, it just heats first then charge. Temperature is unrelated to this issue. I agree with others, must be a bad connection chargeport to charger or a failing master charger...�
Feb 15, 2016
FlasherZ Sounds like your charger is kaput. Hopefully it's a quick turnaround.�
Feb 16, 2016
mknox I have had problems like that in the past. Every time it was the UMC and Tesla replaced it. I installed a HPWC last fall and it has been rock solid (he says knocking on wood!).
Question: When you say the charge port is "blue" are you seeing it change from "white" (which on my car looks like light blue) to dark blue after it clicks and locks?�
Feb 16, 2016
beeeerock I don't think I saw mention of whether you have a single or dual charger setup in your car... presumably 'single'? Out of interest, does anyone know what would happen if the first charger failed in a dual charger car? Would the second one be taken off-line too, or continue to function?�
Feb 16, 2016
jerry33 If the master charger fails, you aren't going to charge. If the slave fails you can charge up to 40 amps.�
Feb 16, 2016
ArtInCT Jerry33 is totally correct. I asked my local SC service manager this exact question a while ago, thinking that the second charger could give me some higher availability.
It does not provide higher availability but does provide more throughput into the battery at greater than 40 amps up to 80 amps... he told me that 50 get you about ~ 25 amps on
each charger...�
Feb 16, 2016
beeeerock That's really unfortunate. It would be nice if the second charger provided redundancy as well as additional charge rate.�
Feb 20, 2016
Andyw2100 Just found this thread. Read through it, like a mystery, expecting to find the answer at the end, since the Tuesday in question was almost a week ago. Was surprised to find no update with what the problem turned out to be.
So...WHAT WAS IT?�
Feb 21, 2016
mgboyes Sounds like a stuck relay/contactor/etc between the charge port and charger modules (i.e. the component that switches the connections when going between AC and DC charging). The master charger is getting the pilot signal from the charge port, but no actual power.�
Feb 21, 2016
SmartElectric Hi folks, I'm back, and so is our Tesla.
Sat Feb 13 to Monday Feb 15:
Tesla wouldn't charge in -20C cold snap.
Many attempts made to resolve between .
Tues Feb 16:
It was -10C in the morning, car still would not accept charge, I unplugged and re-plugged in, pressed the button on the charge screen to force charging, etc.
So I drove it into Tesla Service a 25 km (just under 40 minutes in traffic) trip. During the trip, the regen braking went from completely disabled, to just about 60 kW (almost fully enabled) by the time I arrived.
I picked up an Audi rental car and went to work. The Audi, being a gas car, was a pathetic driving experience. Yuck. I realize it's cheaper for Tesla than keeping around a loaner fleet, so I understand.
I checked on the car periodically during the day, and found they had plugged it into a 40A capable charging system. My UMC and adaptor is only 32A capable, so I know for a fact they weren't charging the car on my equipment.
Tesla checked on the car that day and informed me the car would accept a charge. They couldn't find any faults/errors in the logs. I pressed them further, stating I wouldn't accept "it just works" as an acceptable investigation result. I also notified them that they should actually test charging using my cord and adaptors, as they clearly were not. Later that day, I did see the car charging at 32A, so at least they checked a few more things.
Tesla was unable to find a 10-30 receptacle to test the same adaptor and UMC I use in my garage. Note that I use 10-30 to limit the current to 24A due to limitations in my garage wiring which I will be solving in summer 2016 by trenching in larger gauge wire.
Wed Feb 17:
Tesla informed me they performed additional service on the vehicle, including tire rotation, fluid check and seatbelt recall checks. They also updated the firmware to 7.1, which is something I had requested as the car never prompted for 7.1, even after a month more than anyone else I knew on the forum.
Tesla informed me the battery had reached -23C during the cold snap, and that the battery would not accept charge at that temperature. Upon further discussions, including emails and phone calls, it became clear that Tesla could not explain why my car could not warm the battery to sufficient temperature to charge, even though the car was plugged in for the entire stretch of 3+ days.
Thurs Feb 18:
Discovered the Audi rental car had been patched together with duct tape (not kidding) and zip ties to hold under-body plastic panels together, which fell down and was scrapping on the road during my drive back to the Tesla service centre. Tesla followed up with the rental company on the matter, and I received additional follow up call so I could express my displeasure.
Our Tesla was washed and interior cleaned very thoroughly by Tesla, which was nice, and something my wife appreciated when she saw the car.
I attempted to supercharge the car, and that worked perfectly (as it always has).
I then drove to a public L2 charge point I have tried before, and it also charged the car (left it on for 30 minutes).
I then got home and plugged the UMC into the 10-30 receptacle via the adaptor, and waited a bit just to make sure the UMC was fully started. UMC had a green light, so I plugged the cord into the Tesla, and the car charge port went RED and then YELLOW and then I unplugged. I then plugged in again, and now the charge port went green, and the car charged.
Thoughts:
I am not sure what to say. While we are thrilled to have our Tesla back, we aren't 100% sure why it refused to charge for the 4 cold days last week.
Tesla suggested that leaving the car with the scheduled charging might have been contributory, but given the car was plugged in for 3 nights, and never charged, there is a real issue.
So, one of the posts here said "your battery was too cold". Well, that looks to be a prime suspect.
Another post said "my UMC failed multiple times, eventually went with HPWC". Well, that too looks like a suspect, especially when the UMC + 10-30 adaptor led to a RED/YELLOW light sequence when I first plugged it in at home. This after trying public L2 and superchargers, both of which worked, with no issues just prior to that.
Next Steps:
1. Trench in 100A capable wire to the garage.
2. Buy HPWC and use that for charging in the garage. Put UMC in trunk and likely never use it again.
Meanwhile:
My incredibly cheap to run Smart Electric Drive has never refused to accept a charge, no matter the temperature or conditions. It has never seen service, not for any reason in 2.5 years, since I drove it away from the MB dealer, I've never been back. It's braved -24C temperatures a dozen times, with only one interesting experience with the dreaded "warming battery" indicator where I needed to wait 5 minutes for the car to warm the battery to minimum operating temperature before I could drive away one particularly frigid day a few winters ago.
I would never buy any other car than a Tesla in the future, provided they offered a small commuting appliance like the Smart ED, as I love the size/utility of super small cars.
My wife, she loves her Tesla Model S, and would never want a smaller car. So our garage has two perfect cars for their respective owners.
Thanks for listening/replying/helping/advising, this forum has been a wealth of knowledge, and if my personal plight to attempt to charge our Tesla by performing all sorts of things like pulling fuses and blow drying charge ports has been helpful, well, that's fine with me.
Guidance:
If you ever encounter this behaviour in cold weather, just drive the car at least 30 minutes, and hope that drive warms the battery enough to accept a charge.
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Thank you.
JayRo, for your 8th post ever on TMC, you get reputation points!
Your explanation was the best one and I should have tried harder to get battery up to temperature by driving a longer distance, as having minimal regen from the 10 minute drive wasn't enough.
The issue wasn't only the cold battery, there is a fundamental problem with my UMC + 10-30 adaptor given the RED/YELLOW lights I saw on the charge port once I got back home after getting the car back from Tesla.
Cheers. Wish I could have fully comprehended the fact that Tesla has not put enough logic on the car to make sure it can self-heat without needing to be driven 30 minutes, but live/learn.�
Feb 21, 2016
hiroshiy Just a wild wild guess, could it be possible that in extreme cold weather, Tesla wanted to heat the battery with high power, like 7kW? 7kW requires 30 amps at 240V. I'm wild guessing that this is a bug with the firmware that it doesn't try all the available current (in this case 240Vx24A) for a few minutes and see how it fight against the ambient cold temp. If the firmware did see that 24A is not enough to heat the battery, it should have shown some error message.�
Feb 21, 2016
MP3Mike Maybe the 7.1 firmware update fixed the problem.�
Feb 22, 2016
mknox @SmartElectric, something still seems off to me. You shouldn't have to drive the car to warm the battery before charging AFAIK. This is my 4th winter with the car, and here are a few of my observations given that we live in the same general area:
For the first time ever, I noticed something different during the recent cold snap (same one you had problems in). I have a dedicated meter on my car's charging circuit and am very observant as to what is going on. When I started to charge my car, I noticed that the current (as reported by my meter) was less than what I expected. When I checked the mobile app, it was showing <something less than 40> / 40 amps, with 24+ hours remaining to go from about 70% to 90% SOC. After about 20 minutes, the charge current went up to 40 amps and the car began to charge (based on the now much more reasonable estimated time to complete). What I am pretty sure happened here is that the heating system was activated to warm up the battery before actual charging began. It was very cold, and I am sure this is the desired and appropriate behavior. The interesting thing to me is I have never seen this before in spite of several winters with cold temps like this. Maybe something in v7.x that makes the car more "conservative" as far as battery pre-heating goes??
I always leave my car plugged in when parked. I have never once seen the car draw power from the wall unless a) it is actively charging, b) I have turned on the HVAC via the mobile app, or c) I have opened a door and the HVAC has come on. In other words, I've never once seen it draw shore power for battery heating on it's own. I know that it has been parked in ambient temperatures of -20 C and below at certain points over the past 4 winters. It must have to get pretty darned cold for the car to do anything on it's own about a cold battery.
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For my first 3 winters, I only had 20 amps / 240 volts in my garage, and my car was set to charge at 16 amps (80% rule). What always happened in my case is that the car would draw the full 16 amps from the wall, but would "make up" the rest from the battery. My battery would deplete, just not as fast as it would have without the extra 16 amps from the wall.�
Feb 22, 2016
hiroshiy Thanks, @mknox. Seems something has been changed in the firmware 7.1, that the car uses less (or zero) battery power when connected to shore power, to heat the battery? In any case we will need more similar cases/tests from people in cold climates.�
Feb 22, 2016
Achilz I had a terribly scary experience that same weekend. Took the kids to the Poconos for skiing and waterpark. Planning the trip, I happily discovered that Tesla has a supercharger right near the mountain, in middle-of-nowhere PA. I got there with 54 miles of charge on the car, and parked for 2 nights, thinking that even with normal degradation I could make to to the supercharger 2 miles away. After two bitter-cold, single-digit Fahrenheit days, I checked the app and it said I had 0 miles of charge. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. Fortunately, the car started and I drove very slowly to the supercharger 2 miles away. I plugged in but the chargeport started flickering green and then 15 minutes later, it still wasn't taking a charge. So, I called the Roadside Assistance and they explained the supercharger would heat the battery about 1 degree every 5 minutes. It was at that time 1 degree Fahrenheit outside and the battery was frozen solid. It took well over an hour before the car started to take a charge, and then I had to wait the 50 minutes for a full charge. Over 2.5 hours later, we were finally on the way to our next destination, the Hamptons on Long Island.
Amazingly, Tesla still only has one supercharger on Long Island, in Syosset, which was 67 miles from our destination. I stopped at Syosset and, mindful of my experience in PA, put 200 miles on the car before continuing. It was still very cold, weather was bad and I was driving fast. When I got to my destination, I only had 84 miles of charge left. My friends were kind enough to let me park in their garage, but when we left the next day, the car was down to 69 miles of charge, and we had to make it 67 miles away. Stress? You could say so. It was a very tense, slow, no climate control drive. Fortunately, the weather had warmed up to the 40s/50s but it was raining and I had to use wipers. I tried to keep the estimated range about 1-2 miles above the distance to destination, as much as possible. For the last 20 miles of the trip, I was driving 40-45 mph. When we got really close, the estimated range plummeted and I drove the last 1.5 miles to the destination with the car showing 0 miles of charge remaining. Jeez, that was not fun. We did make it, plugged in and fortunately the car charged up and we were on our way 20 mins later.
I'm still a huge electric fan, but this type of extreme weather really kills the battery so the point where it's going to be very hard to combat ICE.�
Feb 22, 2016
AWDtsla In this kind of cold, I'd be afraid to have an ICE car with that little gas remaining, forget about an EV.
The pack heater is seriously undersized. You can see me complaining about it in other threads. It's a ~5kW heater, when it really should be a 30-60kW heater, which would also mean regen limiting would become a rare thing in the cold.
Sounds about right.
Given your situation I would have definitely spent the extra 40 minutes or whatever to range charge at the supercharger.�
Feb 22, 2016
Cottonwood Hindsight is always 20-20 (6-6), but in this situation, if you had just plugged the car into a 120V outlet in your friends' garage, you would have added about 3 rated miles per hour to the car 36 rated miles in a 12 hour stay. That would have helped...�
Feb 22, 2016
jaguar36
One is plenty, long island is not that big. Syosset to Montauk and back, even in 0 degree weather (241 rated miles according to EVtripplanner) should be easily doable in a fully charged 85.
Would obviously be nice to have more, but there are far more critical areas.�
Feb 22, 2016
MP3Mike Would it really have added that many even in the cold? A 120v outlet is only 1.4kWh, which isn't even enough to offset the battery warmer. But it might have prevented at least some of the loss. Of course the battery would have been warm already if you plugged it in right when you arrived.�
Feb 22, 2016
AWDtsla I would have guessed not really, but you would still be at a slight advantage. Most of that 14kWh or so would just have been lost to the environment.�
Feb 22, 2016
JayRo @ SmartElectric,
Please don't judge me to the 8th post thing, (read them) lol. I am always on the this web site and others and keeping an eye on the stock daily, ok I lied Hourly. I am a huge believer in Tesla and the ideology and technology. I have owned many many comparable ice cars and the MS hands down is the best. It does have it's issues hence my reply to you. I seriously don't waist my time with over postings that are silly but entreating from the stands as you can see but always reading and try to fill in when I feel I have the answer and experienced similar issues.
I have to say your initial reply to my post, left me saying not so good things about you (Inside voice) and I hoped that I was wrong and you had another issue that would be solved quickly. I always keep track of posts and was reading your final one. At first laughed a bit then say you admit fault and thanked me. Not needed for sure but appreciated non the less and speaks volumes of your character and those of this community alike. Sure we have our fare share of Tesla owners that as just plain ignorant and rude and zero class (we know who they are on this site) no names needed. Non the less this revolution started a few years back despite the oil companies trying daily to crush us we still stand strong and united. The facts are the Facts, Tesla might not have got it right with the roadster but it was a great place to start. Now with the MS, it might have started out a little rough but now I would say the product with all its fixes on the fly at the factory is simply amazing.
Sure I don't understand why I can't cancel my call if I choose to while it is ringing and have to wait for voice mail or someone to pickup (i phone). Our trip widget can't seem to count milage accurately and keep track per .1 of a mile and jumps 2-5 miles at a time. Things like that make me laugh a little but those are first world problems for sure. The car does everything a car is suppose to do amazingly well and continues to get better every update, name me any other car that has that capability alone.
Sorry about your cold snap issue. Like I said in my post, I also found it acting weird looking from afar on my app and deducted thus my post to you. This car is a huge marvel. Look forward to more X's and the 3!!!!
Take care and enjoy your baby�
Feb 22, 2016
Cottonwood If all it did was reduce or eliminate the loss, charging on the lowly 120V outlet would have helped. In reality, while it might not have added a full 36 rated miles in 12 hours, I bet the gain would have been positive; anything would have helped. People often forget that the common 120 Volt outlet can help, given overnight, or better yet, days...a 50' 14 gauge extension cord is not that big.�
Feb 22, 2016
mknox It might. Over Christmas I stayed at a hotel in Battle Creek, MI and only had a 120v outlet available to me. While not as cold as we're talking about here, it was well below freezing overnight. I started with a fully warmed battery having driven over 100 miles since charging and I think that helped. I did see a 2-3 mile per hour gain by morning when I came out to the car.�
Feb 22, 2016
SmartElectric I agree completely, but Tesla service did not. They maintained that there were no problems with the car, nor with the UMC. So, I am left with only one option when in similar conditions in the future, drive the car to raise the battery temperature, as that was sure to work.
Tesla told me multiple times during my conversations in email and phone that the car will not draw anything from the plug when the battery is cold soaked to -23C. The battery must be heated from itself during this initial period because drawing current from the plug would otherwise put current into the battery cells, as well as drawing current for the heater. Meaning, the plug cannot be drawn from, as there is no way to prevent current from going into the battery in this case (-23C battery temperature).
One thing to be clear about, our Tesla is a garage queen all week long, getting no more than 4 km of driving daily. We then road trip every single weekend, hundreds of km of driving, up to 1000 km in a weekend a few times. So, while we drove 17000 km in 6 months, almost all of it was weekend with some evening driving. This is very different from most people, and I know you have a sizeable weekday commute, which warms the battery every day. Therefore, with a completely cold soaked -23C battery on Friday overnight, our car is in a different condition to many here on Saturday morning, where the latent heat of the Friday commute would have likely allowed overnight charging.�
Feb 22, 2016
AWDtsla They guys at SC's are inevitable wrench monkeys and "people people", no one that understands software or design.
Makes complete sense, including your 0 voltage. This is also why regen gets completely disabled and no power is used for battery or cabin heater. Model S only has a single power bus. You cannot energize the output on the charger without sending some current to the battery. Although in this case I would think Tesla would be able to de-energize the contactors and simply use the charger to power the heater. But either there's a hardware limitation or more likely, Tesla just didn't think of it, as is that case with many cold weather niggles.�
Feb 22, 2016
mknox That does make sense. When the car draws shore power it is basically just replenishing what is being drawn from the pack. I guess there is a point where Tesla does not want anything at all going into the pack until it is warmed to some value. Mine must have been just that bit "warmer" where they could allow shore power for pre-heating. Does kinda make you wonder why they are so emphatic about keeping the car plugged in, especially when it's cold. I suppose once it's gone though it's self preservation heating, at least shore power could then top it up again.
Well, not any more. I retired as of December 31st. That may be why I saw the previously mentioned pre-heating for the first time ever with the recent cold snap. Maybe my prior long weekday trips were indeed leaving enough leftover heat in the pack that there was still some there by the weekend.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing!�
Feb 22, 2016
Electricfan Hey, my electric blanket idea might have worked too!�
Feb 22, 2016
Lon12 Ok. I think this is pretty important information for us to know. So -23c (-9.4f) battery temperature is the cutoff for charging? Then we need a battery temperature display so we know what's going on. If the regen line is not showing is it safe to assume that the pack is at or below -23c?�
Feb 22, 2016
AWDtsla The thing should be sending alerts to your phone at this point.. What if you don't have enough energy to left in the battery to warm it up? SOL.
Could have been me a few weeks ago if I had to park outside.�
Feb 22, 2016
InternetDude My car sat overnight one night at the hotel, it dipped to -26C. I had no problem charging and adding range. If outside in the cold, plugging into 110V would have made the trip a lot less dramatic.
ABC = Always Be Charging, folks!
�
Feb 22, 2016
SmartElectric Right, but you likely had latent heat in the pack due to driving to get to the hotel, so the charging was allowed as the pack temperature was sufficient.
Meanwhile, our car sat cold soaked for 24+ hours in -20C, leading to the refusal to charge the next day as the pack temperature was -23C according to the cars logs.�
Feb 22, 2016
beeeerock Well, that's very good information to have. If your battery is low when you get to a cold destination, you pretty much have to plug it in right away or be prevented from charging. If vampire loss takes what little is left down to almost nothing, you wouldn't even be able to go for a spin around the block to internally heat the pack the next day. Then you're really in a pickle.
At that point, you'd probably take a trick from my grandfather, a telephone lineman back in the '30s. He had some sort of gas or coal-fired heating box that he'd light up and slide under the engine block to start the work truck on a cold winter morning... LOL. I think he also drained the oil in the evening and brought it inside to stay warm overnight, but I can't think of anything analogous to the Tesla!
I think we would benefit from a warning pushed to the phone app... if the temperature trend is downwards and likely to get to a dangerous point. Warn the owner that his window of opportunity to plug in and get a charge/heat going is limited. If you use most of your charge to drive to your winter cabin and forget to plug in on arrival, you might be staying a while...�
Feb 22, 2016
Ulmo This is an example of something I think Tesla should have been fixing during 2014-2016. Late is better than never. Here's hoping Tesla puts more meat into the reliability and usability. Better logic, explanations from the car to the user of what and why, and better hand-holding from the car to the person. Keep the person informed fully and do the right thing, rather than not informing the person and not doing the right thing (as the example showed).�
Feb 22, 2016
hiroshiy @SmartElectric, thanks for great information! That makes sense. So if we really need to cold soak under -20C, we should keep charging with low amperage all night.�
Feb 23, 2016
Cottonwood Be careful what you hear from Tesla. There is an amazing amount of mis-information floating around among Tesla employees.
As an example, when the torque problems were happening with the P85D's last winter, I was on the phone with the Tesla rep in Denver. He claimed that my car was limping along on front wheel drive only. To check this out, I pulled into a parking lot with several inches of packed powder snow, and put the car in "slip start" mode, then did a pedal to the metal start. After getting out of the car, it was obvious that there were four divots in the packed powder and I still had an AWD car.
The Tesla AC charging modules have significant control over their outputs. While I agree that the battery probably needs to be connected when the AC charger is drawing power, the AC charger can certainly be controlled to manage zero net current into or out of the battery. Who knows what the Tesla algorithms in their software do, but it is certainly possible to draw only enough power to run the heater. If they want to be careful, they could even draw a small amount of power from the battery to stay on the use side.
While I am looking at some nice, white, new snow outside my window, it may be next year before I see below -23? C here in Colorado, but when we have another clear, cold night here in Colorado, I will do an experiment and leave my Model S out in the cold, outside of its cozy 10? C. garage.
We know that if you use the App to start HVAC while on shore power, the car uses enough shore power to run the HVAC, and we believe that it also runs the battery heater if range mode is off. It would be great if some folks can try App based HVAC use while on shore power in the cold.�
Feb 23, 2016
chriSharek I have a solution: FLORIDA!�
Feb 23, 2016
mknox I don't think so. I've had re-gen completely disabled (complete with warning message on the dash) at temps well above -23C.
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Still seems odd to me. Okay, so Tesla says that at these temps it cannot use shore power to heat the pack... but why, when you tried to initiate a charge, wouldn't it then simply use internal power to heat the pack up until such point that it was warm enough to start actually taking shore power? (not criticizing you, @SmartElectric... just wondering out loud).�
Feb 23, 2016
AWDtsla It works. For now.�
Feb 23, 2016
Cebe I have a feeling it's 7.1 and hopefully the latest build that talks about "improving cold weather something or other" fixes.
I think I ran into the same problem as OP, but it's hard to tell. On one of those -23C days, I started preheating the car, turned on charging (to preheat to avoid not having regen), but 10 minutes later, it was still showing 0A in the app. Had to leave, so I ended up driving around the city for 20 minutes or so, all without regen. Eventually, by the time I got home, I had about 10kW regen available, and the car started charging just fine when plugged in.�
Feb 23, 2016
AWDtsla
If I ever get it, I'll note if it actually improves something.�
Feb 23, 2016
Cebe Me too, but given the weather, probably not until next winter�
Feb 23, 2016
Andyw2100 It's February, and you live in Canada. You must be quite the optimist!�
Feb 23, 2016
Cebe
You're right, I probably angered the weather gods and we'll be getting a week long -30C cold snap next week. My apologies in advance to anyone else in the area that gets hit by this.
I forgot to mention - my car was set to range mode when this happened, which is not what I normally do, but has been mentioned as a possible contributing factor elsewhere in this thread.�
Feb 23, 2016
EcoHeliGuy I live in Canada and I don't recall the city of Victoria getting any snow this winter. And there are palm trees, kiwis and lemons. Drive a couple hours into the interior to see scorpions and rattle snakes.�
Feb 25, 2016
SmartElectric Interestingly, Byorn Nyland's friend Jorgen Winther-Larsen shows his experience with a cold (-18C cold soaked overnight) battery. In his case, the car accepted the charge while warming the battery.
�
Jun 10, 2016
sammyfan711 My electrician noted the operating temperature for the wall charger is 22F - i am thinking of installing a garage heater in my exterior garage just to maintain the wall charger above freezing.
Any suggestions or "real world" feedback about this proposed action?�
Jun 10, 2016
Zythryn Waste of energy in my opinion.
Is your garage insulated? If so, I would guess you will be fine. If not, insulate it, that will be far cheaper.
I've had a Tesla charging in an unseated, but insulated garage the last 6 winters. Two Teslas the last 3 winters.
Although I have been charging on the UMCs, not the HPWC. I have experienced no issues with the UMCs in Minnesota winters.�
Jun 11, 2016
sammyfan711 Getting it insulated / drywalled now (the electrician strongly suggested the insulation and I'm going to decorate a "Tesla Garage" with the drywall!), I'll hold off on the heater. Thanks for the tip!�
Jun 11, 2016
Zythryn My pleasure.
If you ask around of other Tesla Club members in MN, WI or IL you may get someone that also has a HPWC.
Considering I have seen HPWCs outside as Destination Chargers, I would think they are quite robust.�
Jun 11, 2016
Boatguy The HPWC is just a smart relay, maybe the relay won't trigger. Will it charge with the UMC?�
Jun 11, 2016
SmartElectric When I experienced the refusal to charge issue this past winter, it was way colder than 22F! So cold that I decided to bring the UMC into the house to warm up to see if thawing it out would help. It didn't help, same problem.
I'm going to install a HPWC when I get around to putting the new wiring into the garage.�
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