waidy said:
"Charge Now" feature on EnTune does not work for us. Does it work for any one?
Knowing the charge timer doesn't work, Darren purposely set the timer at 7am for a designation time of 5pm, he then plugged in the J connector and noted the estimated "time start" (9:30am) on the dash. He then left the garage for work.
At 10am, he checked the charging status via EnTune. Not charging (not surprise), so he initiated a charging session via EnTune using the "charge now" button. After many pushes, he concluded that the "charge now" feature does not work and went to the garage and manually force a charging session.
Please advise of your experiences using enTune's "charge now" feature.
I would have to agree that using Entune to initiate a "Charge Now" is quite unreliable. Last night I had to do many attempt to get it to work. I probably tried at least 6 times before it finally initiated the "Charge Now" command.
At the time my RAV4 EV was parked outside in my driveway while plugged in to my Leviton EVB32 (7.7KW) series EVSE L2 charger. I tried both WiFi and 4G on my iPhone 4S and it did not initiate either way, but I think it finally worked on WiFi. Of course, it is possible my signal strength on 3G/4G was too weak at only 3 bars. However, my phone still works good enough to make a cellular call from inside the home, so that probably is not the cause of the Entune "Charge Now" failures.
Later today I need to take a long trip (~100 miles), so I set it to do an extended charge last night which started at 9:22pm (PG&E's off peak rate on weekends) and completed at 3:22am this morning, for a total duration of 6 hours. I started with 9 miles on the GoM and after completion, my range gauge went up to 119 miles. This implies the car has normalized my recent driving efficiency with respect to the GoM, to about 2.9mi/kWh, or perhaps it is because of the relatively cold OAT (<50F) at the time of this charge. Hmmm, I wonder . . . . as my driving efficiency indicated in the Entune ECO Dashboard is currently at 3.3mi/kWh!
Here's a graph that show the charging event on my Home Energy Monitor (HEM):
https://www.enerati.com/Electricity/ConfigDashboard.aspx?param1=NzM0¶m2=NTU0¶m3=ODAwMDAxMDAxMDAwNDAwMjkwMDAwMDAyMDAwMjAwMDA=
Note, that the total kWh usage, according to my HEM, for this charge was 42.12kWh. The maximum output power near the end of the charge was 7.7kW which seems about right for my EVSE. Since I did not start with a fully depleted battery, it did not receive a 100% charge of its full capacity of 41.8kWh. I started with 9 miles on the range gauge, which Entunes said was at ~15% of full capacity. So, doin the math, the actual amount of charge put back in the battery was ~85% of total 41.8kWh capacity, or ~35.5kWh. Thus, in terms of efficiency, consuming 42.12kWh seems about right at an overall charging efficiency of ~85% from the EVSE to the battery pack.
Also note, as can be seen in my HEM graph, that this charge did not exhibit the phenomena of a post charge completion "balancing" top off charge at a substantially lower power level. I have observed this mostly several hours after the completion of a "standard" charge. However, by zooming in on this graphs toward the tail end of the extended charge around 3am to 3:30am, it is apparent there was a slowly decreasing charge level accepted by the battery during the last 20 minutes. Fwiw, this behavior is exactly the same as I see whenever fully recharging my Chevy VOLT.
