Charging on a Tesla Type 2 Destination Charger in Australia

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OzKona

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We are new to road trips in a Kona, so please forgive me if this an old question.

At the hotel where we're staying there are two Tesla destination chargers. One is labelled Tesla cars only and looks like it has a J1772 plug. The other looks the same but has a Type 2 plug. Not expecting it to work because it's Tesla, we tried it on the Kona and after a few seconds of a red ring around the charger port it actually did, all 6.8kW. Lovely.

But the real point of my post is ..

We have a long day ahead of us so AC charging is set to 100%. After some hours I checked progress by unlocking and opening the driver's door to wake the display. It showed 95% and 0.5kW and 90 minutes to go, which is pretty much what I expected at 95%. I shut the door and re-opened it because I had forgotten something. Now it showed 95% and 6.8kW, which was totally unexpected given charging curves posted by others here in other threads.

30 minutes later I checked again, with exactly the same results - first door open and shut 0.5kW, second door sequence it went up to 6.8kW. I didn't wait around to see how long that high rate was applied, but presumably it quickly tapered

So what is the deal? I thought that at high SOC the charge rate would be held low during the "top-off" phase. And it does, but why does it stay at 0.5kW when I open and close the driver's door the first time, but switches to 6.8kW when I open the door the second time?
 
What you are seeing is normal behaviour. Unlocking the car also unlocks the charge cable from the charge port in anticipation of you removing the cable to terminate the AC charging session. The car lowers the charge rate to 500W to reduce the risk of arcing, but still high enough that the charging station doesn't terminate the session if you don't pull the cable.

After 15 seconds the cable will relock and the charging session will ramp up again to around 7kW. If you sit in the car then press the unlock button on the keyfob you'll see that rate drops again to 500W (because the charge port unlocks again). If you continue to watch you'll see it ramp back up again.

I have attached an image from a home charging session on my 2019 Kona (awaiting battery replacement). My car has the latest BMS version as installed in current vehicles. You can see that the cell check takes place at 80% SoC when the charge rate drops to around 1kW which it does for around 90 seconds. As the SoC approaches 100% you can see the charge rate drop in stages down to 2kW as cell ballancing occurs before the session ends.

For information my overnight home baseload is between 200 to 500 watts depending on how many fridges and freezers are running :). I get four hours of very cheap electricity between 00:30 and 4:30 so it usually takes me two days to fully charge.

Hope this helps

John.

Screenshot_20220212-151953_Bright.webp
 
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