hobbit
Well-Known Member
I had a collection of misadventures with Electrify America over the weekend, at one of their sites in
NJ where I'd traveled to [for a real live in-person conference/convention, yet! A bit of normalcy amid
the continuing madness!] I hooked up at head #1, and the card-reader refused to work. Head 2 [out
of 3] had a guy in a Taycan at it, who was getting a pitiful 40 kW or so trickle from his session, and said
that when the chargers had been installed, they'd been nice and fast, and recently were severely limited
for no clear reason. [Cable/connector coolant all leaked out, or what?] Head #3 looked like its card
reader might have been functional but the entire thing was saying "unavailable".
So I called EA, and after several tries to reset the reader on #1 and/or the whole thing [embedded Windows,
poor choice] the gal on the phone said the people who could take payment deets over the phone [which
apparently *is* an option normallly] simply started a session gratis. Because of all the difficulties I was
describing to her, or something.
So then my car was only getting a 41 kW trickle too. Should have been substantially more, in the morning's
nice 50+ degree temps. While waiting, I wandered around the backend boxes of the installation where the
actual power supplies are, and found this:
which would not properly latch closed again no matter what I tried. I would have had to open the locked
front of the box and work the side-door latch handle, so had to give up trying to fix it. By numeric ID
correspondence, this was pretty clearly the box for #3.
I called in again and got the same person; I guess the callcenter is slow on a Sunday morning. I asked her
about the slow charge on me and the Taycan [had no idea], and I told her I'd likely found the problem with
head 3. While talking to her, I held in the button switch at the top of the door to simulate it closed, and she
could actually see that charger come back online after a while. So then I said "okay, I'm gonna let go of it
now!" and after another while she saw it go "unavailable" again.
The one or two locals I talked to in the meantime of all this confirmed that this site was *not* being
maintained properly, so maybe as the EA person submitted all of this into her ticket, they'll pay more
attention and start getting a clue about what "critical infrastructure" means. And I of course threw in
my usual complaint about app availability and lack of any alternatives to establish an actual account.
In all I was there for an hour, which should have been about half that if their shiny new sh*t actually
worked as it should.
_H*
NJ where I'd traveled to [for a real live in-person conference/convention, yet! A bit of normalcy amid
the continuing madness!] I hooked up at head #1, and the card-reader refused to work. Head 2 [out
of 3] had a guy in a Taycan at it, who was getting a pitiful 40 kW or so trickle from his session, and said
that when the chargers had been installed, they'd been nice and fast, and recently were severely limited
for no clear reason. [Cable/connector coolant all leaked out, or what?] Head #3 looked like its card
reader might have been functional but the entire thing was saying "unavailable".
So I called EA, and after several tries to reset the reader on #1 and/or the whole thing [embedded Windows,
poor choice] the gal on the phone said the people who could take payment deets over the phone [which
apparently *is* an option normallly] simply started a session gratis. Because of all the difficulties I was
describing to her, or something.
So then my car was only getting a 41 kW trickle too. Should have been substantially more, in the morning's
nice 50+ degree temps. While waiting, I wandered around the backend boxes of the installation where the
actual power supplies are, and found this:
which would not properly latch closed again no matter what I tried. I would have had to open the locked
front of the box and work the side-door latch handle, so had to give up trying to fix it. By numeric ID
correspondence, this was pretty clearly the box for #3.
I called in again and got the same person; I guess the callcenter is slow on a Sunday morning. I asked her
about the slow charge on me and the Taycan [had no idea], and I told her I'd likely found the problem with
head 3. While talking to her, I held in the button switch at the top of the door to simulate it closed, and she
could actually see that charger come back online after a while. So then I said "okay, I'm gonna let go of it
now!" and after another while she saw it go "unavailable" again.
The one or two locals I talked to in the meantime of all this confirmed that this site was *not* being
maintained properly, so maybe as the EA person submitted all of this into her ticket, they'll pay more
attention and start getting a clue about what "critical infrastructure" means. And I of course threw in
my usual complaint about app availability and lack of any alternatives to establish an actual account.
In all I was there for an hour, which should have been about half that if their shiny new sh*t actually
worked as it should.
_H*
