Support

A few weeks ago an earth fault in the middle of the night caused the RCD that feeds our 3 OpenEVSE units to trip off. When I noticed that I checked and could find no problem so powered them back on, but one of them would not charge the car. It seemed to have lost most of the basic settings, but even when I reset current etc limits, the 'Setpoint' was stuck resolutely at 6A so no charge was possible. Only when I moved the current slider on the charge screen did the Setpoint suddenly 'catch up' and start working correctly and with all current settings looking correct it would then charge the car.

I powered it off and on again to check and it again had lost its settings. So that is the first problem, although since then it has not been powered off and continues to work. The issue is why did it lose the settings when powered off? This should not happen and did not in the past.

I am now working on integrating the 3 units (2 later ones with the big screen and one earlier with the small screen, all on latest 8.2.2.EU with WiFi v5.1.5) into Home Assistant and notice strange behaviour of the 2 later units.

When no vehicle is connected and it is 'disabled' by the timer schedule, the 'Vehicle Connected' Entity in HA flashes continually between 'Plugged In' and 'Unplugged', every second or so. Connect to car and/or override timer to active mode and all is correct.

This however is not actually an HA problem as the web interface into these units and also their own screens show the same flip-flop between 'Connected' and 'No Vehicle Connected'.

Unfortunately I cannot confirm when this began. Possibly after the RCD related power outage, or before and I never noticed, or since then. I have no idea. However the fact the problem is restricted to the later units with the large screen suggests the problem is related to those.

Would appreciate ideas on both these issues.

Would appreciate some support/feedback on this problem. The 2 units with the large screen just flash constantly when not connected to a vehicle. This is clearly a malfunction of something and did not previously happen. I have to keep powering them off when not actually in use.

Is anyone there?

Thanks, but afraid I have no idea. As is usually recommended, I try to keep all soft/firmware up to date and cannot now recall when I updated to 5.1.5. However, I would say that both EVSEs were running fine on 5.1.5 for quite some time before I noticed this issue. While it is possible it had been occurring for months without me noticing, I really doubt that. I keep a good eye on things like this and not noticing the large flashing EVSE screen (that lights up a dark garage) during any connect or disconnect during that time is so unlikely I am confident it was not happening.

What I do think is that it started only after that apparent earth fault which caused the RCD to trip. There has been no reoccurrence of that and neither EVSE report any earth problem currently. They have also in the past suffered many power cuts due to the frequent grid failures from which we suffer, none of which seemed to have any detrimental effect. This earth fault and power cut has however caused both large screen OpenEVSEs to behave in this way. The other with a small screen still works fine with no such problem.

The different screens mean a different WiFi board don't they. For some reason, one board type has no problem, but the other is now having this problem, coincident with the temporary earth fault but not apparently related to firmware version.

Should I try to downgrade though? Is that possible? Does 5.1.2 still allow for OTA upgrades?

I downgraded one of the EVSEs to 5.1.2 and…

Yay! The connected/unconnected flashing stopped.