charging malfunction with solar

Did you do a full charge at the dealership?
Can you leave a voltage monitor on that garage line?
Either low voltage, incorrect Hz or non-compliant sine wave may be the cause?


PS- congrats on your solar setup! I'm envious

 

Well you've already stated 240v public/charging works fine. Simple. Just 120v charge at a grid tied location and see if you still fault. If you don't, your inverters are the likely culprit. From experience, I've found the portable chargers can act up if they're not provided well grounded grid quality power.
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Does anyone know how much maximum current the charger draws?​

I believe it is 12 amps, some one correct me if I am wrong!

 

I don't have an answer, but I would not compare charging electronics such as phones, laptops, tablets with charging a car. Electronics chargers transform the 110v down to something like 18 or 20v for a laptop that requires 16v...just as an example. And if the voltage drops for a few seconds there is no safety shutoff...the charge just continues when the voltage comes back up to where it needs to be.

The charger in the car and/or something in the EVSE, probably detects a voltage drop (just guessing) and intentionally opens the circuit and will not reset it because this is somehow a safety feature. This is just a guess and maybe Toyota should know about this so it can be tweaked. Maybe after 5 minutes it should reset itself and try again.

If you had something like a Watts up pro you can take readings at some interval and dump to a spreadsheet via USB.

Mike

 

When was the last time you replaced or serviced the batteries? How old are the inverters? Do you have any sort of monitoring for your off-grid system? Charge level of the batteries? Output of the inverters? Time stamped logs? Stuff like that? If so, I'd look for any anomalies in the system at the time of the charging failure.

Can you remember if you had turned on some sort of high-load appliance that would've caused a momentary sag in voltage? If the voltage drops below a certain point, the EVSE & car will shutdown the charging session. Why it would throw a hybrid system failure code is beyond me, but given how complicated this car is, it wouldn't necessarily surprise me.

If you don't already have some sort of monitoring system, a TED (The Energy Detective) system for the whole house would probably be a good start. You can add additional sensors to monitor individual circuits like the garage one you use to charge the car.

The EVSE pulls a max of about 12 amps.

 

The Trace 4024 are not pure sinewave. They use 34 to 52 steps to make the waveform.
How are they stacked? Each should be capable of 33 amps continuous. The charger is pulling 12 amps, what else is loading the circuit? Brownout? Floating neutral/ground? from your stack configuration causing the EVSE GFI to trip? We have come a long way in reliability of series/parallel stacking control since your inverters were made.

Could the inverter(s) be going to sleep when the PiP charger shuts off to check battery charge level? That little delay while the inverter(s) came back on would be seen as loss of power and maybe causing the error.

 

Let us know the outcome

 

i think this is probably your culprit. the pip does a weird thing where it will pause the charging session and stop charging for a few seconds and then resume. if the inverter decides to shut off and then can't come back on quickly enough, that could be tripping the car.
i do find it extremely odd that the dealer can't find an error code. that makes no sense.
if you have an android device (tablet or phone), i would highly suggest getting Torque+a cheap ($20-30) bluetooth OBD reader to see if you can read the codes yourself. you would also be able to reset them without going to the dealer.

 

We have the same size solar power system. I have two SMA 5000 inverters.

Sounds like you do not have a monitoring system. You have no idea whats going on! A reasonable priced systen can be bought for $200 here, TED 5000 Shopping Helper. You will find out what's going on. Just click on History or Graphing Tab. Go back to the time the charge failed.

Just buy the Basic, 1 source to monitor.

Note:
1) My Live TED 5000 link. TED 5000
Click on Tabs on my live system.

2) I'm grid tie. So as long as you have power to your house TED will monitor your system output.

3) My electric bill has been zero every month for 2012. For 2013, month of Jan, I have produced 190 kwH's in excess so far. My meter is read on 16 of month. So end of Jan is Feb 16 for me.

 

What was the SoC when you started charging and what was it after it quit.

Some PCers are able to log the entire charging cycle which is how we found out about the current dropouts.
I still think its related to this dropout even if it isn't specifically sleep mode as your only getting the loss of power message. I can remember people having to use incandescent lights as a secondary load to stabilize/filter the line when trying to power devices with switch power supplies. and the old turn on a light to light your pilotless stove or use a match..

 

+1 on the TED system as I recently talked about in a recent thread.

I'm grid-tie as well (solar and wind), and I use all of TED's 4 possible monitoring inputs (MTUs) (although I wish I could use more than 4). One for solar, one for wind, one for my house, one for my outbuilding/water well.

You end up finding out all sorts of uses for TED monitoring beyond the well-documented drop in your electrical use simply by becoming more mindful of your uses as well as tracking down loads you didn't know existed, etc. One example in my case...I have a fairly extensive drip irrigation system which sometimes "blows out" an irrigation component, leaks, etc. Since I know how much electricity the irrigation system uses normally (ie the electric used by my elec well...obviously this wouldn't work if you were on city water), I can easily see when one of these leaks or "blow outs" occurs. Combine this with some basic home automation capability (I use Z-wave/micasaverde), and I can remotely turn off my well and save not only electricity but water as well until I can repair the problem.

'More info than you probably wanted, but thought I would share