kempette

I have a newly acquired Q4 (1 month) and a Chargepoint Home Flex level 2 charger. Whenever I plug the car in, the initial handshake results in a red light on the Audi charge port. If I unplug the charger & plug it back in, we get the green light and it begins charging immediately.

Initially we thought that it was because we had the Home Flex set up on a schedule and it was having an issue because of the delayed start. So I set the timer on the Audi itself, but had the same result. I have now turned off all the timers and still have the same result: initial plug in- red light of doom, second plug in- green light & charging.

As you can imagine, Audi says this is a Chargepoint issue and Chargepoint says this is an Audi issue. My question is, has anyone else experienced this and if so, do you know what caused it and did you find a solution?

getmoving

I had various weirdness when I first started charging our Q4 with the Chargepoint HomeFlex, including sessions that reverted to a minimal amperage. But on a hunch, I decided to open and close the passenger front door to "wake up the car" before I plugged the charger into the port, and everything has been fine for almost a year with this protocol. I get an immediate "green light" at the port, and solid 11.5 kW charging every session with my hardwired 6 gauge connection. Whether other protocols would produce the same result is unknown; I don't mind the short commute. ;-)

No timers are set at either the vehicle or the charger. Although we now have an overnight charging rate, so maybe I'll try to break something and set a timer.

getmoving

Having refreshed my memory, one other component of my protocol is that I hold the charger plug firmly into the socket until the port indicator switches from white to green. I think I read somewhere that there can be issues with flakey physical electrical contact, and that upsets the charger. I can't really fault the charger for that; poor contacts create heat, especially when we're pushing lots of current through them. Fires are bad.

The "charger" is really just an AC source with protection circuitry to mitigate exactly these kinds of issues. The actual charging circuitry is inside the vehicle. The thing on the wall is technically EVSE ( Electric Vehicle Service Equipment ), but you will probably get stares if you call it that.