Only charging at 3.6kW/hr at Chargepoint stations

[lordnoah]

Hi everyone, I just got a 2015 eGolf SEL with the 7.2kW onboard charger a couple weeks ago. I plug into a block of Chargepoint stations at my office everyday while at work and have noticed that I'm only pulling between 3.1-3.6kW/hr (according to my Chargepoint app and charging activity account details), instead of >6kW as I would have expected. I know these particular stations output a higher rate since I previously had a 2013 Nissan Leaf with the 6.6 charger. Also, several co-workers have Leaf's that park in the same lot and are able to charge at the higher rate, so it seems specific to the Golf. I've verified on the actual onboard charger the sticker read "7200 watts", so I do have the faster charger and should be capable of charging at the higher rate.

The Chargepoint stations are rated to output 7.2 as well, so I'm not quite sure if there is a communication problem between the Golf and the station or what. I'm talking to Chargepoint about it and can hopefully get it figured out, but was curious if anyone else has noticed anything similar?

 

[jack8trades]

If you don't have car-net setup, please do so first. Login to car-net, visit https://carnet.vw.com/group/vwcwp/remote and check, in the battery section, for the Max Charging Current. If that's MAX, check the settings of any charging locations that might be configured -- these will show up at the bottom of the page.

It's possible that one of those settings are limiting the power level your car will charge at.

 

[miimura]

Some dual-head ChargePoint stations are also fed by a single breaker, so when two cars are charging they will share the available 30amps, each drawing 15 amps until one is finished, then the remaining one should ramp back up to 30 amps.

 

[lordnoah]

jack8trades: Thank you for the reply. I do have car-net setup and logged into my account as you suggested. Under "Max Charging Current", it is already set to MAX. Also, there are no configured charging locations that I can see. There are only 3 default timers at the bottom of the page, all are set to "Off" (I have never configured a timer).

miimura: Thanks for the thought. The stations Im usually connected to are the CT2000 single-head units, shown here:

https://www.chargepoint.com/files/CT2000-Data-Sheet.pdf

I thought maybe current might be reduced if there are several cars charging at once, but again, I never had this problem on my Leaf, and other co-workers are able to charge at a higher rate at the same time. The station has a read-out on the screen that shows them charging at ~5.9kW and mine shows ~3.2.

It feels like there should be a setting somewhere that is limiting the rate here, but I don't know where else to check.

 

[jack8trades]

Is it possible that when you plug in, you're already pretty close to full charge? I haven't watched the behavior on my car recently, so I'm not sure, and I only charge to 100% about once every 3 weeks, but I seem to recall the rate tapers off at some point after 90% even with an L2 supply.

Then again, if you used the Leaf under the same circumstances, I'd think it's charge profile would be similar.

 

[lordnoah]

I usually arrive at work with <20% battery life left, so the rate should be much faster for initial charge, then taper off once it's >80% (generally speaking). Thanks again for the thoughts, I'm still waiting to hear from Chargepoint, but will be sure to update this thread when I get some kind of resolution so that anyone who might run into this in the future might save them some hassle.

 

[lordnoah]

I think I got this solved. For the past 3 days I have been able to charge at a rate of approx 5.8kW/hr. I verified with Chargepoint that nothing has changed on their side, so I do not have a definitive answer for what actually fixed this, but my current theory is that it did indeed have to do with the current setting in the e-manager/battery menu in the car-net app.

jack8trades: Thanks again for mentioning car-net. Even though the app and my profile on the car-net site showed that my current was already set to MAX, I went ahead and adjusted it down to 5amps, saved, then set it back to MAXIMUM and saved. This last update took several minutes to register with the vehicle. Since then though, as I mentioned above, I've now been seeing the faster charging rate on multiple Level-2 chargers. I'm going to call this fixed for now.