Charging problem with chevy Bolt.

Discussion about components from Ampera/Bolt and the PSA group which owns Opel these days
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Sphere478
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Joined: Fri Jun 25, 2021 6:49 pm

Charging problem with chevy Bolt.

Post by Sphere478 »

Hello.

I’m having a issue charging my chevy bolt EV

It seems to be related to the cleanliness of my sine wave.

I have less trouble with the car erroring out if there are more loads already present on the inverter. I recently went from two inverters to three and now the problem is impossible to overcome, whereas with two it sometimes worked for a while if I turned on the oven for a few min

It’s not related to surge, the car doesn’t make a surge

They are trace sw5548 inverters

I have it configured where the outer ones make split phase and the middle one makes 120v

All my 120v loads are on the middle
All my 240v loads are on the outters

I’ve tried capacitors, resistors, isolation transformer, even a 400$ noise filter on the line, but nothing aside from turning on all the other 240v loads seems to help.

My conclusion is that there is a anomaly in the sine that diminishes with more load

My open evse gives an error for a gfci and open ground
But I disabled that error in the configuration screen
I have also verified that there isn’t actually a real problem with the ground, it’s a false detection. Neutral and ground are bonded and a ground rod is present all connections are tight.

Because there are many loads on the 120v I have been able to charge on the 120v inverter but it takes 3-4 days and is a major pain.

I’m assuming the car is having the same error with a ground but I am not recieving any detailed error information. Or it just doesn’t like the sine wave.

I used to have this problem running my 500e on one of these inverters (separately, outside of the house) and I could fix it by tying case to neutral and putting a 8uf capacitor across neutral and line.

Those tricks have no effect anymore on the bolt

My friend came over the other day and plugged his tesla in

It would charge fine on the 240 so long as it didn’t try to draw more than about 20-24a and I had the gfci and ground detection disabled on the open evse

These inverters work fine for everything else in the house, I do not want to replace them

I want to disable the problem at the vehicle, the house is set up correctly, the car just doesn’t like it how do I fix the car it’s self or filter out the problem that the car doesn’t like?
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EV_Builder
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Re: Charging problem with chevy Bolt.

Post by EV_Builder »

These things are best looked at with drawings / sketches but from a ground perspective i wanted to point out that there is a difference between 2phase 120Volts and 1phase /N 120Volts.

Now the whole quality point with these inverters is maintain sinus quality underload. I know fluke have some devices to measure line quality. Depending on what you measure you can perhaps try to improve it. I think you should first check where the intolerance comes from. Or how it is defined....

Maybe using a UPS between the car and your net is enough to improve the sinus.
Converting an Porsche Panamera
see http://www.wdrautomatisering.nl for bespoke BMS modules.
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