Andersen EV charger support

[Durzel]

Website now confirms it has ceased to trade and is now in administration:

Will Wright and Nick Holloway from Interpath Advisory were appointed Joint Administrators to Muller EV Ltd on 11 October 2022.

The Company ceased to trade, please direct your queries as follows:
Suppliers and employees: [email protected]
Customers: [email protected]

Nicholas Holloway and William James Wright are authorised to act as insolvency practitioners by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales. We are bound by the Insolvency Code of Ethics. The Officeholders are Data Controllers of personal data as defined by the Data Protection Act 2018. Personal data will be kept secure and processed only for matters relating to the appointment. For further information, please see our Privacy policy at – www.interpathadvisory.com/privacy-insolvency

I can't see my charge stats anymore in the app. I don't know if that's a coincidence or whether things are accelerating quickly or not...

EDIT: It's just slow.

 

[NewbieT]

I’m conscious many chose the A2 for the aesthetics.

I’m not sure of size constraints but would anyone consider ripping out the guts and replace a la DIY charge point

Fit a contactor and a Hive Plug (or eco system of your choice) for on/off control. Also gives you options to setup IO if you’re a bit techie.

 

[Durzel]

I've been interrogating my charger's IP, since I'm anticipating these services will disappear very quickly. It looks like it's pretty locked down, all of the open ports are protected by "tcpwrapped", which is to say they are basically firewalled. A second attempt to scan it made it stop responding to my scans completely - suggesting some sort of protection system in place.

I really hope Andersen release documentation and software so we can replicate this smart functionality ourselves, otherwise we're just going to have supremely dumb chargers.

 

[Tony Hoyle]

You probably need to find a serial port to do any kind of deeper analysis. Might be just solder pads on the board..

 

[Winner365]

Mine did have an issue where it would charge despite being fully powered and green light on. It needed a hard reset at the breaker. Had to do this twice now and so I emailed them last month and they just ignored it. Perhaps I could pursue this as an avenue with credit card company instead

Ah business credit card not covered under section 75. Ah well dumb charger it is

 

[RagingWhisky]

If the Konnect app wholly and fully goes offline (and no future app/ocpp allowance to Andersen owners, then it'll be good to keep in the back pocket how to force 'dumb mode'

1. Press the setup button located at the bottom left between the faceplate and the body of the unit five times.
2. If done correctly, you should see three lights begin to flash

The unit will lose all wifi knowledge and be completely offline - it's default state is then 'Green- enabled' and will now supply charge.

Will be up to your car to set schedules, or to manually turn the unit off at the fuseboard, or if you opted for one during the install, flip whatever breaker switch you additionally installed in your property to turn the unit on/off without touching the fuseboard.

Silver lining - dumb unit = no control from the grid or energy providers to dictate when you charge

Hope that helps

 

[Avendit]

Well, bah.

I think they got their business model a bit wrong. By insisting on fitting the units themselves, and a fixed price, they were open to market variances in eg petrol prices. My fitter came up to Edinburgh from the Leeds area. Twice. In his transit. Would that be £300 of fuel? Same guy covered all of Scotland, and there are 2 Andersens on my street alone.

Certainly made a dent in my co2 savings from going electric, and presumably any margin.

Lovely units tho. Shame I never got the solar charging working properly. Guess no one around to troubleshoot any more .

 

[up_north]

If the Konnect app wholly and fully goes offline (and no future app/ocpp allowance to Andersen owners, then it'll be good to keep in the back pocket how to force 'dumb mode'

1. Press the setup button located at the bottom left between the faceplate and the body of the unit five times.
2. If done correctly, you should see three lights begin to flash

The unit will lose all wifi knowledge and be completely offline - it's default state is then 'Green- enabled' and will now supply charge.

Will be up to your car to set schedules, or to manually turn the unit off at the fuseboard, or if you opted for one during the install, flip whatever breaker switch you additionally installed in your property to turn the unit on/off without touching the fuseboard.

Silver lining - dumb unit = no control from the grid or energy providers to dictate when you charge

Hope that helps

I‘ve already lost connectivity via Konnec. Well, I think I have, it seems to let me log in but all the screens are blank with a spinning connecting thingy.

 

[Chimpy McChimp]

Ouch. A friend had theirs installed yesterday....

 

[Durzel]

Yeah the app is dead. That was quick.

Tempted to scrape the website support pages while I can, but too tired to do it now. Will check tomorrow, hopefully it’s still there.

 

[Avendit]

Pretty sure I have all the pdf's in my downloads folders if the post on p1 doesn't have everything.

And here we meet the cloud problem . You never fully own anything that's cloud connected.

 

[pdk42]

The bigger problem is that most of these smart chargers all have proprietary back-end systems. The back-ends cost money to run and yet who would want to pay a monthly sub just so that their charge point kicks in at 12:30? I suspect there’ll be more manufacturers under pressure in the future. I have an EO Mini, but if/when it dies, I’ll be getting an OpenEVSE - it’s all open source.

 

[Durzel]

I’d like to think that the developers that were working on it have test scripts that connect locally to them. The AWS cloud stuff ought to only really be necessary for internet control.

What might be a problem is stuff like private keys, certificates, authentication etc.

The problem is - how does one get hold of some code, or an SDK, or anything really, to write our own app?

 

[Fayf]

Thanks for all the info, the app was very slow earlier, but its been like that before, but then when it lost functionality, i found this forum.

I did the usual 5 presses of the reset button on the A2 unit, it went to amber, and started charging, then stopped charging.

Then i turned off the power at main board ,for the charger, and it came back up, its charging away now, car is getting the normal 7.0 kw, but app seems to be functioning somewhat normally, except the charts (costs)don’t seem to be functioning. Therefore, right now, there is no need to do a full reset and disable wifi completely, allthough that may, eventually be needed.

 

[Durzel]

I would not assume the app is going to work in any consistent way anymore, and I’d definitely be very wary of doing anything like setting a new schedule or disabling it from the home screen, just in case you can’t undo it later.

 

[Rooster6655]

I’d like to think that the developers that were working on it have test scripts that connect locally to them. The AWS cloud stuff ought to only really be necessary for internet control.

What might be a problem is stuff like private keys, certificates, authentication etc.

The problem is - how does one get hold of some code, or an SDK, or anything really, to write our own app?

Yes, unless we get access to someone from Anderson its going to be a very tough task to get anywhere, the charger will be making calls to the Anderson servers, you could redirect these to a local server but unless there was some security flaw probably going to be a tough job to make quick progress

 

[up_north]

My app is working again this morning apart from the table/charts screen - that’s just spinning. But I can see my schedules.

 

[Avendit]

My app is working again this morning apart from the table/charts screen - that’s just spinning. But I can see my schedules.

I suspect the app is used to set a schedule that runs locally, so from a cloud perspective is quite a cheap operation. Recording the past will incur data and storage fees (s3 is cheap, but not free, especially if the data is maintained near at hand for producing reports).

Last night may have been the remaining Dev gutting the system to make it cheaper to run. I hope they retained all those records as they probably represent a bunch of useful data on charging habits that could be valuable in its own right.

 

[Zakalwe]

The app seems to be fully functional this AM. I can access it, including the reports. I'm sure it will soon go offline unless it's bought as a going concern or someone manages to integrate local control.

Later units are OCCP compatible (post early 2019, IIRC), but no idea if that means diddly squat or not.

 

[Foucault]

Well this is annoying news as was easily the best looking home charger with smart functions helping justify the high price. Unfortunately, as other have said, I think we are going to be stuck with a dumb charger with the cloud based system likely to cease if it hasn’t already (mine has always been a bit iffy with connections despite the router only being a few feet away, so can’t really tell).