New issue I haven’t heard about. My 2023 Model 3 RWD was parked at home charging during a storm. Power went in and out several times. In the morning I go and discover the port tried to close and snapped on the charger handle. Nearest service center is 2 hours away and mobile service can’t do this…
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Charger port cover broke from power outage
- Thread starter bbbbrass
- Start date
First off: Don't know why Mobile Service says they can't do anything about this. Back when the SO and I were tootling around in our 2018 M3, the charging door stopped closing completely, stopped opening complete, and, at times, wouldn't open at all. Luckily, was able to pry it open (against not much resistance) so could still charge the car.
A mobile tech showed up under warranty to fix it. I watched him do it. He opened the trunk, non-destructively pulled off the liner, got out a wrench or three, and unbolted the assembly from the inside of the car, then put a new one in.
Now, I'll give you that this was, to some extent, a known problem; the techie said he'd done a number of these and it had to do with some gears getting meshed out of order with limit switches and such. The solution was to replace the entire assembly with Something That Wouldn't Do That.
Next: I'm a-gonna put on my EE Lightning Surge Testing Hat. Yeah, I've done a lot of this kind of testing, and there's lightning surge testers back at work that have my fingerprints all over them. As well as 'scopes, clamp-on ammeters in the 1000's of amps range, and you name it.
First off: If one looks at some $RANDOM residential district, there's typically a Single Wire 'Way Up On High on the top of the telephone poles. Every couple-four poles, there's a wire going straight down from that top-most wire into a metallic stake pounded into the ground. Purpose of this configuration is, you guessed it, lightning strikes. If your telephone poles don't have that configuration, Good Things Are Not Going To Happen.
City power is well-known to have real garbage on the line, not just due to lightning strikes (which are Other, more in a bit), but because every blame motor kicking on and off with arcs and sparks will put some thousand-volt hoo-ha on the wires with very little prodding. More so if one is near a power switching substation.
Further, going back to lightning: Even if one does have the wires-on-tops-of-poles stuff going on, if lightning actually does strike close by, there's going to $DIETY's own surge of current heading down that pole ground wire on its way to the Earth. Big, rapidly changing currents in a wire make for Great Big Changing Magnetic Fields in the immediate vicinity, and that includes the actual city power wires, next down from the top of the pole. A significant amount of energy can get transferred onto the power lines that way which can then, if one is somewhat unlucky, get transferred from the power pole to the feed in the house and, from there, to Everywhere.
This is why houses immediately adjacent to a power pole strike often lose their TV sets and such. The more interesting bit is why everybody else in a 200-yard radius doesn't lose theirs.
Answer: Because these fast rise and fall times of the combined voltage and current pulse radiate into the ether like there's no tomorrow. Further, copper has resistance which absorbs the energy as well. Generally, it's kind of like a rock thrown into the pond: Right at the spot of entry, the water's going every which way: 50 yards out, nobody notices.
Now, silly as it sounds, the people building stuff hooked up to city power know about this. All those UL, CE, CSA, etc., etc. marks that one sees on the sides of everything from cell phone chargers to TV's to major appliances to Wall Connectors (and the Teslas that they connect to) have to pass testing with the aforementioned surge testers of various flavors. (My favorite requirement, for street-corner telecom equipment: "A cheesecloth of a certain weave shall be placed over the equipment, then the door closed. A surge (of the crazy huge variety - we're talking street corners) shall be applied. Afterwards, the equipment under test shall not become a fire or fragmentation hazard." I actually met a guy who did that kind of testing - and, in one notable case, actually did have something catch on fire. Go figure.)
Thing is: The testing that's done on, say, TV sets doesn't approach that street-corner gear of which I spoke. So, it's clear that stuff in somewhat more controlled environments (i.e., inside a house) doesn't have to handle the super-duper strikes that hit a street light.
Farmers whose houses are out in the countryside know All About This. The notable case I read about was some farmer whose house was on a small hill a half-mile from anywhere, with a lone power line traipsing across the fields to the house. This fellow and his family kept on losing TV sets and other $RANDOM electronics fairly regular, until, finally, the guy Had Had It. He called in a licensed electrician who put a heavy duty lightning arrestor on the side of the house, through which the city power went before it met up with the meter and breaker box. The arrestor system had, for starters, spark gap electrodes between the two hots and neutral and ground (and a Rather Big Ground Stake It Was, Too), so, when the voltage got up to 5kV or so, the gaps would flash over, limiting the voltage surge. From that point, one runs into chokes, capacitors, Metal Oxide Varistors (MOVs) of the Rather Large Variety so, when the power feed was deemed beat upon enough by the experts, it was allowed into the house. Our farmer hero stopped having issues.
By the by: MOVs and their near-siblings, TVS diodes, have a characteristic: When the voltage across them is below yea (whatever yea is in the data sheet), they're effectively an open. Above yea, they become a near short circuit. If you haven't guessed, those lightning surge protectors one buys at Home Depot has these things in them. The better classes of those surge protectors detect when the MOVs wear out (yeah, they do that, in the presence of repeated surges) and light up an LED to let the owner know it's time for a new surge protector. The cheap ones don't, and the "indicator" is when one's computer gets fried.
MOVs come from the garden-variety ones that can absorb 15J or so and are 1/4" across or so to the ones that the Power Companies use in their switching yards, where they stack multiple hockey-puck sized ones to handle the Other stuff that comes down from high tension lines and such.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the Wall Connector likely has MOVs in it to protect itself and the car; the car itself probably has MOVs, likewise, and that the pair can probably handle strikes without too much trouble. However, lots and lots of strikes, or nearby strikes that overwhelm the energy ratings of the MOVs, can cause True Evil to occur - and that includes frying every bit of electronics in a Tesla, at the upper end.
This probably explains why the Service Center wants to see the car. If the door, which is working off of the car's normal 12V, is having Serious Issues after a strike, it's more than half-likely that other things have been fried as well. They probably want to do a full diagnostic.
There has been a few discussions around the Tesla Motors Club about this kind of issue; one guy reported that after a strike, what was likely ball lightning flying out of his workshed that was (naturally) on a hill; a Tesla charging there might have Real Issues with a big bolt.
Another fellow stated that he wasn't comfortable leaving his Tesla plugged in when (frequent) lightning storms that had, indeed, fried stuff in his house before came around. His solution, he said, was to simply leave the car unplugged when lightning storms came by. I suggested that wasn't the best of solutions since, as an example, if he plugged the car in overnight and was asleep at 2 a.m. when some storm or other barreled on by, he was going to be out of luck.
At least one other person reported having one of those farmer-guy house surge protectors installed on his place.
And here, at my place, it so happens that the power comes from underground wires. That's very, very good: The electromagnetic fields running down an underground power feed tend to be absorbed by the earth surrounding such feed; so I don't worry about lightning.
So, to the OP: What's your physical situation regarding lightning? Are there poles with that lightning protection wire at the top, or did your power company leave those off? You up on a hill? Had problems with fried this-and-that before?
A mobile tech showed up under warranty to fix it. I watched him do it. He opened the trunk, non-destructively pulled off the liner, got out a wrench or three, and unbolted the assembly from the inside of the car, then put a new one in.
Now, I'll give you that this was, to some extent, a known problem; the techie said he'd done a number of these and it had to do with some gears getting meshed out of order with limit switches and such. The solution was to replace the entire assembly with Something That Wouldn't Do That.
Next: I'm a-gonna put on my EE Lightning Surge Testing Hat. Yeah, I've done a lot of this kind of testing, and there's lightning surge testers back at work that have my fingerprints all over them. As well as 'scopes, clamp-on ammeters in the 1000's of amps range, and you name it.
First off: If one looks at some $RANDOM residential district, there's typically a Single Wire 'Way Up On High on the top of the telephone poles. Every couple-four poles, there's a wire going straight down from that top-most wire into a metallic stake pounded into the ground. Purpose of this configuration is, you guessed it, lightning strikes. If your telephone poles don't have that configuration, Good Things Are Not Going To Happen.
City power is well-known to have real garbage on the line, not just due to lightning strikes (which are Other, more in a bit), but because every blame motor kicking on and off with arcs and sparks will put some thousand-volt hoo-ha on the wires with very little prodding. More so if one is near a power switching substation.
Further, going back to lightning: Even if one does have the wires-on-tops-of-poles stuff going on, if lightning actually does strike close by, there's going to $DIETY's own surge of current heading down that pole ground wire on its way to the Earth. Big, rapidly changing currents in a wire make for Great Big Changing Magnetic Fields in the immediate vicinity, and that includes the actual city power wires, next down from the top of the pole. A significant amount of energy can get transferred onto the power lines that way which can then, if one is somewhat unlucky, get transferred from the power pole to the feed in the house and, from there, to Everywhere.
This is why houses immediately adjacent to a power pole strike often lose their TV sets and such. The more interesting bit is why everybody else in a 200-yard radius doesn't lose theirs.
Answer: Because these fast rise and fall times of the combined voltage and current pulse radiate into the ether like there's no tomorrow. Further, copper has resistance which absorbs the energy as well. Generally, it's kind of like a rock thrown into the pond: Right at the spot of entry, the water's going every which way: 50 yards out, nobody notices.
Now, silly as it sounds, the people building stuff hooked up to city power know about this. All those UL, CE, CSA, etc., etc. marks that one sees on the sides of everything from cell phone chargers to TV's to major appliances to Wall Connectors (and the Teslas that they connect to) have to pass testing with the aforementioned surge testers of various flavors. (My favorite requirement, for street-corner telecom equipment: "A cheesecloth of a certain weave shall be placed over the equipment, then the door closed. A surge (of the crazy huge variety - we're talking street corners) shall be applied. Afterwards, the equipment under test shall not become a fire or fragmentation hazard." I actually met a guy who did that kind of testing - and, in one notable case, actually did have something catch on fire. Go figure.)
Thing is: The testing that's done on, say, TV sets doesn't approach that street-corner gear of which I spoke. So, it's clear that stuff in somewhat more controlled environments (i.e., inside a house) doesn't have to handle the super-duper strikes that hit a street light.
Farmers whose houses are out in the countryside know All About This. The notable case I read about was some farmer whose house was on a small hill a half-mile from anywhere, with a lone power line traipsing across the fields to the house. This fellow and his family kept on losing TV sets and other $RANDOM electronics fairly regular, until, finally, the guy Had Had It. He called in a licensed electrician who put a heavy duty lightning arrestor on the side of the house, through which the city power went before it met up with the meter and breaker box. The arrestor system had, for starters, spark gap electrodes between the two hots and neutral and ground (and a Rather Big Ground Stake It Was, Too), so, when the voltage got up to 5kV or so, the gaps would flash over, limiting the voltage surge. From that point, one runs into chokes, capacitors, Metal Oxide Varistors (MOVs) of the Rather Large Variety so, when the power feed was deemed beat upon enough by the experts, it was allowed into the house. Our farmer hero stopped having issues.
By the by: MOVs and their near-siblings, TVS diodes, have a characteristic: When the voltage across them is below yea (whatever yea is in the data sheet), they're effectively an open. Above yea, they become a near short circuit. If you haven't guessed, those lightning surge protectors one buys at Home Depot has these things in them. The better classes of those surge protectors detect when the MOVs wear out (yeah, they do that, in the presence of repeated surges) and light up an LED to let the owner know it's time for a new surge protector. The cheap ones don't, and the "indicator" is when one's computer gets fried.
MOVs come from the garden-variety ones that can absorb 15J or so and are 1/4" across or so to the ones that the Power Companies use in their switching yards, where they stack multiple hockey-puck sized ones to handle the Other stuff that comes down from high tension lines and such.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the Wall Connector likely has MOVs in it to protect itself and the car; the car itself probably has MOVs, likewise, and that the pair can probably handle strikes without too much trouble. However, lots and lots of strikes, or nearby strikes that overwhelm the energy ratings of the MOVs, can cause True Evil to occur - and that includes frying every bit of electronics in a Tesla, at the upper end.
This probably explains why the Service Center wants to see the car. If the door, which is working off of the car's normal 12V, is having Serious Issues after a strike, it's more than half-likely that other things have been fried as well. They probably want to do a full diagnostic.
There has been a few discussions around the Tesla Motors Club about this kind of issue; one guy reported that after a strike, what was likely ball lightning flying out of his workshed that was (naturally) on a hill; a Tesla charging there might have Real Issues with a big bolt.
Another fellow stated that he wasn't comfortable leaving his Tesla plugged in when (frequent) lightning storms that had, indeed, fried stuff in his house before came around. His solution, he said, was to simply leave the car unplugged when lightning storms came by. I suggested that wasn't the best of solutions since, as an example, if he plugged the car in overnight and was asleep at 2 a.m. when some storm or other barreled on by, he was going to be out of luck.
At least one other person reported having one of those farmer-guy house surge protectors installed on his place.
And here, at my place, it so happens that the power comes from underground wires. That's very, very good: The electromagnetic fields running down an underground power feed tend to be absorbed by the earth surrounding such feed; so I don't worry about lightning.
So, to the OP: What's your physical situation regarding lightning? Are there poles with that lightning protection wire at the top, or did your power company leave those off? You up on a hill? Had problems with fried this-and-that before?
Last edited:
Thanks for replies.
No footage; as far as I can find. Car didn’t report any events.
When I put in the service request it only lists the physical locations. Mobile wasn’t an option.
No electrical issues in car, charger still working. I’m in a subdivision with underground lines.
Charger door still functions, just is broken in half.
No footage; as far as I can find. Car didn’t report any events.
When I put in the service request it only lists the physical locations. Mobile wasn’t an option.
No electrical issues in car, charger still working. I’m in a subdivision with underground lines.
Charger door still functions, just is broken in half.
I was thinking those were light reflections on the tail light and on the paint forward of the charge port door. I would have thought the charge port door would have snapped the other direction if it was attempting to close though????
PianoAl
Active Member
I've also had mobile service replace the whole charger door assembly (a few years ago).
I've always felt that the charger door design could be more robust.
I've always felt that the charger door design could be more robust.
PianoAl
Active Member
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
He is talking about a gray part ahead of the door where it seems to be missing paint. If this is parked outside is there any cars passing by on this road or is it accessible to the public (possible vandalism)? Maybe OP needs to review if there is any Sentry footage.I was thinking those were light reflections on the tail light and on the paint forward of the charge port door. I would have thought the charge port door would have snapped the other direction if it was attempting to close though????
Before looking at it, I thought that it broke off at the post, as that seems to be the designed weak point, but it does look weird/unintuitive the way it broke off.
It would seem luckily this is fixable temporarily with some Superglue or duct tape (wouldn't be as easy if it broke at the post).
ForTheHalibut
Member
IMO something fell on the cover during the storm. Probably a branch. Wouldn’t it have snapped the other way if it was forced closed?
Seems to me that something falling on it would exert the same direction of force as someone forcing it to close.
PianoAl
Active Member
it cracked in the other direction, then folded down when the door was opened again.
Benito1283
2021 MYLR 19"
Message service and tell them you’d like mobile service, since many others have had this fixed via mobile. A lot of times mobile isn’t available in the app and service will change it once they read the ticket.
Delayed update, after having to schedule in person service I received a message that mobile service could fix this. That’s great; but it sure would have been nice to be able to do that from the beginning.
If this was out of warranty or broken from misuse I would have figured out my own solution.
The door tried to close on itself when power to charger was going in and out during a storm. Once the handle was removed the broken part then flipped down.
Sentry did not detect anyone come near the vehicle during the night; and there were no sticks or debris down more than leaves. There is dirt on the car, but no scratches.
If this was out of warranty or broken from misuse I would have figured out my own solution.
The door tried to close on itself when power to charger was going in and out during a storm. Once the handle was removed the broken part then flipped down.
Sentry did not detect anyone come near the vehicle during the night; and there were no sticks or debris down more than leaves. There is dirt on the car, but no scratches.
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