ev.energy Outage Yesterday

[Glan gluaisne]

Correct - you need a smart charger from the OLEV approved charger list but at the moment there is no requirement to use it in smart mode. In my case this would be difficult as we have no mobile reception at home. I can’t even get a Smart electricity meter installed, even if I wanted one, so no cheap rate electricity for me unless I go down the economy 7 route.

Same here, although they are working on a mesh system that may allow smart meters to communicate with neighbouring meters until the data gets to one that has a connection to the WAN.

I'm more interested in what happens to the car if charging is resumed after a power cut, though. My testing suggests that the Tesla handbook isn't right, when it says that charging will be resumed after an outage. If the car goes to sleep (which is may well do after a prolonged cut) then it won't wake up again and restart charging. I need to do more testing, but right now it doesn't seem that the Model 3 is compliant with the charge point protocol.

 

[Jason71]

Correct - you need a smart charger from the OLEV approved charger list but at the moment there is no requirement to use it in smart mode. In my case this would be difficult as we have no mobile reception at home. I can’t even get a Smart electricity meter installed, even if I wanted one, so no cheap rate electricity for me unless I go down the economy 7 route.

No mobile phone reception? I didn't realise you even had electricity there yet!

 

[Tonybvi]

No mobile phone reception? I didn't realise you even had electricity there yet!

Electricity but no gas where we live!

 

[Cwmwd]

I've now had an update on the outage and looks like it was related to an update. Here's the report, in case anyone's interested...

Downtime Incident - 30/11/2019
From the period from 30/11/2019 -> 04/12/2019, the ev.energy app and smart charging service experienced a degradation in service which affected some user's ability to load the mobile application and the ability to schedule smart charging sessions. This degradation in service did not affect all users and did not prevent all smart charging sessions however, any impact on our user's ability to access the service is taken seriously and this report outlines our investigation and actions taken to prevent similar issues in future.

Timeline
28/11/19 11:00 - Update released to improve the accuracy of scheduling smart charging on Tesla cars.
30/11/19 09:00 - First incident of downtime alerted, identifies as a server running out of disk space due to log files. Log files removed and service restored.
03/12/19 06:00 - Second incident of downtime, restored by 09:20.
04/12/19 01:00 - Third incident of downtime, restored by 09:30.
04/12/19 12:00 - Fix deployed to the Tesla integration which resolved the root cause and all operation back to normal.

Root Cause
The root cause of the issue was a change made to the Telsa integration to keep our charging data up to date. However, this change introduced a bug that led to cars being updated far more frequently than planned. This manifested itself as a large increase in load across our infrastructure

Resolution
The error made in the Tesla integration was updated to ensure that the update rate was frequent enough to accurately report charging data without being unnecessarily frequent.

Actions taken to improve system and response

• Introduced an out-of-hours alerting system to alert engineering team of issues overnight.
• Improved monitoring of car and charge integrations which make it easier for the ev.energy team to diagnose issues.

Future action:

• Increase the un-coupling of the backend infrastructure so that an issue with one car/charger integration does not cause a downtime of the application
• Ensure there is a fallback to non-smart charging during time when ev.energy is not able to control the car.

 

[Christiez]

I've now had an update on the outage and looks like it was related to an update. Here's the report, in case anyone's interested...

Appreciate you posting this, gives me more confidence. Out of curiosity, did they email you this?

 

[rotor2k]

Except currently my Rolec is showing as offline (I have it set to dumb, so hopefully it’s not an issue). So I suspect it’s not resolved yet.

 

[Cwmwd]

Out of curiosity, did they email you this?

Yes, I raised a support ticket by emailing them after finding the car had failed to charge and I got a pretty rapid reply (parts of which was in the first post of this thread), this was the follow up that I got from them today.

 

[Cwmwd]

Except currently my Rolec is showing as offline (I have it set to dumb, so hopefully it’s not an issue).

Is it charging though? From my understanding part of the changes they are making is to make sure that "offline" chargers still work as "dumb" ones: maybe they got confused and also make "dumb" chargers into "offline" ones?!

I got timely response by emailing them at [email protected] so might be worth shooting off an email if it's not charging either, there's a "Feedback" link near the bottom of the "Account Settings" page in the app. for the same address. They might need the charger serial number off the left hand side of the Rolec unit.

 

[rotor2k]

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. I think it’s ok because the car knows it’s been plugged in:

 

[rotor2k]

Is it charging though? From my understanding part of the changes they are making is to make sure that "offline" chargers still work as "dumb" ones: maybe they got confused and also make "dumb" chargers into "offline" ones?!

The car charged fine overnight, and the app still shows the charger offline. So you might be right that they’ve accidentally made my charger offline.

 

[anon37485]

I had issues on Saturday (7th), and was unable to charge. The EV app was telling me the car was connected and charging, even though nothing was plugged in (I then turned the charger off completely, yet the app still thought it was charging). Whether I plugged it in or not, the app state didn't change, and every time I tried to toggle a setting (smart / CO2 etc) it 'Failed to get request'.

I called and emailed them, but their auto reply stated they were only open Monday - Friday, so there was nothing I could do.

It was very frustrating to literally have a working car and charger, yet the EV app was preventing me from charging at all.

Eventually after ~10 hours the car started charging and I've not had a problem since.

If it happens again, I'm making it 'dumb' as I don't need or use the app at all. How do I make it dumb?

 

[Christiez]

Hope everyone had a nice Christmas and New Year.

Can someone do me a favour and check if the ev.energy app is working? Want to see if it's just me with the issue!

 

[R.A.G]

Working ok for me.

 

[p_iv]

Seems a bit hit and miss today - long load times but seems to work eventually. Did charge OK last night though.

 

[Christiez]

Cheers both, appreciate the feedback.