Hi -
New to the site / forums but I just wanted to post some info that may be of use to the community if you find yourself with a Gen1 cable that doesn't charge, and outputs the 3 red flash error indicating contactor failure - my story:
Background: I exclusively charge my '16 P90D with the UMC, through a professionally installed outlet with a 60A 240V breaker, 4AWG wiring. A high quality hubbell 14 50 outlet was also installed. The outlet is in my garage and the controller housing is never subjected to the outdoors. The temp extremes the controller part of the cable would ever see in my garage are ~ +10 to +100F.
1 - I had the following issue occur ~8-10 times in the past 6 months: I would get into my car in the morning and notice that it hadn't charged, or was partially charged. I went to the mobile charger and saw that it was flashing the 3x red error code indicating the contactor had failed.
2 - Being an electrical engineer by trade - I wanted to see if the issue in the cable controller housing was fix-able. Since the control board housing is a sealed unit, I went to youtube first to see if there was anyone that had disassembled the housing to get a read on the components inside. There wasn't much available re: videos, but I did get a look at the PCB from a video where the person disassembling exposed the PCB to show their viewers and did nothing beyond that (and had to cut open / trash the housing in the process). They didn't have the background to troubleshoot and fix, but I got a look at the PCB. I did not want to open my cable because everything is still under warranty, even though I really wanted to start diagnosing / probing the board.
3 - In that video I observed a large electromechanical relay, which I assumed is the "contactor" that the error code refers to. In my experience, internal carbon deposits on the contacts from switching arcs, incorrect switching, or over-loading of relays cause stiction on the internal relay arms from time to time, and is what I assumed was happening.
4 - The quick fix to this problem is to bang the relay on something hard to release the contacts, which is what I did. I slammed the cable controller housing on the floor. It solved the problem. Following the manual's recommendation to unplug the UMC from the vehicle and wait 10 seconds did not solve the issue for me (nor would it solve relay arm contacts sticking).
5 - I posted a service call with Tesla SC in Springfield NJ, and they acknowledged that this was a known issue. In fact, the SC tech mentioned that their fix to the contactor failure error was to bang the housing on the something as well.
Anyway - I still have the cable and am going to live with it for another couple weeks - the SC offered to replace the cable with a gen2 30 A cable, but i decided to see how much more use I could get out of the existing cable before getting it swapped out. The error occurs for me approx once every 2-3 weeks.
I'll probably get it swapped out soon, but I wanted to post this information to get any other Gen1 cable users out of a pinch if there wasn't time to get the cable to an SC and they needed to get their car charged asap.
New to the site / forums but I just wanted to post some info that may be of use to the community if you find yourself with a Gen1 cable that doesn't charge, and outputs the 3 red flash error indicating contactor failure - my story:
Background: I exclusively charge my '16 P90D with the UMC, through a professionally installed outlet with a 60A 240V breaker, 4AWG wiring. A high quality hubbell 14 50 outlet was also installed. The outlet is in my garage and the controller housing is never subjected to the outdoors. The temp extremes the controller part of the cable would ever see in my garage are ~ +10 to +100F.
1 - I had the following issue occur ~8-10 times in the past 6 months: I would get into my car in the morning and notice that it hadn't charged, or was partially charged. I went to the mobile charger and saw that it was flashing the 3x red error code indicating the contactor had failed.
2 - Being an electrical engineer by trade - I wanted to see if the issue in the cable controller housing was fix-able. Since the control board housing is a sealed unit, I went to youtube first to see if there was anyone that had disassembled the housing to get a read on the components inside. There wasn't much available re: videos, but I did get a look at the PCB from a video where the person disassembling exposed the PCB to show their viewers and did nothing beyond that (and had to cut open / trash the housing in the process). They didn't have the background to troubleshoot and fix, but I got a look at the PCB. I did not want to open my cable because everything is still under warranty, even though I really wanted to start diagnosing / probing the board.
3 - In that video I observed a large electromechanical relay, which I assumed is the "contactor" that the error code refers to. In my experience, internal carbon deposits on the contacts from switching arcs, incorrect switching, or over-loading of relays cause stiction on the internal relay arms from time to time, and is what I assumed was happening.
4 - The quick fix to this problem is to bang the relay on something hard to release the contacts, which is what I did. I slammed the cable controller housing on the floor. It solved the problem. Following the manual's recommendation to unplug the UMC from the vehicle and wait 10 seconds did not solve the issue for me (nor would it solve relay arm contacts sticking).
5 - I posted a service call with Tesla SC in Springfield NJ, and they acknowledged that this was a known issue. In fact, the SC tech mentioned that their fix to the contactor failure error was to bang the housing on the something as well.
Anyway - I still have the cable and am going to live with it for another couple weeks - the SC offered to replace the cable with a gen2 30 A cable, but i decided to see how much more use I could get out of the existing cable before getting it swapped out. The error occurs for me approx once every 2-3 weeks.
I'll probably get it swapped out soon, but I wanted to post this information to get any other Gen1 cable users out of a pinch if there wasn't time to get the cable to an SC and they needed to get their car charged asap.
