No charge with cold battery

[Canuck]

There are tons of Teslas in Norway. There must be a solution.

The way north is not always icy cold

According to ancient legend, the name Norway comes from the old norse word Norðrvegr, which means “the way north”, a name given to this long and craggy coast because it was largely ice-free in the wintertime.

Sharing the same latitude as Alaska, Greenland and Siberia, Norway has a pleasant climate compared to these places. Due to the Gulf Stream and warm air currents, Norway has a friendlier climate than the latitude would indicate, and the coldest areas in the winter are often inland or far to the north.

 

[AllenWong]

Have you tried to plug into a SuperCharger? With my limited experience (1st winter with the S), SC warms up the battery way faster than traditional home charging.

This has been my experience as well. Plugged into a Toronto supercharger in the winter (15 degrees F) to find out that it wouldn't start charging. Called the Tesla techs and they told me that it was normal and just to wait it out. Sure enough, after a few minutes of warming up the battery (you can hear it warming up the battery I think), it started to charge slowly. And eventually started charging faster and faster.

 

[tga]

Even at 220v it may not be enough. I opened a similar thread a few days ago when I plugged in and received no charge overnight. I was plugged into 220v @ 10ams (2.2kw) with temperatures outside at -20c // -4f. Obviously there was not enough power being supplied to heat the battery, let alone heat AND charge.

When plugging into a 32amp outlet, I was able to get 26km/h of charge rather than my usual 35, suggesting around 25% of the 7kw supply was being used by the battery heater. 7kw * 25% = 1.75kw. So when it was super cold, it used a constant 1.75kw just to keep it warm enough to pump 5.25kw of energy into the battery.

In theory, the 2.2kw outlet should have been enough to heat up the battery and charge at the super super slow rate of 0.45kw (2.3km/h). But charging itself actually produces some heat so probably that 0.45kw of 'extra' power going into the battery produced next to no heat, making the 1.75kw insufficient.

Solution? Use a higher power charger!

Until I finish cleaning out the garage, my new S is stuck outside in the New Hampshire winter. It was 0F here last night, and warmed up to the mid 20's by early afternoon. I drove 1 mi to a 30A/240V J1772 around 3pm with the blue snowflake, a 75kW power limit, and 0 regen. When I plugged in, it took a few minutes for the current to ramp to 6A/240V. Then a ramp to 20A. The car stayed at 20A for at least a half hour, before rising to 30A.

However, it was only adding 15 miles/hr, vs the normal 18-19 I see at that station. I suspect I had a similar issue as randvegeta - ~25% of the 6kw power drawn wasn't going into the battery, so I suspect it was going into the heater.

 

[Doug_G]

Something is wrong there. I have charged a cold soaked car at -30C no problem. At first it turns on the pack heater, then once the pack warms up it gradually eases in the charge current.

Unless you're just plugged into 110V. In really cold conditions there's not enough power at 1kW to heat the battery pack up enough, and it never charges.

 

[croman]

I agree with @Doug_G and other posters. I park outside currently in Chicago. It has been 0F or colder for about half the time I have my car. I always charge to 90% after coming home for the day. I then top off the battery in the AM to warm the battery and condition the air to further heat the battery and cabin. Even with the interior of the car at single digits (outside temps around -10F), the car will take a charge eventually. It starts at 1A and slowly builds to 30A (but only 18mi instead of 23mi). I also noted recently that despite saying 18miles it would add more in an hour if the heat wasn't on.

OP, I think something is wrong. I would ask your Service Center why it wasn't taking a charge while plugged in. Even if cold soaked, the battery should eventually charge (its never taken longer than a 1/2 hour for me). There are even colder places than Chicago but recently we've been in a nasty cold funk (though today it was 46!).

 

[Bangor Bob]

This has been my experience as well. Plugged into a Toronto supercharger in the winter (15 degrees F) to find out that it wouldn't start charging. Called the Tesla techs and they told me that it was normal and just to wait it out. Sure enough, after a few minutes of warming up the battery (you can hear it warming up the battery I think), it started to charge slowly. And eventually started charging faster and faster.

There was a story posted a few days ago about someone plugging into a supercharger in Quebec and Supercharging would not start, even after two hours. Plugging into a nearby J1772 charger did let charging start...

Use L2 charger instead of Supercharger when battery is cold with very low SoC

So... Temps and SOC matter, apparently. That surely seems like a software bug though...

 

[artsci]

Do you have Range Mode on? Are you using scheduled charging? There have been threads recently about both of those things inhibiting charging.

Range mode is always off and I turned off scheduled charging.

The car should start warming the pack to a temperature that is safe to charge. When this happens the LEDs on the EVSE will show energy is flowing and the car should show the voltage, but 0 amps. If you leave it alone it should eventually start charging.

That's what I was seeing. It was indicating that it was charging but no amps and no voltage were showing.

 

[lundse50]

For the past several days it's been extremely cold here in Maryland, with temps overnight in the teens and in the 20s during the day. My car sat outside for several days with only short drives of less five miles or so. Having not encountered this before I wan't aware of cold weather charging issues. If only I had looked them up on TMC.

For the past two evenings the car wouldn't accept a charge. I worked with Tesla service to determine a fix and nothing seemed to work (resetting the UMC, powering the car off, leaving the climate control running, etc.) I thought the car would need to go into service for a fix.

Today the car was inside all day as the new higher res front and rear cameras were being installed, so the battery pack warmed up. When I got home and plugged in the car it started charging immediately at normal rates.

Lesson learned? When the battery gets too cold it will not charge. If it gets cold enough turning on the climate control is not sufficient to heat it up to charging levels. And one cannot keep the climate controls on long enough to heat the battery to sufficient levels. A conundrum for sure.

What do owners in much colder climes that Maryland do to keep the battery sufficiently warm to charge?

 

[artsci]

Also my line usually charges at 40 amps. I also saw the blue snowflake but didn't know what I meant until I searched on TMC.

 

[lundse50]

I have been in Delaware the past few weeks and it has been cold but I have not had problems with it charging when it is 12F or less. Sounds like a problem that Tesla needs to fix.

 

[SmartElectric]

I am responsible for a multi-page thread on this very topic.

-20C : Our Tesla will not charge

The underlying cause was never diagnosed by Tesla. They tried pushing it back on me as user error. My lesson learned is to record video in the future if this happens again (to me). Word of mouth isn't good enough.

Never seen this repeat itself. Then again, the conditions were particularly harsh.
I have only 24A 240V charging in my garage, which is 6kW, almost as much as the car uses to pre-heat/condition the battery.
Not many people charge on 24A via the rare Tesla 10-30 adaptor, so my charging situation is a bit unusual in that respect.

 

[SmartElectric]

Mine was plugged in over two night and no charging occurred. That rang alarm bells as nothing seemed to raise the temp of the battery to safe charging levels.

Same as what I saw. My experience sounds similar to yours for sure.

 

[seclinton]

So from a battery guy here who makes your Apple laptop batteries...ok enough bragging

Li-ion batteries as we all know don't do so well when cold. What is t talked about is as the temp drops, at some point the temp reading becomes unreliable (~-20C). The power electronics have built in safety feature to not allow an inrush of current at low temps as it could initiate Lithium plating and cause dendritic growth (I.e soft shorts, which are bad for batteries in general).

So entrepid engineers build into the GasGaging "GG" controller to put in a secondary, albeit temporary, protection circuit to prevent charging when its cold. It will be logged as an event "known as lifetime safety" event. Stored in hex code, it translates to "system under temp protection".

After some hysteresis, the rise in temp clears the flag preventing charging and will enable charging again.

Really quite interesting engineering feat doing that with 400V and 7600 cells in series/parallel.

Warm up your Tesla folks. It'll be ok

 

[Electric700]

Also my line usually charges at 40 amps. I also saw the blue snowflake but didn't know what I meant until I searched on TMC.

So you connected a 240 V / 40 A line to your car, initiated charging, and it still wouldn't begin adding miles after 15 - 30 minutes? That should have been enough time to heat the battery sufficiently, so perhaps have a service center take a look. Until they do, you may want to try manually starting the climate control system using the app about 15 minutes before you start charging. That might help.

 

[artsci]

So you connected a 240 V / 40 A line to your car, initiated charging, and it still wouldn't begin adding miles after 15 - 30 minutes? That should have been enough time to heat the battery sufficiently, so perhaps have a service center take a look. Until they do, you may want to try manually starting the climate control system using the app about 15 minutes before you start charging. That might help.

Did that but it didn't work. The climate control shuts itself off after a period of time and wouldn't stay on long enough to warm the battery. For me 15 minutes on climate control didn't work.

 

[ThosEM]

I've only run into this once, as the car is usually in a garage and protected from the worst cold. It surprised me when it happened and I thought there was a malfunction for sure, but after a bit, the car did start charging.

It seems like driving the car around for a few minutes might be the trick to get the battery warmed up, charge level permitting. Has anyone tried that after a cold soak?

 

[AllenWong]

I believe the battery heater and climate control heater are two separate things (at least it looks like it in the Tesla API - they're two separate fields and don't always match). You might be better off not turning on the climate control to conserve the energy to power the battery heater.

It seems like driving the car around for a few minutes might be the trick to get the battery warmed up, charge level permitting. Has anyone tried that after a cold soak?

Driving the car would warm up battery, I believe. Because I've driven to the same Toronto supercharger before and had no trouble charging. But after I left the car overnight outdoors in the subfreezing level, even driving 15 minutes to the supercharger wasn't enough to charge the battery. I believe that driving does warm the battery, because I noticed that when it's too cold, regen is disabled. But as I'm driving it, I notice the regen returning (i.e. the battery is allowed to charge again). It does take quite a while, though. Probably better off not driving to save the charge level.

 

[evp]

This has been my experience as well. Plugged into a Toronto supercharger in the winter (15 degrees F) to find out that it wouldn't start charging. Called the Tesla techs and they told me that it was normal and just to wait it out. Sure enough, after a few minutes of warming up the battery (you can hear it warming up the battery I think), it started to charge slowly. And eventually started charging faster and faster.

Agreed. I overnighted in Goodland KS a couple of weeks ago where it was -9F overnight. I plugged in to the SpC in the morning and got no charge for about 10 minutes, but the battery conditioner was making noise. Then it started pushing a little current into the battery. Pretty soon it was chugging along just like normal.

 

[SmartElectric]

As I posted in my thread from last year.

I had a similar "can't charge" event in -20C.

I tried:
Preconditioning
Driving till regeneration enabled
A J1772 charger (not just my UMC)
Resetting fuses in frunk fuse box
Powering off and Powering on
Thawing the UMC indoors
Waiting two days plugged in
Manually initiating charge on charge screen
Screaming at the car


The only solution was driving 30 km to the Tesla service center two days later when the temperature warmed up to -8C and the car had fully enabled regeneration. The car charged at Tesla supercharger and their UMC.

I still firmly hold this is not user error.

 

[artsci]

I believe the battery heater and climate control heater are two separate things (at least it looks like it in the Tesla API - they're two separate fields and don't always match). You might be better off not turning on the climate control to conserve the energy to power the battery heater..

Running the climate control is what what Tesla roadside support recommended, and it made no difference whatsoever. I had the sense in several discussions with tech reps that they really didn't know very much about solutions to this problem. They shoulld have been armed with a set of questions that would help them determine the specifics of the situation and suggest solutions. Frankly, I learned a helluva a lot more reading posts on TMC. Maybe that's because the tech folks are in California, where cold this severe is never encountered.