We have a "Zappi" charger (made by MyEnergi) for mrs mik's E-Tron.
About 6 months after installation the car didn't charge fully one night. Weird, but it was fine the next night.
About 3 weeks later - same again. Weird. Next time it happened (3-4 weeks later) I realised the car had released the cable. Which it doesn't usually do at the end of a charge cycle. Message on dash displayed "charge port door fault" (or something like that). If I pulled the cable out and immediately re-inserted, the car would start charging again.
Spoke to MyEnergi at the time - updated the firmware and adjusted some settings. At that time we'd only charged away from home a handful of times, and it was always fine, but MyEnergi were pretty convinced that the car was causing this. Particularly with the "charge port door fault" message.
Spoke to Audi - they checked a couple of things when it was next in for a service, but couldn't see anything obvious, and couldn't get it to repeat... so they asked us to "monitor it".
Issue frequency increased and I booked the car into Audi for a check. Then some van driver bloke ran into the back of it. Took the car to Audi as planned who said "hmmm - damage at the back - could be exposed wires or anything mate. Can't assess it. Bring it back once the repair is done and then we can look at it".
And of course fixing repairs takes for evvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah at the moment.
Zoom forward to Jan-24 and Audi have the car in for a full assessment. No fault codes recorded. Charge it on 3 different chargers (AC and DC) and report no issues. They are convinced it's the charger at fault. Gah!
Go home and suddenly think to try actively cutting the power to the charger at the breaker momentarily whilst it was charging. Charge stopped (obviously), but the car also immediately released the cable (as cutting
all power meant there was no longer any comms between charger and car) and the charge port door tried to close.... and failed - due to the presence of a charge cable. Keep up at the back. After it tried a couple more times the charge port door stayed open and displayed "charge port door fault" on the dash.... as far as the car was concerned there was no longer a cable attached, and since the charge port door wouldn't close - it must be faulty.
OK - so the issue is now
definitely confirmed as our charger!
Something is clearly causing it to drop out momentarily every so often.
Zappi has a 3yr warranty from date of installation. Checks date of installation.... 3yrs and 3 days ago.
Contact MyEnergi, who get me to do some shizzle, update firmware again, but it doesn't help. Charger is at this point dropping out every couple of days - so it was now very easy to verify that it's still not working right. And since I was able to tell them
exactly when I spoke to their techs back in 2021 - they agreed it was a long-standing issue and even though I was now out of warranty, they'd install a new one for £0. Fair play to them. Very happy with that.
This took about 3 weeks to organise, but now I was focussed on the charger I tried a couple more things. There is no option for the user to charge at a lower power output, but I discovered that the installer can limit current draw (in case you install it on a weedy supply that can only handle 16A for example) so I went into that installer menu and dropped peak current from 32A std (7.3kw) to 22A (5kw) and it stopped tripping. Slower charge obviously, but still fast enough, and at least it was working reliably again.
New updated model now fitted. Full speed home charging again. Happy boy.
TL;DR - we got a new car charger.
Still averaging mid to high 30s and low to mid 40 on a run so cannot argue with that!
