mg4 i Smart charging outside scheduled time.

[chadcombe]

I have been using the ismart sucessfully for a few months now but yesterday, thankfully I noticed on our smart meter in the house that there was a sudden draw on power usage for the house. The car was plugged-in as usual ( around 7pm) as I wasn't using it again that day. I had as usual set the charge to schedule from midnight -0700 using my ev tariff....all as I usually do. I assumed it wasn;t the car charging as the App said it was scheduled for midnight as requested. I isolated the various circuits from the consumer unit and was left with the circuit that has the 3 pin plug I have been using in the garage ( granny charging.. yes , I know not good ). Went to the garage, stopped the car charging and everything was back to normal, basically the app had starting charging the car 4 1/2 hours early. Good job I had noticed. I checked the app and saw I had added charge to the car. My worry is that this may now happen again at anytime. Does anyone else have experience of the same issue ? Would appreciate any input/suggestions. thanks all ...

 

[DixieTGS]

The actual start and stop of scheduled charging is controlled only by the car, and the settings shown in the car have been reliable in my experience.

Ismart should be able to tell you the current state of the schedule and charge limit set in the car, and also to change these values, however both of these operations can be quite flakey especially on older versions of Ismart.

Usually after changing these settings, or wanting to refresh them, I exit the app completely and open it again which although not foolproof, gives the best chance of it reporting the cars status correctly.

As to your problem, I would be very surprised and somewhat worried if ismart ever sent commands to the car on its own. I.e. not as an immediate action when you press a button. My best guess is the most recent command to set the schedule failed, and so the car would have charged based on the previous schedule, or immediately if no schedule.

It may take a few more failures to be confident in what went wrong unfortunately.

 

[ReintjeWA]

Also, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with using a granny charger. If it suits your needs than it’s fine.

 

[chadcombe]

The actual start and stop of scheduled charging is controlled only by the car, and the settings shown in the car have been reliable in my experience.

Ismart should be able to tell you the current state of the schedule and charge limit set in the car, and also to change these values, however both of these operations can be quite flakey especially on older versions of Ismart.

Usually after changing these settings, or wanting to refresh them, I exit the app completely and open it again which although not foolproof, gives the best chance of it reporting the cars status correctly.

As to your problem, I would be very surprised and somewhat worried if ismart ever sent commands to the car on its own. I.e. not as an immediate action when you press a button. My best guess is the most recent command to set the schedule failed, and so the car would have charged based on the previous schedule, or immediately if no schedule.

It may take a few more failures to be confident in what went wrong unfortunately.

Many thanks for your input. Didn't realise the app can't control the scheduled charging time if that's what your advising? The app allows you to set the start and finish time, see image. Anyway, my concern is that I had changed nothing and it had been working correctly now for 2 months, since I bought the car. I'm hoping it's a one-off , I'll keep an eye when I charge again this evening , fingers crossed it was a glitch. Again my thanks for taking the time to reply...

 

[chadcombe]

Also, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with using a granny charger. If it suits your needs than it’s fine.

Thanks for the comment... . You are spot-on. We only use the car most of the time locally with the ocassional longer trip which is less than the total range so we can always get back to charge at home cheaply, it's working perfectly to charge overnight a few times a week.

 

[DixieTGS]

Didn't realise the app can't control the scheduled charging time if that's what your advising?

The app can change the times set in the car, but sometimes when you tell it to do so the new settings fail to get set in the car.

 

[chadcombe]

Understood...it will be interesting to see what happens going forward.