Having a charger installed at home for your electric car is very convenient, not only for the obvious home charging, but also for having scheduling and other features built-in. Sadly, like with so many devices today, these tend to be tethered to a remote service managed by the manufacturer. In the case of the JuiceBox charger that [Nathan Matias] and many of his neighbors bought into years ago, back then it and the associated JuiceNet service was still part of a quirky startup. After the startup got snapped up by a large company, things got so bad that [Nathan] and others saw themselves required to find a way to untether their EV chargers.
The drama began back in October of last year, when the North American branch of the parent company – Enel X Way – announced that it’d shutdown operations. After backlash, the online functionality was kept alive while a buyer was sought. That’s when [Nathan] and other JuiceBox owners got an email informing them that the online service would be shutdown, severely crippling their EV chargers.
Ultimately both a software and hardware solution was developed, the former being the JuicePass Proxy project which keeps the original hardware and associated app working. The other solution is a complete brain transplant, created by the folk over at OpenEVSE, which enables interoperability with e.g. Home Assistant through standard protocols like MQTT.
Stories like these make one wonder how much of this online functionality is actually required, and how much of it just a way for manufacturers to get consumers to install a terminal in their homes for online subscription services.
“Stores like these make one wonder how much of this online functionality is actually required”
Absolutely none of it. Everything that the EVSE needs to do happens completely locally, and the only useful thing that online EVSEs do is to track your power consumption and allow you to add in a charging schedule.
My electricity tariff charges a different price for each 30 minute slot throughout the day depending on national demand and generation. My online EVSE can get the price data and choose when it’s below a threshold.
That’s about it though. Everything else I could have done with buttons and a display on the unit.
Gas companies must wish they could charge you a monthly fee on top of gas…
I mean, my natural gas does
thats not true. I have two of them. I bought that brand/model for a specific purpose that no longer works due to lost communication/software. I was able to install two 40A chargers on one 50 A breaker because the chargers would communicate and limit the total amp draw to 40A if both my wife and I plugged our cars in at the same time. Now I have two dumb chargers and I have to remind my wife to not plug her car in when mine is charging or it will trip the breaker. I lost very specific functionality that was the main reason for choosing this brand.
You could have a manual transfer switch installed to go between the two chargers. I work for an installer in the Bay Area and sometimes we put the transfer switch between a laundry dryer and the car charger to meet local code for homes with 100 amp service.
The benefit of auto load sharing over a switch is one car can start charging when the other is balancing or reducing it’s charge rate. If the cars are charging 20/20 then when one is near complete it increases the other for example a leaf when balancing drops to around 6A at 240vac. So the other 34A can be directed to the other. Rather than waiting for a switch to disconnect.
My personal setup is 3 48A evse’s that all load share an allotted 60A on a 90A sub panel in my garage. These also take into account solar production so with all vehicles plugged in I have a capability of charging at up to 100A with 10kw of that from solar. It dynamically tracks the solar and adjusts the chargers depending on grid and load. Unfortunately there is no currently simple setup for this and it required and MQTT broker on my smart home server to manage.
Yes but the point is that the functionality you describe COULD be all local. They don’t have to hook it up to the cloud but they do because it gives them complete control over your data and obsolescence cycle.
I did the OpenEVSE brain translant on my JuiceBox. Works great. I control/moitor it via the OpenEVSE Home Assistant integration.
Also
OpenEVSE for the win, again. Been using my setup for 10 years now, and it’s been great.
Tie it into home assistant/mqtt, and my OpenEVSE has all kinds of great functions, like throttling back depending on other the household loads, scheduling, alerts, all that stuff, and all local. Can’t say enough great stuff about OpenEVSE, and it can be as simple or complex as you want, from a status LED up to a TFT, web server and Internet connection.
I’ve got Charge point at home and a Empora at my mom’s, they both have apps but work perfectly fine without using them
It’s kinda sad that a company can generate so much e-waste with the push of a button. The world is drowning in failed technology, and i’m sure most of these chargers will be just… chucked.
Open source is an amazing glimmer of hope in a world ran by the greedy.
It’s just a glorified battery charger, so why should it absolutely require an internet connection?
I can’t conceive of any non-nefarious reason (ie: service able to cripple your devices remotely) that it could really be absolutely required for.
My phone charger doesn’t need one, so why should a car?
I’m 100% with you on this. The product reviewers failed to actually review the product. If I had known this, I wouldn’t have bought it.
Time of use tariffs. Cheap energy depending on grid availability.
“Time of use” tariffs could be transmitted via the power lines -> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Load_management&useskin=vector#Ripple_control (no, not PLC)
Which would probably be better than depending on working Internet on all ends.
Eg. if you have power but the tariff data is missing (server/Internet outage, …) do all EVCs start charging? VS. Power available == Data available.
And even without Ripple-Control it would be nice if you can easily hard-proxy the data transmission one-way-only (give the EVSE data but don’t let it connect to the whole Internet)
“could be” doesn’t help anybody. We could do a lot of things if everyone worked together to form an ideal solution, but we don’t, so the fall back is on doing what you can with the systems available. That’s almost universally related to the internet.
“can” doesn’t help anybody. We can do a lot of things if everyone worked together to form an ideal solution.
“Could” is just a form of “can” that doesn’t change capability so you really didn’t add anything except a failed attempt at being smug and pedantic.
I used to have a bunch of problems with my juice box taking forever to recognize that it was plugged into my car, etc. So when I reset the whole thing to see if that would fix the problem and it absolutely would not accept my Wi-Fi password, I just decided to not worry about that and just use it as a dumb charger. Everything immediately improved. Sure, I don’t get the status updates and all that stuff but it works reliably and recognizes being connected to the car within one or two seconds. Before, it would take up to a minute. It was maddening.
“My phone charger doesn’t need one” … yet.
Actually no. It’s a glorified mains outlet. There is no “charger” smarts in it. It just supplies mains power after a bit of handshaking with the vehicle.
No there’s plenty of smarts in it, such as defining when to provide power or actually signalling different power levels available. There’s a lot of useful functionality dependent on the smarts in the charger.
It’s even less than that — a power relay and some electronics to tell the car how many amps it can deliver.
It true that basic charging functions do not require a connection. But there are multiple reasons, and people (like myself) paid money to specifically have these options and now they have been removed. For me it was that I could install 2 40A EVSE on one 50A breaker because they can communicate and make sure they use a max of 40A combined if multiple (2 in my case) are running. This was selected so that I did not need a larger subpanel in my detached garage, which would have required larger conductors running from the main house panel all the way to the detached garage. this feature allowed me to save thousands of dollars and still have 2 EVSE at our garage. That safety feature no longer works so now I’ve 80A of EVSE installed on a 50A breaker. Not great.
For others it may be time of use charging rates. Its also nice to be able to track your usage, though I do that with other means. People paid money for these features and now they are gone.
Now lets hope someone starts looking at lobotomizing the EVs themselves. Some server in Korea knows all about my driving habits. What routes i choose, when I’m late for work, where I’m more likely to break the speed limit, heck, even my tire pressure is uploaded regularly.
We’re all google maps street view now.
Especially Chinese EV’s.
There’s demand response features that require connectivity. Some utilities offer a program where they can throttle down high-load devices in exchange for a credit on your bill. We got $5 a month before EnelX shut down.
Or just get a bare-bones non-wifi non-bluetooth EVSE like the Grizzl-E Classic.
Unless you need utility controlled off-hour rate charging and/or load shedding, there isn’t much use for a “smart” EVSE. Sure the data harvesting might be of interest to some people, but beyond that the “smart” bits just provide another attack vector. Both in terms of security and forced obsolescence by the manufacturer. Even if the device was backed by a healthy company, they will only support it for so long. I don’t want to wake up one morning and, whoops, my car didn’t charge because of (reason) determined by the manufacturer.
Last year we had a sparky in to fit an external power supply for our little outside goldfish pond. This required tapping into the power feed for our Zappi Internet connected charger. When it was open on the drive I spotted the bog standard ESP32-wrover or similar module just soldered to the main board. Good to know that when those services go dark, I’ve got options. 👌
I have a ChargePoint Home Flex and I can think of two reasons that it needs to be able to connect to the mothership. You could manually do one, but I don’t see how you could do the other.
The first feature, and one that I make use of, is scheduling based on my electricity rate plan. My plan changes twice per year and is different on holidays weekends and mid-week. It also computes costs based on the plan but that’s unimportant to me.
The second feature is the discounts that you get by participating in the programs that allow the power company to shut down the charger in times of high demand. It’s free money because I never charge during peak demand but if I needed to I could override the setting.