HIVE/Alfen Charger - annoying.

[Bcc212]

Hi guys, I finally got my BG HIVE charger installed on Thursday and frankly it’s a pain in the ****. 

I use the cable that came with the car and remove it from the car only in the morning. When I get home, I plug it back in. But the charger doesn’t seem to recognise the car or visa versa. I get a blue light, but the car doesn’t lock the charger in place. 

It takes numerous times and messing with the app schedule settings to get the charger/car to lock and sit ready for the evening charge. 

Anyone else had this?

[Hayzee]

Ben I've just had a very similar experience with my Hive charger too. Only had it 3 days and when I plugged in the third day it did the same as yours, blue light but my car did not acknowledge any charger was connected.

After a long conversation with a BG warranty engineer today, I removed the charger from the Hive app, uninstalled then reinstalled the app, added the EV charger again using the charger ID and Pin provided in the original email. Lo and behold the thing is working again. There's an updated version of the app for Android (if you are IOS check it ) so if you can do the same, remove the EV charger from the app and then uninstall/ reinstall the app and add the charger again and see if that cures it for you. 🤞

[nlee]

11 hours ago, Bcc212 said:

Hi guys, I finally got my BG HIVE charger installed on Thursday and frankly it’s a pain in the ****. 

I use the cable that came with the car and remove it from the car only in the morning. When I get home, I plug it back in. But the charger doesn’t seem to recognise the car or visa versa. I get a blue light, but the car doesn’t lock the charger in place. 

It takes numerous times and messing with the app schedule settings to get the charger/car to lock and sit ready for the evening charge. 

Anyone else had this?

Are you using a schedule? Is it set on the car or the charge point. I have a different brand of charge point so it may behave differently but I have the schedule set on the charge point and when I plug in, it doesn't lock the plug into the socket. I believe this is basically because until the schedule time starts, it doesn't provide any current to the plug. The socket has to sense a current to activate the lock. It activates the lock as soon as the schedule starts. Imagine connecting your "granny" cable without it being plugged into the 3 pin socket, it will (should) behave the same.

If the schedule is set on the car, or there is no schedule set, then it should lock as soon as you plug in so ignore the above, it's probably something else.

[Centaur]

I have not got my car yet and so I haven't had the chance to use my wall charger.  However, the installers fitted a Matt:e box as part of the installation and said that this, as well as being an RCD, would prevent the charger from operating if the voltage at the wall charger was outside the range of 207v-253v.  The Matt:e box is not part of the wall charger itself, so it actually disconnects if it detects a lower incoming voltage of 216v.  The incoming voltage is unlikely to be higher but could well be lower than that if you and / or your neighbours are putting enough load on the system to drag the voltage down.  In addition, it also detects your whole house load and, again, it will disconnect the wall charger if your total consumption is above a set threshold (60A, 80A or 100A depending on the installation).

I would assume that in the above scenarios, the LED on the wall charger itself would just go blank.  However, it could be that you may still get the blue light showing, so this could be a possible explanation.  If it happens again, take a look at the LED on the Matt:e box itself and see if it is showing a fault.

[Hayzee]

Nigel....with mine there was no schedule set in the app or the car MID. For some reason the Hive app appeared to be waiting for some input, what that is we don't know. The engineer just messed with the app till it responded but she didn't know why it was not charging beforehand. The uninstall and reinstall seems to have sorted this flakey app for the time being at least.

[Hayzee]

On 7/25/2022 at 9:26 PM, Bcc212 said:

the charger doesn’t seem to recognise the car or visa versa. I get a blue light, but the car doesn’t lock the charger in place. 

It takes numerous times and messing with the app schedule settings to get the charger/car to lock and sit ready for the evening charge.

Has this been sorted Ben?

[Mike2222]

On 7/25/2022 at 9:26 PM, Bcc212 said:

Hi guys, I finally got my BG HIVE charger installed on Thursday and frankly it’s a pain in the ****. 

I use the cable that came with the car and remove it from the car only in the morning. When I get home, I plug it back in. But the charger doesn’t seem to recognise the car or visa versa. I get a blue light, but the car doesn’t lock the charger in place. 

It takes numerous times and messing with the app schedule settings to get the charger/car to lock and sit ready for the evening charge. 

Anyone else had this?

Just chiming in, but from my experience, the hive is a bad fit for the Rav4 in terms of design mismatch for this - @nlee has it right about current required to lock the chargeport on the Rav4, which the hive does not supply until the requested time to start the charge, and the Rav4 does not lock the chargeport when the central locking is activated (despite requiring central locking unlock to release - slight odd omission imo)

 

I also have a nissan leaf, and had previously installed a different charger (ohme home pro), which tries to 'communicate' with the car whenever it is plugged in, in order to determine the current state of charge (this is so you can ask it to charge to a specific percentage, eg on an EV where it is good for longterm Battery health to only charge to 75-80% for the average day where you aren't going to require full range). When I plug the ohme to the Rav4, the chargeport locks instantly, as it senses the tiny amount of current, then after ~30seconds or so the ohme settles into "delayed charge" mode, ready to get going at the off peak time, but the chargeport stays locked. 

Unless you manually start a charge on the hive, purely to lock the chargeport, then manually swap to timed charging in the hive app, I don't think you're ever going to get whta you'd like with the hive. And thta just sounds like far too much of a faff for me! 

[Hornet3D]

I have been using Hive for a number of years now for home automation and I have to say it can be very flaky at times.  The outdoor camera they produced should never have reached the market it was too buggy to even be a beta.  In the end Hive has settled down and BG seem to have seen the error of their ways and are stopping support for the camera and some other features.  Hopefully their new focus will be on getting the electric vehicle chargers to work, there really is too much at stake to get it wrong.