I got a BMW 330e PHEV in February, and have had continuous problems with charging at home from the start. Charging will get under way OK, but be interrupted at frequent random intervals, so that I have to reset charging at the car, when charging will restart, only to fail after 2-50 minutes. The problems occur at any time of day or night. Details:
1 BMW checked the car's charging 2 days ago, and found it free of any fault. The car's charging control system is being triggered to shut off the supply of power by some change in the quality of the power supplied by OVO.
2 interruptions occur whether I supply the power via my Indra Smart Pro charger OR via a 3-pin plug from one of our domestic sockets (using in this case the BMW-supplied Flexible Cable Charger. So apparently the fault is arising upstream of both my domestic outlets and Indra Smart Pro charger and its separate cabling from the meter box. As far as I can understand, this can only be in the meter box itself, or even in our domestic supply to the house. However, this supply has never shown any other such fault, nor limited the use of any of our domestic appliances.
3 charging via a public charger, and at BMW's garage proceeds without any interruption, fault free.
4 My Indra charger was installed by one of Indra's approved supplier/installers
5 I an signed up for OVO’s "Charge Anytime". Credits have been applied as expected to my billing, BUT those only arise from this charging in a highly interrupted manner, as I described. My car's battery is only 12kWh capacity, but I have experienced up to 10 interruptions to each charge session, necessitating reset/restart of charging, so a charge needs many hours overall.
I am advised by BMW that they have experience of such failures to charging from other customers including Intelligent Octopus customers. They explain their understanding as being that the interruptions to charging arise from the sourcing of electrical power . They say that I should request a "change of tariff" to fix the problem.
I’m a retired engineer, but frankly unable to understand either what can be causing the problem, or what the cause/solution advanced by BMW means. I have written a similar note to the above to OVO Energy, but for my own satisfaction I’m hoping for clarification from the gurus on this superb Forum - hopefully in words even I can understand 😉
