TLDR: The 28 day cut off if network connection is not achieved is an extremely poor design and I am desperate for this to be disabled. If I could return the charger I would over this design.
Feature request: Ability to disable this function.
I recently had to decide on a smart or dumb charger. I went with the Evnex smart charger on the guidance of the sparky who said it would be a better choice in the long term.
The garage has no internet connection and at some point fairly recently, the telcoms did something that has completely black spotted our entire building.
The plan was to eventually wire wifi into the garage but that is going to take some time given the difficulty of managing common spaces and in the mean time I was going to just use my hotspot.
However, the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more disgruntled and upset I am that this device has 28 days of run time before it bricks itself.
I know it can operate as a dumb charger because that’s what it does for 28 days at a time with the ‘smart’ features primarily being the reporting. However the fact that technology is simply not really reliable over a given amount of time really upsets me that over any 28 day period, my car charger may just become a wall mounted plastic box with a flashing blue LED.
I have owned the charger for just over a month and once the 28 days arrived and it disabled itself, I tried to connect and through one bug or another I could not get it to communicate online.
Everything turned out okay in the end as it was actually a couple of app bugs and a reporting bug. The device itself did connect but I was none the wiser as the app continued to fail or report a failure to connect.
This is not really a rare occurrence either. The fact is that apps, APIs and server based services fail all the time and I find it really disorienting that I am depending on the continuation of the company and all services continuing on an ongoing basis in order for my car charger to work at all.
I read somewhere on this forum that the philosophy here is to fail in favour of charging but this is quite the opposite.
I spoke to support and they reassured me that if something were to happen (for example the company becoming insolvent) that things would be organised to find another provider but we all know from experience that this is simply not guaranteed or even the priority for a company going under and could simply be resolved by the defacto state returning to a dumb charger of some kind.
I am frankly desperate for there a way to disable the 28 day bricking as otherwise I feel like I’m sitting on a rather expensive wall hanging that will continue to charge my car only if several things go right. I have already had this experience this last day as, while it did work out, I spent a 1-2 day cycle with the (albeit incorrect) understanding that my charger was now bricked until I could both contact evnex support and also have a resolution organised.