ESB eCars

ELM327 · 09-10-2020 12:46pm

Kramer wrote: »

You should leave all that behind - I hear BMW V12s make a lovely sound..........:).
It would likely cause bronchitis for a few penguins though, but if you're on reduced mileage (WFH), would be acceptable.

So was this confirmed, the whole ECars network went offline?
If that gets out, that the national network can go out completely, stranding commuters etc., it'll fuel the anti EV lobby & further set back mass adoption.

Backwards we're going, backwards :rolleyes:.

It should default to free vend if its offline. I can't see why more networks dont do this. You can't rely on a network otherwise.

Silent Running · 09-10-2020 1:19pm

ELM327 wrote: »

It should default to free vend if its offline. I can't see why more networks dont do this. You can't rely on a network otherwise.

Even when charging was free they wouldn't allow free-vend. If a charger went out of communication it simply wouldn't allow a charge. A truly stupid way to run a charging network.

ESB ecars has a lot to answer for, but no-one is asking the hard questions... in fact, any questions.

Black_Knight · 09-10-2020 2:09pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

Seems wrongly placed on the app.
https://myaccount.esbecars.com/findCharger?53.9166720,-6.9685400,18z,TEV028,1852st

Tesco is closer to the roundabout. Reported it on esb app.

Wrong again ESB:
https://myaccount.esbecars.com/findCharger?53.9180824,-6.9710236,16z,Tesco%20Superstore,Thomas%20St,%20Beckscourt,%20Bailieborough,%20Co.%20Cavan,1548si

They just can't get that pin right.

unkel · 09-10-2020 3:24pm

Is there an award yet for the least competent, best salary paying state body yet?

You all know which one would get my vote

The whole nationwide charging network down. You couldn't make it up. In the private sector, the responsible person would have been sacked already.

the_amazing_raisin · 09-10-2020 3:27pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

Wrong again ESB:
https://myaccount.esbecars.com/findCharger?53.9180824,-6.9710236,16z,Tesco%20Superstore,Thomas%20St,%20Beckscourt,%20Bailieborough,%20Co.%20Cavan,1548si

They just can't get that pin right.

That Tesco in Cavan is awfully mobile

Black_Knight · 09-10-2020 5:50pm

cruisey1987 wrote: »

That Tesco in Cavan is awfully mobile

You missed a Tesco mobile joke there

Black_Knight · 12-10-2020 1:32pm

Decided to scrape ESB for the charge point status. Not put much thought into it, but I can see individual charge point activity over time, how many overall are working (available, charging, occupied) vs how many are unavailable (offline, unavailable, unknown, faulted). It's very high level at the moment, but i'd like to expand it to highlight dead ports on units. A FCP might be available, but if CCS isn't working on it it's not very useful. Similar with SCP if only 1 port is working it can be risky.

Interestingly it reports "occupied" and "charging" separately. Lots of NI units "occupied" even 1 FCP right now.

3 FCP not available at the mo.
50 SCP not available at the mo, thought looks like only 16 of those are in RoI

liamog · 12-10-2020 1:35pm

I would suspect the NI chargers are seeing much higher utilisation than the ones in the South, they still don't have to pay.

the_amazing_raisin · 12-10-2020 1:36pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

Decided to scrape ESB for the charge point status. Not put much thought into it, but I can see individual charge point activity over time, how many overall are working (available, charging, occupied) vs how many are unavailable (offline, unavailable, unknown, faulted). It's very high level at the moment, but i'd like to expand it to highlight dead ports on units. A FCP might be available, but if CCS isn't working on it it's not very useful. Similar with SCP if only 1 port is working it can be risky.

Interestingly it reports "occupied" and "charging" separately. Lots of NI units "occupied" even 1 FCP right now.

3 FCP not available at the mo.
50 SCP not available at the mo, thought looks like only 16 of those are in RoI

That's interesting, I think the chargers in NI are still free right? I wonder is there a bit of camping going on???

I'd count the ones with broken CCS as very useful since that wipes out about 50% of the cars that can use it and leaves it free for my Leaf.

Unfortunately, about 95% of the cars that NEED to recharge on a journey are Leafs... :rolleyes:

MJohnston · 12-10-2020 2:54pm

There probably isn't that much camping on NI fast chargers, because most of them are located in petrol stations in the middle of nowhere. Boucher Road and Sprucefield ones might see a bit of overstaying, but even there I doubt it.

Black_Knight · 12-10-2020 3:15pm

cruisey1987 wrote: »

That's interesting, I think the chargers in NI are still free right? I wonder is there a bit of camping going on???

I'd count the ones with broken CCS as very useful since that wipes out about 50% of the cars that can use it and leaves it free for my Leaf.

Unfortunately, about 95% of the cars that NEED to recharge on a journey are Leafs... :rolleyes:

Yup. NI is free. 4 campers (OCCUPIED units) at the moment, all in the north.

When I get some time some evening i'll start capturing the port status. It looks as though you need to query each individual unit to get that detail though. The call i'm making just returns whether, based on your filters, the unit is available. For this reason i've removed AC43 from my filter (a unit is available when DC is in use if you're open to using AC43). Sorry Zoe drivers. I might just capture port status a few times a day, rather than every 5 minutes.

garo · 12-10-2020 4:54pm

Ah sure query every point every minute. Nothing better than a soak test to shake out the problems.

the_amazing_raisin · 12-10-2020 5:01pm

garo wrote: »

Ah sure query every point every minute. Nothing better than a soak test to shake out the problems.

Jaysis don't do that, we've already had the whole network down last week! :eek:

Black_Knight · 12-10-2020 5:07pm

cruisey1987 wrote: »

Jaysis don't do that, we've already had the whole network down last week! :eek:

I in no way contributed to that....

garo · 12-10-2020 5:10pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

I in no way contributed to that....

Sure....

or as the Yanks say:

Yeah right!

the_amazing_raisin · 12-10-2020 5:11pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

I in no way contributed to that....

Oh I believe you, the eCars networks doesn't need help to fall over, it does a pretty good job of that itself :rolleyes:

Royale with Cheese · 12-10-2020 6:13pm

Does anyone know if you still need to pay for parking at the Luas park and ride stops if you're AC charging now that the charging costs money? I've always left the car at the DC charger and not paid for parking and it's been fine. It would be handy to leave it AC charging just for a top up for 30-45 mins when shopping in the evening, the car park is mostly empty at that time anyway.

Black_Knight · 12-10-2020 7:28pm

Only have data for the last 9 hour or so, but it looks like of the 112 fast chargers in the country, 72 were in use at some point today (in use is defined by a Chademo and CCS port not being available, because 1 of those 2 ports was in use. I ignore the AC43 port). The remaining 40 were not used in the last 9 hours. Be interesting to see this over time.

Harder to read the SCP stats, since when 1 port is available the unit is available, but it might nicely identify the "always in use" slow chargers.

the_amazing_raisin · 12-10-2020 8:41pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

Only have data for the last 9 hour or so, but it looks like of the 112 fast chargers in the country, 72 were in use at some point today (in use is defined by a Chademo and CCS port not being available, because 1 of those 2 ports was in use. I ignore the AC43 port). The remaining 40 were not used in the last 9 hours. Be interesting to see this over time.

Harder to read the SCP stats, since when 1 port is available the unit is available, but it might nicely identify the "always in use" slow chargers.

That's awesome, it's great to see the majority of fast chargers are getting used

the_amazing_raisin · 12-10-2020 8:43pm

Royale with Cheese wrote: »

Does anyone know if you still need to pay for parking at the Luas park and ride stops if you're AC charging now that the charging costs money? I've always left the car at the DC charger and not paid for parking and it's been fine. It would be handy to leave it AC charging just for a top up for 30-45 mins when shopping in the evening, the car park is mostly empty at that time anyway.

The old app used to say but the new version doesn't

I've not used the luas chargers but I would imagine if the parking was free before the charging was paid for then it's still free.

The parking and charging are paid to different companies, so it's doubtful they're sharing money

Black_Knight · 12-10-2020 11:12pm

cruisey1987 wrote: »

That's awesome, it's great to see the majority of fast chargers are getting used

I'd only hope/imagine usage is down these days with the lockdown in place. Pity I didn't get this all setup before the lockdown. Im curious to see the ones not used today, and after a week or so see what ones are never used

zg3409 · 13-10-2020 9:18am

Black_Knight wrote: »

I'd only hope/imagine usage is down these days with the lockdown in place. Pity I didn't get this all setup before the lockdown. Im curious to see the ones not used today, and after a week or so see what ones are never used

http://cpinfo.ie/ has been displaying and logging data from ESB for years. Last time I attempted to use it, it would not work for me. However I believe they have a database of historical data online. If you Google cpinfo you can see discussion and the owner.

As ESB have a public API it would be great if we could update cpinfo or have a similar service with some useful statistics, particularly chargers that are known to be down. I don't want to re-invent the wheel, or duplicate an existing service, but when ESB flag a charger as faulty it would be handy to be alerted.

Black_Knight · 13-10-2020 9:50am

yeah, cpinfo was a nice idea, but difficult to use I found. I'd love to make what I have publically available (currently it runs on a mini pc I have at my house), but I just don't have the time at the moment. I might shift my focus towards that in the near future.

Pretty sure you'd have to reinvent the wheel. Unless cpinfo is being developed, I believe it runs against the old maps kml file. Horrific to deal with.

innrain · 13-10-2020 10:16am

zg3409 wrote: »

As ESB have a public API it would be great if we could update cpinfo or have a similar service with some useful statistics, particularly chargers that are known to be down.

Had. The file esb.ie/electric-cars/kml/charging-locations.kml
was not updated since February.

Funny enough based on the ruby script that the cpinfo creator posted on github I managed to make my own data grabber. With the new system I don't know where to start.
Black_Knight if you find the time and you're stuck for resources I'm happy to help.

Black_Knight · 13-10-2020 12:28pm

innrain wrote: »

Had. The file esb.ie/electric-cars/kml/charging-locations.kml
was not updated since February.

Funny enough based on the ruby script that the cpinfo creator posted on github I managed to make my own data grabber. With the new system I don't know where to start.
Black_Knight if you find the time and you're stuck for resources I'm happy to help.

Might stick what I have on github. I was/am limited on resources from my mini pc, and had an influxdb up and running already so i've been using that as my backend. Nice for timeseries stuff, but makes things a bit awkward when building queries against the data. Hindsight is 20:20, so I might rethink things if I end up porting this to AWS. Ideally i'd have this deployed somewhere (Just using grafana for the front end) and branchable on github so others can contribute.

McGiver · 13-10-2020 1:16pm

Does anyone has stats how many DC units were added to the network (bar Ionity) say last year, this year or in 2018?

Something must be done here, if there was no Ionity growth spur last year, there would have been basically nothing new added to the network.

kanuseeme · 13-10-2020 1:25pm

Something was done,

Ionity increased their prices to make sure that it would be a last option and thus reduce the need for expansion of their network,

and Ecars upgraded a few AC units to 44 kW DC and 6 AC if you can charge on 3 phase.

Amazing progress.

McGiver · 13-10-2020 3:28pm

kanuseeme wrote:

and Ecars upgraded a few AC units to 44 kW DC and 6 AC if you can charge on 3 phase.

I won't count the conversion, they're at best keeping the status quo. I'd like to see the number of units added per annum last three years (2018-2020).

Is it what I think? Basically zero. If we don't count the 3 new 150 kW additions....

markpb · 13-10-2020 3:33pm

McGiver wrote: »

I won't count the conversion, they're at best keeping the status quo...

In terms of creating a “fast” charging network, 44kW is better than 20kW (which few cars can avail of anyway) so it’s definitely an upgrade for lots of people.

Why wouldn’t you count the 150kW charge points? They’re definitely a step forward.

MJohnston · 13-10-2020 3:34pm

McGiver wrote: »

I won't count the conversion, they're at best keeping the status quo. I'd like to see the number of units added per annum last three years (2018-2020).

Is it what I think? Basically zero. If we don't count the 3 new 150 kW additions....

Yes if you don't count any of the new additions it certainly would be zero

ESB eCars

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