RavCharge, a solution to charge timer and entune woes

[fooljoe]

What is your recommendation for how to set the timers in the car to best use the RavCharge timers? If you disable the timers in the car altogether, it will default to Charge Immediately, right? So, that's not the right way...

Right, I recommend leaving the car's departure timer on, but probably a bit later than you had it previously. That way you'd need both the timers to fail to skip a charge. Of course RavCharge would never fail , but it relies on entune, and that could go down for whatever reason. Redundancy for the win!

[SeaMonster]

Great idea. Thanks.

Can you enable/disable extended charge mode from your UI? I'm guessing you can't, but I'm really hoping you can.

[fooljoe]

Great idea. Thanks.

Can you enable/disable extended charge mode from your UI? I'm guessing you can't, but I'm really hoping you can.

Nope, no way to do that (I hoped I could too.) I've also been meaning to test what the SOC value does when you have a full extended charge, but I don't have high hopes. I expect it'll still just say 100% for anything over the normal charge level, just like the car does.

[TonyWilliams]

Entune gives a 0-100 value for SOC, where 100 represents a full normal charge. I simply take the nominal 35 usable kwh figure for a normal charge and multiply it by the SOC value as a percentage. I can't vouch for how accurate it is (hence "approximate").

This, of course, makes no corrections for degradation. You might want to add a user input for that.

Also, wouldn't 100% be 41.8kWh? Or, does it really show 100 for an 80% "normal" charge and a different 100% for the 100% "extended" charge?

Edit: I see you already addressed that:

Great idea. Thanks.

Can you enable/disable extended charge mode from your UI? I'm guessing you can't, but I'm really hoping you can.

Nope, no way to do that (I hoped I could too.) I've also been meaning to test what the SOC value does when you have a full extended charge, but I don't have high hopes. I expect it'll still just say 100% for anything over the normal charge level, just like the car does.

[Dsinned]

This is FANTASTIC!!!

F I N A L L Y after countless griping about this to "do-nothing-about-it" Toyota, one of our own on this forum comes up with the most promising "fix" to date.

However, I am having a problem logging in to RAVCHARGE.COM. I have tried several times, and followed the instructions given, but I keep getting "This page can't be display" errors. Just to be sure I'm using the correct login email address and password, I logged out of ENTUNES on my mobile phone, and logged back in successfully. What am I doing wrong???

[TonyWilliams]

I was sitting in the car today and used the app to turn on the air conditioner. Within about one minute, it came on. I used my IR thermometer to measure 32F coming out of the air vents with the thermostat set to 72F and about 78F ambient temperatures.

When I was done, I just used the RavCharge app to turn it off. Worked awesome.

I'm going to guess there is no way to adjust the temperature. Of course, my car failed to charge with its onboard timer this morning, like always.

[fooljoe]

This, of course, makes no corrections for degradation. You might want to add a user input for that.

Yeah, that's on my to-do list.

I'm going to guess there is no way to adjust the temperature. Of course, my car failed to charge with its onboard timer this morning, like always.

Can't adjust the temperature, but it does provide what the cabin temperature is when it's running, so I could for example have the climate run until you get to a target temperature (also on my to-do list).

However, I am having a problem logging in to RAVCHARGE.COM.

Yeah, we had a bit of an outage earlier after someone entered a malformed time. For the record, you shouldn't be typing dates or times in - your browser should have controls for that. If it doesn't, you need a new browser. But I put in some error handling code so such a thing doesn't cause a complete crash and we should be good for now...

[rav4buyer]

This is great and I will try it out.

Just a heads up for those that purchased through Dianne. You may want to change your Entunes password.

[Scott1258]

Hey Joe,

i'm looking forward to trying your new app! We just got our Rav last weekend from Dianne (awesome experience by the way!), the electrician is installing the 240 plug and charger on Monday. So I've only charged it up at a local charge point station by our house so far. But I want to charge the car between midnight and 6am to use the super off peak rates with sce.

But here's my question: when you set the car to charge at a certain time and you are using the ravcharge app, do you just connect the charger to the car and it starts automatically at the selected time? If you could just post up step by step instructions how to set up the car for,charging with the use of the app it would be appreciated for all us new owners who are pretty clueless on the car charger timer ( ie... Do this and then do this ...) thanks!

Scott

[fooljoe]

Hey Joe,

i'm looking forward to trying your new app! We just got our Rav last weekend from Dianne (awesome experience by the way!), the electrician is installing the 240 plug and charger on Monday. So I've only charged it up at a local charge point station by our house so far. But I want to charge the car between midnight and 6am to use the super off peak rates with sce.

But here's my question: when you set the car to charge at a certain time and you are using the ravcharge app, do you just connect the charger to the car and it starts automatically at the selected time? If you could just post up step by step instructions how to set up the car for,charging with the use of the app it would be appreciated for all us new owners who are pretty clueless on the car charger timer ( ie... Do this and then do this ...) thanks!

Scott

Good idea - I've added such a guide to the top post.