Managing Contactor Wear

Charge HQ has features to avoid excessive wear on the charging equipment.

Each time EV charging is started or stopped some switches (called contactors) in the charger open or close. This is generally audible as a click or clunk sound. Contactors typically have a design life of a certain number of open/close cycles. It is possible, though unlikely, that excessive stop/start cycles could lead to premature failure of the contactors.

To help address this, Charge HQ has delays to prevent frequent stop/start cycles when in solar tracking mode. In particular:

• When the amount of solar drops below the minimum charge rate Charge HQ will wait 6 minutes before stopping the charge. This delay also applies to the Min Solar Generation and Min Excess Solar limit. This is intended to prevent charging from stopping and starting every time a cloud goes over.
• When charging has stopped due to low solar, Charge HQ will wait 15 minutes before restarting. You may force Charge HQ to restart earlier using a button on the home screen.

Vehicles also have contactors however they don't necessarily open and close each time charging stops and starts, and tend to be more heavy duty than the contactors in the charger.

If you don't want charging to stop and start during the day at all then you can use Solar + Grid mode, see Solar Tracking Settings.