Hi,
I’m moving houses in a couple of weeks. My new house has a NewMotion / Shell Recharge charger (a.k.a. “lolo”) installed already. Is there any chance Stekker will add support for these in the near future? Would make a lot of sense, it seems there are quite a lot of those installed in The Netherlands.
I’d like to know this. If there will be support, I might keep the charger and wait. If nothing is planned to support those chargers, I might install a supported one at some point.
(My car, a Renault Zoe, is not supported, so that’s not an alternative option for me.)
Hi @bkummel,
I’m afraid that supporting the LoLo box is difficult for us. It appears that this charger uses a controller that only works reliably in conjunction with Last Miles Solutions as a backend service. The implementation of the open protocol (OCPP) is below par, sadly. This means our last option is to work with LMS, but we’ve reached out multiple times. It appears LMS plans to implement smart charging by themselves, but we’ve not seen anything yet that you may be able to use.
Have you tried Jedlix in combination with their Zoe integration? At some point in their history, Renault has invested in them, so I would figure that this implementation works quite well. I can’t say for sure that this will work, just share my assumption that it might. If it’s not working out, feel free to report back to us. If people have no option with any of our competitors, this is a good case to implement an integration with Renault. But if someone else covers this already to satisfaction, it might be better to focus on an unsupported vehicle type.
One last option you could consider is to use a relay on the Control Pilot signal combined with IFTTT. This is much more gentile on the electronics of your car and on the relay itself. A Zoe uses a considerable charging current which creates the risk of “welding” the contacts of the relay together after which the relay becomes useless (it becomes permanently connected). If you are you interested in pursuing this route, we can provide pointers. This is not an officially supported route of Stekker, but you’re not completely on your own as this community has several people in it who are knowledgeable in these areas.
Hi @Stekker-ErikDeBruijn,
Thanks for your response! I really appreciate the elaborate answer. It’s a bit sad that the LoLo chargers are such a closed bastion. They seem to be very capable otherwise.
I’ve looked into Jedlix. The discription in the AppStore says they work with Tesla, MINI, Jaguar, BMW and Audi. So no Renault support there either. That said – for me personally using the Renault-route would be difficult anyway. I bought my Zoe second hand, it was imported from France. I never managed to get the Renault app working with it. It seems to be very hard and/or Renault seems not very eager to help me. The local dealer points to Renault Nederland, and Renault Nederland points to the dealer. At this point, I’ve given up on it. I might give it one more try when I’m moved, since I’ll have a different dealer nearby then. But it wouldn’t give me smart charging, because none of the smart charging apps seem to support Renault.
So that leaves me with a couple of options:
- I can buy a Easee or Zaptec unit and replace the LoLo with that one. Will cost me hundreds of €, even if I manage to sell the LoLo.
- I can try the relay option. I can see that happen, since I have a background in electrical engineering.
- I can contact Shell Recharge and ask about their plans for smart charging support.
For the short term, I’ll just take over the Shell Recharge subscription form the previous owner of the house and manage the charging manually. After I’ve settled down in the new house, I’ll revisit the smart charging project… Thanks again for thinking along!
One addition: I looked a bit further and found out that Jedlix apparently has a separate app, called Mobilize Smart Charge, that does support smart charging with Renault cars. I suppose I need to get the Renault app working first, since they most probably make use of the same API. I guess I’ll need to give that another shot with the dealer then, once I’ve moved.
Maybe with newer Zoe cars that might work. But our 2013 Zoe has always had a crappy app and crappy connection (gprs, only updated once in a very long time during charging, service was regulary down). IT and Renault, I would stay away. We abandoned all the online functions.
I would try the relay option, that is the cheapest and can probably work great.