Hey everyone, 2017 Zero DS ZF13.0 with charge tank owner here and I thought I'd share my failed charger experience that I've tried to detail and examine at the best of my capabilities. I bought this bike on March 20th and rode it a few times here and there, putting maybe 100miles on it on side streets and a tiny bit of interstate, probably 5 charge cycles on it total, till April 23rd when I finally was in possession of the title and had gotten my licence plate for it.
So I went out to replace the licence plate light and install the plate. The battery was at 88% and I was planning a long ride for the "maiden legal voyage" I was going to take finally. So I plugged in the charger to top off the battery while I got to work. Everything seemed fine, dash showed charging with about an hour/half hour (I don't remember exactly) till fully charged. While I get to work on the licence plate I hear some clicking sounds (some may have been popping sounds) about a minute into charging that just don't sound right. I get back up (was sitting around back putting the plate on) and I smell burning electronics/plastic, see smoke pouring out of the back of the onboard charger where the wiring goes into it, the dash saying 89% charge 0:00 till full, and immediately scramble to rip the charging cord out of the bike.
At this point I was like do I laugh or do I cry at my luck right now, and grabbed my tools and went straight to work completely removing the onboard charger. After maybe two hours it's completely disconnected and removed from the bike, but now the dash is stuck saying the bike is charging when it isn't (which means no throttle/can't ride it). I do a BMS software reset which doesn't fix it, so I do a BMS hardware reset and it finally fixes that. Some blipping of the throttle shows the bike can still move under its own power and there's no error codes. I pull the MBB and BMS logs and there's zero errors at all for anything that happened. I take it for a ride up and down the street and nothing goes wrong, so I go to a nearby free EVSE charger and it charges my bike from 80% to 95% and shuts off. So no issues there with the charge tank (thank god) and I head back home.
I then take the onboard charger inside and go through the long process of removing its casing and de-potting the circuit board. After an hour or two I've got ~80% of the underside of the board de-potted and find an area on the board with a chip that clearly went up in smoke and even burned a hole straight through the board itself to the other side. There's zero chance of this being repairable and at this point I stop.
I research failed Zero chargers and find info stating this is part of the CAN-BUS interface in the charger and it is believed the bike itself erratically sends a power surge through the CAN-BUS that this chip just can't handle and it goes up in smoke, basically the bike destroyed a properly working charger. Looking at the pictures at
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Gen2/Calex_Charger/Damage_Report the damage looks nearly identical, only mine less severe probably from me being nearby and immediately yanking the power cord out. Talking with u/BonesJackson on Reddit (someone involved in the creation of the DigoNow aftermarket onboard charger upgrade
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/DigiNow/Super_Charger_V2.5 ) he states that bikes would end up frying their aftermarket chargers once they tried adding a CAN-BUS connection to the bike, thus their discontinuation of their aftermarket charger and the statement that a bike that blew one charger will blow more weather aftermarket or OEM if it connects to the CAN-BUS.
So at this point I'm at least lucky that I have a charge tank installed that is working properly, a luxury that many in this situation don't have. This leaves me with two options: I spend ~$900 and install a new onboard charger with no warranty that has a high probability of failing again due to my bike having some CAN-BUS issue, or I spend ~$200 and get a 120v/240v EVSE J1772 charge tank cord off Amazon with 5 star reviews and a two year warranty. I feel like the onboard charger being gone will affect the value of my bike if/when I sell it years from now, and now I have to carry a bulky EVSE charger with me on longer trips, but I went with the EVSE option and it will arrive tomorrow for me to use.
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Topic: Not charging (Read 10894 times)