This updated guide I've prepared for the charging timer might be useful to people:
20180707 EXPLAINING AND SETTING THE TIMER CHARGE SYSTEM ON OUTLANDER PHEV
1) TIMERS
If you are paying a flat rate for your electricity at any time ofg the day or week, then you do not need top bother with the timers. On the other hand, you may find it worth switching to cheap rate electricity as it can be much cheaper at night, when you may usually charge the car. If you get cheap rate electricity (and you want to minimise the demand on the grid and your bills), then you need to use the timers:
For this explanation, let’s assume your home electricity rates are as follows (these are the actual hours for Powershop in Melbourne Australia):
Cheap rate 10pm to 7am
Shoulder (middle) rate 7am to 3pm
High rate 3pm to 9pm
BUT at weekends it is always Cheap rate.
You can set three different time periods, eg 1 could be cheap rate, one could be shoulder and the third high – but this would NOT be a good solution (for example you’d never want the car to charge at HIGH rate if you could avoid it!). To set the timers needs more logic.
Timer limitation:
You can only set one timer per day. So if you want to charge the car from midnight to 8am (cheap rate) then you could set timer 1 for 00.00 to 08.00.
HOWEVER, if you did this, you could not charge it from 10pm to midnight (also cheap rate) unless you first disabled the timer, which is a pain and I at least would forget to turn it off, or to turn it back on!.
2) WEEKDAYS
Luckily, there is a solution. You will find that the timer does not only operate in the day chosen, but for 24 hours from the starting time chosen. So for example if I selected timer 1 to operate from 10:00 PM to 8:00 AM, and chose timer 1 for MONDAY, this is actually telling the car to START CHARGING ON MONDAY AT 10:00 PM (which you would expect) but to CONTINUE CHARGING INTO THE NEXT DAY AND FINISH CHARGING AT THE NEXT 8:00 AM (ie TUESDAY) – like an airline flight, it should say 8.00 AM (Next Day)! (I imagine that this would be overridden by the Tuesday setting if it conflicted, eg if timer 2 was selected, which was set to turn on the charger at 6:00 AM and off at 7:00 AM, it would still be on from the previous instruction and would stay ON at 6:00 AM, but would go OFF at 7:00 AM rather than timer 1’s 8:00 AM, but I have not checked this).
3) THE WEEKEND TRANSITION.
Because I have cheap rate all weekend, and also tend to drive in and out of home frequently during the weekend, I want the car to charge whenever I plug in for a top-up. So I could select timer OFF for Saturday and Sunday.
However, I got back at 11:00 PM one Sunday evening with an empty battery, and plugged in, and it started charging (a click and a solid green light). But come Monday morning it was not fully charged. What happened? As I said, the timer was OFF for Sunday – so it charged from when I plugged it in at 11:00 PM until the end of Sunday, ie 1 hour of charge. But when Monday started, timer 1 (which is selected for Mondays) came into force. And timer 1 is only set to come on from 10:00 PM to 8:00 AM. So as Sunday moved into Monday, the charging was switched off – Monday’s charge timer said OFF UNTIL 10:00 PM, so it did as it was told, and switched off!
I have now resolved this problem by selecting another timer setting (timer 3) for Saturday and Sunday. Timer 3 is set from 8:00 AM to 8:00 AM (so on Friday night – as Friday is set to Timer 1 - it starts charging from 10pm Friday and finishes when it is full, or at 8.00AM on Saturday – but if I plug it in any later time on Saturday it will charge through to 8AM Sunday morning, and if I plug it in any time on Sunday, it will charge through to 8am Monday morning).
4) THE ‘FULL CHARGE’ OPTION
I should also explain the ‘full charge’ option.
The system will normally stop charging when the timer reaches its cut-off time (for example on ‘shoulder rate’ this would be at 3pm). If I plugged in at 2pm (and did not have the ‘full charge’ option selected - that is, it is selected to ‘OFF’ as above), then I’d only get the hour of charge from 2pm to 3pm.
However, to avoid this frustration (even if some of the charging will be at a higher cost), you can set the system to continue until the battery is fully charged. To do this, you select Full Charge ‘ON’ on the right side of the ‘Timer Settings’ page. This will OVER-RIDE THE TIMER CUT-OFF TIME.
So selecting Full Charge ‘OFF’ really means ‘TIMER FULLY OPERATING’!
I found this confusing, so to state it a different way, when ‘Full Charge’ is set to ‘OFF’ the charging is determined solely by the timer times, but if Full Charge ‘ON’ is selected, then the charging will start according to the timer ON time, but charging will continue until fully charged regardless of the Charging Timer's OFF time.
5) LOCATION
If you have or set up cheap-rate electricity at night, then you should set up the timer so that you get home and plug in, knowing that it will limit the charging to the cheap period (or at least avoiding charging in the highest rate, depending on how you set it up).
However, if you ever want to charge elsewhere during the day (eg at work or a fast charge station), then you don’t want the timer to operate on these occasions, or you might come back having plugged it in only to find it has not charged at all (because it was in a ‘Timer OFF’ period)!
For this reason, you can set ‘Location’ – once this is properly set, the timer works only when the car is at the selected location (eg home), which is automatically determined via GPS, but in any other place the timer is disabled, so wherever else you plug in, it charges immediately.
However, when selecting ‘Location’, it has to show as registered (see image above – top of screen, it says ‘Linkage ON’). Initially I had set home as the street address (but it was not the exact parking location) and when I selected Location it said ‘not registered’. I had to delete and re-register the home address and use ‘TUNING’ arrows to register it precisely. It now shows as ‘Registered’ and works as it should.
