DJI 1kW Fast Car Charger Fails Again: Time for a Spare

I wrote that line in our last post about the DJI fast charger warranty return, talking about the difference between being stranded and being inconvenienced. I didn’t expect to be taking my own advice quite this fast. The replacement DJI Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger, fitted at the end of June after we’d gone through the whole Amazon returns nightmare, has died. Less than two months after we started using it.

The pattern so far

We’re a full time motorhome couple, so hook-up electric isn’t preferred method of living, and we rely on our DJI Power 2000 setup to keep us online. When it works, it’s brilliant. When the fast charger dies, we’re back to being able to go without hook-up for no more than 24 hours, before things get tight.

Here’s the run so far:

• First charger ordered 11th February, died at the end of May. Just short of four months.
• Replacement fitted end of June, died in mid-August. Less than two months.

Two failures, same fault both times, less than six months apart. That’s not bad luck anymore, that’s a pattern.

Why this matters for a product I actually rate

I want to be fair here. The DJI Power 2000 itself has been great when it’s working, and I’m not walking that back. But the DJI Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger, the £230 part that actually gets power back into the system, has not been reliable. Two units, two failures, and both times it’s left us counting down the hours until we needed hook-up again. When a single component keeps failing this often, it stops being a fluke and starts being a warning worth passing on. If you’re relying on this setup the way we do, go in with your eyes open about how this specific part has performed for us.

What are we meant to do?

That’s the honest question we were left asking. You can only go through the returns process so many times before you accept that hoping the next one holds isn’t a plan, it’s a gamble. So we’re not gambling anymore.

The radical idea: buy the backup before you need it

As mentioned in the last post, the answer is a spare. We’re buying a second DJI Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger so we can swap it in the moment the primary fails, rather than sitting powerless while a replacement gets shipped and a warranty claim crawls through the system. Not many people have £230 sitting by for a backup of a backup, but the alternative is being stranded or returning back to the girl’s house to charge up, and that costs more than money.

Kathy said it herself “If we were home and ran out of oil, we’d have to order more, this is the same thing, we can’t run out of electricity, and I don’t want to have to remain within a 20 mile radius of the girl’s drive.”

While we were placing that order we also picked up the DJI Power Expansion Battery 2000, taking our total available power up to 4000W. Ireland’s summer has been mostly a washout this year, unlike England and Wales working through their fifth heatwave, so the extra capacity means we can stretch further into autumn without worrying about every cloudy day.

Where things stand

The dead charger is going back to DJI first thing Monday when the post office opens. We’ll be watching to see how fast DJI UK Repairs turn the return around, while we wait for the warehouse to dispatch the spare charger and the expansion battery.

Our current order total stands at £1,028. That’s a hefty bill for what should be a reliability problem DJI needs to solve, not one their customers should have to engineer around. But until they do, we’re not getting caught out again.

Grim times to be living in a motorhome, but at least this time we’ll have a spare when we’re gonna need it, and judging by how long these things last, it might be by the end of October.