Thanks for the input. After speaking with a more knowledgeable tech at the company, I found that there was nothing wrong with those voltages that I measured. However, that doesn't help me resolve my problem with the car charger.

According to the knowledgeable tech, the clicking is almost certainly caused by voltage fluctuations, but not the noticeable kind that make your lights dim noticeably (more on that later). Instead, he suggested that there is noise on the line that is causing voltage spikes - very brief voltage fluctuations that might only last milliseconds at a time, and therefore not be measurable on my crude multimeter, but would cause the safety circuitry in the charging station to briefly suspend the flow of electricity to the car - that's what all the clicking is. He suggested that this could be caused by loose ground connection at the panel, or that there could be something on another circuit introducing noise. I thought that it was odd that turning lights on would mitigate the problem, but he said it might be that the extra loads could actually help to dampen the noise (or something like that) so that the voltage fluctuation at the charging station would not be enough to cause the problem.

So, further diagnosis required.

Now, when he brought up these brief voltage fluctuations, I said oh, like how when the compressor for our geothermal heat exchange system kicks in the lights dim for a fraction of a second? No - apparently that's a different but possibly related problem. I can't decide from searching the internet, whether that is normal or a real problem - depends who's talking. Our house, built in '77 has a 200 amp service (I think). but we live in a rural area, and are literally the last house on the power line, so distance from the transformer could be a problem.

So, there could be multiple issues.

I've had a number of CFL and LED bulbs fail prematurely (IMO), but I always chalked this up to new technology not being particularly robust. Now I wonder if these failures are really due to a problem with our electric service or wiring.

Wondering if the next step is to have an electrician come have a look or to ask the power company to test things on their end first - apparently they can hook up some kind of data logger.

-J