Intelligent Octopus Go - EV Charge Error

teecee90

Just recently got an EV and Hypervolt charger and switched to the IOG tariff. When signing up I elected to connect to the charger rather than the EV, even though both were listed as compatible.

IOG created a charge schedule based on my settings of 80% charge by 6:00AM. The 80% target is also set directly in the car settings/app (Mini Aceman) so everything is consistent. The car duly charged to 80% well within the allocated time slot (it was already at about 60% when plugged in).

However, the octopus app has thrown up an error message saying ….. “Hmm…something went wrong with your charge. Charge unsuccessful. Looks like there was a hiccup during your smart charge, so we couldn't quite reach your charging target.”

The charging target was met so I wonder why this error is appearing and how to avoid it in future. Does anyone else get this error or having any suggestions for resolving it? Thanks.

Keep_pedalling

You will get that error message if the car instructs the charge point to stop charging before the amount of charge you gave requested has been delivered. When you control the charge via the charge point, neither the charge point nor Octopus know what state of charge the car is in, so when you tell the Octopus app that you want 80% charge, you are not telling the app to charge the car to 80% but to add 80% of charge, which it works out based on the battery size of the car.

So if you plug in at 40% state of charge and want it charged to 80% you should tell Octopus to add 40% not 80%. Having said that apart from the error message it is not going to cause you real issues if you tell the app to add more than you need. If you use the car to control the amount of charge it works in the way you thought it should do with the charge point. Personally I prefer to let the charge point to control the charge. 

PS how are you enjoying driving electric?

QrizB

Agreed, as above the error message is due to you telling both the car and the charge point to control the amount of charging.

Tell one or the other, not both. Or put up with error messages.

teecee90

I don’t have any choice but to tell both. There is no option to not set a charge limit either in the car or the octopus app. The car requires a charging target of between 20-100%. If I don’t set a percentage in the octopus app then it simply won’t charge. It seems I just need to tell octopus the difference between current charge and target charge, as Keep_pedalling has noted above.

QrizB

teecee90 said:

I don’t have any choice but to tell both. There is no option to not set a charge limit either in the car or the octopus app. The car requires a charging target of between 20-100%.

This suggeats four options (there may be others):

- Set the car to 100%, then manage your SOC via Octopus.

- Manage your SOC via the car, set Octopus to 100% and have error messages 

- Try to set both, and still get occasional error messages

- Unlink the charger from Octopus and link the car instead.

We have an EV (a VW) and IOG. We've picked the first option from my list above. We only get errors like yours when we've asked for more charge than the car battery will hold, eg. plug in at 50% SOC and ask for a 60% charge.

(We thought about linking the car, but after the first three months VW wanted us to subscribe to a service and the cost outweighed any benefit.)