Intelligent Octopus Go limiting cheap charging.

QrizB

"Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no home chargers that can directly communicate with the car to obtain the SoC. Ohme manage to do it via the car manufacturers API as does Octopus with their car integrations, but the car manufacturers are not really cooperating to make this easy or reliable."

Not helped by some car companies (I'm looking at you VW) charging their owners a non-trivial sum to enable API access.

I think Mrs QrizB was quoted £90 a year, which is rather more than the saving IOG offers over regular Go.

MattMattMattUK

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857670#Comment_81857670

I agree that some of this does appear to be car manufacturers being deliberately difficult. Several of them even blocked energy companies controlling charging entirely (I think Ford et al). For all the owners proclivities one of the things about Tesla vehicles is they seem to just work. They are happy to let energy suppliers control charging, integration takes less than thirty seconds, they allow the vehicle owner to fully control charging to even use third party APIs to control if they want. For Superchargers just plug in and walk away, no messing around with apps, RFID cards, credit cards etc. they just charge and are usually less than half the price per kWh of other public chargers.

It is just frustrating that this issue largely originated from people trying to game the system, rather than Octopus kicking those people off of IOG they are making it worse for everyone else.

MWT

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857688#Comment_81857688

Right now, nothing is changing at the end of the month, the original plan has been delayed and we do not yet have a date for when it will change.

MWT

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857659#Comment_81857659

I don't think a different charger would have helped, Zappi works just fine with IOG if you use the Zappi integration.

MattMattMattUK

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857698#Comment_81857698

Yes, I am aware, but changes are still incoming, I suspect the delay is because they are having issues with billing via EV/charger reported usage, but they have not withdrawn the changes yet either, so still pending.

MWT

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857702#Comment_81857702

Some part of the delay does seem to be around the 'discovery' of the way Ohme/Hypervolt etc. were being instructed to spread the charge over 15/30 mins.

Despite my confidence that the Octopus staff must have known about the way Kraken was working, it has been confirmed that this was playing into the perceived level of 'gaming' so with that in the process of being fixed the degree of problem that was driving the enforcement changes has been reduced.

kingstreet

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857701#Comment_81857701

The Ohme/Octopus IOG group I use reports Ohme has a fix for the VAG problem of vehicles going to sleep. It maintains a constant trickle to keep the vehicle awake throughout the charge cycle.

MWT

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81857857#Comment_81857857

If this is the "CP wakeup fix" it is sending additional wakeup signals to the car between charging periods and while it might work to deal with the VAG sleep issues it can be bad for your 12V health as it can interfere with the charging of the 12V and stopping deep sleep increases the drain in the 12V as well.