Octopus EV charging rip-off coming end January

chrisw

bigpops 

In 6 hours I can get up to 150 miles of charge.
If I were to need  a full 300 miles of charge in one night this will cost about three time as much as currently.
According to Octopus' own figures, one in five customers will be hit by these extra charges.
Shame on you, Octopus.

How often do you need to do this? I regularly travel long distances but I'll just split the charge over 2 nights, either before or after.

tim_p

bigpops said:

According to Octopus' own figures, one in five customers will be hit by these extra charges.
Shame on you, Octopus.

Surely the ‘shame’ is on the customers for gaming the system that has caused Octopus to introduce this change in the first place. 

armith

I have no problem with Octopus limiting the charge to 6 hours, so long as I have the option to opt-out of going over the 6 hours, this is what the tariff was designed for. I've never tried to "game" the system, I don't have a home battery or anything so it would be pennies, which is not the right thing to do. I have a hybrid, I tend to load 10KW of electricity into it three/four/five times a week using an ordinary 3 pin plug. The charge is negotiated between Octopus and the Audi control in the car - and, by and large, works really well. I plug in when I get home in the late afternoon, it's set to charge to 100% by 7:30am and when I wake up it's almost always fully charged. This means I do between 25 and 35 miles of my 40 mile commute on electricity - including all my in-town driving.

What I do wonder though is how scenarios like what happened last night work? I plugged in as usual but the Octopus app decided that 17:56 - 18:00 would be a good time to do some charging. The app showed about a dozen slots spread through the evening and night, some with just the odd four or five minutes in the half hour. Great (and not typical) because I get the whole half hour at cheap rate for the whole house. How will this work going forward though? Will Octopus tot up all the odd minutes individually? Would the four minutes at five-to-five count as half an hour of charging (at half an hour's cheap rate) - or just the four minutes it was actually charging? If it didn't reach the target charge after 6 hours worth of slots would it stop charging (if I opted out of bump charge rates)?

MeteredOut

bigpops said:

Good news, readers.
Octopus have just offered to alter their charging app so that we can choose to only accept 6 hours of EV charging per night. This will be alongside the current option to choose the amount of charge and time to finish.
For those awake enough to choose the new option you will avoid the chance of Octopus charging full rate for EV charging, at their discretion.
In 6 hours I can get up to 150 miles of charge.
If I were to need  a full 300 miles of charge in one night this will cost about three time as much as currently.
According to Octopus' own figures, one in five customers will be hit by these extra charges.
Shame on you, Octopus.

Is this a new announcement? They said a number of weeks back they they were going add this feature to the app, ahead of the change at the end of January.

MeteredOut

chrisw said:

bigpops 

In 6 hours I can get up to 150 miles of charge.
If I were to need  a full 300 miles of charge in one night this will cost about three time as much as currently.
According to Octopus' own figures, one in five customers will be hit by these extra charges.
Shame on you, Octopus.

How often do you need to do this? I regularly travel long distances but I'll just split the charge over 2 nights, either before or after.

According to Octopus, the measurement period will be midday-to-midday, not midnight-to-midnight, so you'll have to change how you split your charging if you want more than 6 hours smart charging at off-peak rates.

MeteredOut

armith said:

I have no problem with Octopus limiting the charge to 6 hours, so long as I have the option to opt-out of going over the 6 hours, this is what the tariff was designed for. I've never tried to "game" the system, I don't have a home battery or anything so it would be pennies, which is not the right thing to do. I have a hybrid, I tend to load 10KW of electricity into it three/four/five times a week using an ordinary 3 pin plug. The charge is negotiated between Octopus and the Audi control in the car - and, by and large, works really well. I plug in when I get home in the late afternoon, it's set to charge to 100% by 7:30am and when I wake up it's almost always fully charged. This means I do between 25 and 35 miles of my 40 mile commute on electricity - including all my in-town driving.

What I do wonder though is how scenarios like what happened last night work? I plugged in as usual but the Octopus app decided that 17:56 - 18:00 would be a good time to do some charging. The app showed about a dozen slots spread through the evening and night, some with just the odd four or five minutes in the half hour. Great (and not typical) because I get the whole half hour at cheap rate for the whole house. How will this work going forward though? Will Octopus tot up all the odd minutes individually? Would the four minutes at five-to-five count as half an hour of charging (at half an hour's cheap rate) - or just the four minutes it was actually charging? If it didn't reach the target charge after 6 hours worth of slots would it stop charging (if I opted out of bump charge rates)?

According to what Octopus have said, they are going to add up the number of minutes the car is charging (as reported by the charger/car), not the cumulative total of all the 30 minute slots in which the car is charging, with regards to calculating the 6 hour max smart-charging in the 24 hour period.

I've not seen them confirm whether the whole-of-house will get that peak rate during a 30 minute  smart-charging slot where, eg, only 10 minutes car charging takes place, but I'd assume so, otherwise billing will get very messy.

born_again

bigpops said:

Good news, readers.
Octopus have just offered to alter their charging app so that we can choose to only accept 6 hours of EV charging per night. This will be alongside the current option to choose the amount of charge and time to finish.
For those awake enough to choose the new option you will avoid the chance of Octopus charging full rate for EV charging, at their discretion.
In 6 hours I can get up to 150 miles of charge.
If I were to need  a full 300 miles of charge in one night this will cost about three time as much as currently.
According to Octopus' own figures, one in five customers will be hit by these extra charges.
Shame on you, Octopus.

While that may be the case for users of the Octopus app. I can not use Octopus app, as OHME is my link to IOG & you have to use OHME app.

Not that it bothers me. 

armith

MeteredOut said:

I've not seen them confirm whether the whole-of-house will get that peak rate during a 30 minute  smart-charging slot where, eg, only 10 minutes car charging takes place, but I'd assume so, otherwise billing will get very messy.

Thank-you for this, very interesting. I'm now used to getting the 40 page monthly electricity bill  - not sure if I could take it if they moved from 30 minute detailing to "every minute"!!!

jimmy6363

So if I plugged in during the day and Octopus gave me say a couple of hours of charging, could I then plug in at 23.30 and boost the charge for 6 hours at the cheap rate for the full 6 hours, or would it only be the cheap rate for 4 of those hours, i.e. Octopus use the EV charger data to ensure you only get 6 hours charging regardless?

Also, is anyone having issues with the usage data both in a browser and in the app? In a browser, it no longer lets me back track through past months and shows a single green bar for usage each day, rather than standing charge/peak/off peak as was previously shown. In the app you can still backtrack and December data is still split (except 1 day which is really weird). January's readings are missing entirely on both platforms, December has various missing days, this despite having an Octopus Mini. It used to be great!

QrizB

jimmy6363 said:

So if I plugged in during the day and Octopus gave me say a couple of hours of charging, could I then plug in at 23.30 and boost the charge for 6 hours at the cheap rate for the full 6 hours, or would it only be the cheap rate for 4 of those hours, i.e. Octopus use the EV charger data to ensure you only get 6 hours charging regardless?

Only 4 hours.

jimmy6363 said:

... and shows a single green bar for usage each day, rather than standing charge/peak/off peak as was previously shown.

I've never seen SC / peak / off-peak in that fashion in the year-and-a-bit I've been on IOG.