Content by Rolfe in December, 2025

As a Millport person at one remove, I can tell you that if you can see Goatfell clearly it's going to rain, and if you can't, it's raining.

Thank you all for your concern. I'm surrounded by extremely nosy neighbours, and they're on alert to be exceptionally nosy any time I'm away. Oh, and the burglar alarm has just been serviced.

If MG can't even manage OTA updates, I struggle to imagine that they could disable the cars.

They exhort people to keep Smart charging on all the time, but so far as I know there's nothing in the T&Cs to say that you must do that. Just that you must do a Smart charge once a month. (That's not going to happen in January, as I'm away for four weeks on holiday. The car will be sitting in...

This. I do understand that you have to set the % charge every time, but every time I switch on Smart charging the damn thing has already created a "schedule" based on the previous % that's already in the app and remembered, before I get the chance to change it. This is silly too. In a way I...

I don't think I'm breaking their T&Cs. I do a Smart charge every so often. I ask for it to be done by 5.30 am, that's all. I'd be happy to let them Smart charge the car at other times if they would notify me in advance so I could set the inverter to protect the house battery at these times, but...

Handy. So I'm OK for the night of 21st/22nd December. Yes, I'd probably just do that if there wasn't any leeway in iOG. Just start the charge on the Zappi timer at 11.30 and let it run, without any Smart charge. But if I can get an extra half hour or so from a Smart charge in December, I'll do...

They need to discontinue this "schedule created" nonsense".

Am I right in thinkint this isn't going to go live until the end of January? Because I might need a wee bit more than six hours on Sunday night - a lot of driving on Sunday, then setting off for a long trip on Monday. I want to get to Tebay for my break, and in winter I need to start at 100% to...

I was watching what was going on overnight when I was sick and couldn't sleep. The slots were in constant flux. I did a running commentary on twitter and the Octopus bot stepped in asking me to DM. I did, but got no reply. This was the eventual charging pattern.

Given the quality of the responses I've had from Octopus, I'm not in the least bit surprised.

Calibration charges are the only thing that will be impacted by this I think. I reckon don't use a Smart charge if you can only get 6 hours anyway. Start at 10.30 and let the car have access to the home battery for the first hour, reducing the amount of peak-rate juice consumed. Then over to...

Only once did I forget to plug in, and plugged in in the morning. I didn't really need that much but I just asked the app to go on charging till 10 am, the time I had to leave. At that time you could do that, and I took the car almost to 100% for 7p. Now though, the latest ready-by time the app...

Cross that bridge if it's encountered. If they make iOG too unattractive, we just switch. But as of now, you absolutely can switch it off, and if you don't want the car to take your solar and you don't want to switch off Smart Charging, just unplug the car.

It's not though. You only have to do a Smart charge once a month to fulfil the T&Cs, and they're not absolutely strict about that. Come on, they can't force you to plug your car in when you don't want to! How would they even know you were at home? And they don't give you a switch to turn off...

Don't leave Smart charging on when you don't want the car to charge.

Yes, you can. I did it last night.

I see that now, thanks.

Oh, I see, you weren't talking about MGs.

Is it? How does that work?

Honestly, I'm just going to set the occasional Smart charging session for say 50% starting at 11.30 and ending at 5.30 to keep on board with the requirement to use it sometimes, and charge on the Zappi schedule the rest of the time. I think they're going to find that a lot of people are going...

Bloody not banned.

Might do this. Phone in order. Get collection time. Then must go!

Wish takeaway delivered.

Talking about @securespark. Obviously. Ignore Terry.

Cat missed breakfast. Cat not pleased. Lunch: two sachets. Sweetness and light.

Thanks a lot. Slept till noon. Can't be bad. (Happy about baby.)

Five ante meridien Woke up coughing Hope not bronchitis Back to sleep

Back to bed.

Still bloody inconvenient.

Not covid, anyway.

Horrible nasty bug.

Still feeling rotten.

It's a great system.

My original dealer was 22 miles away, the closest. I'm moving to one 35 miles away, because the original one is a scam merchant.

It's possible to force that. I do.

Yes, I saw that. It's not the same, though. The other forum has also moved to this platform, and mostly it's a massive improvement, but this one deficiency is a shame. I had to abandon my Hallowe'en avatar completely. (The cat gradually turns black and its eyes glow red.)

Leave a car parked in direct sunlight and the same happens here as anywhere else.

It may just be one of these things. See what happens.

I would go for the former, but that's because I'm an SE fan. I don't think the mileage is all that important .

How big is your battery?

Someone else did that for me in another forum, quite a few years ago. If this platform supported gifs in avatars, you'd see the snow falling.

We actually did this in my thread about my solar installation. The answer was that because I pay quite a high price for kerosene then it's slightly cheaper to heat the water at the 7p overnight tariff. It was fairly marginal though, and a bit of a drop in the oil price would push it the other...

This.

All of the above.

Horrible bug. Ill.

You'll be able to see in the app. Sometimes it shows up as peak rate at first but then changes to off-peak rate within a day or two.

Only the very early ones had the tinted glass. My April '23 one doesn't.

And mine.

I hate dentists.

Without some very significant changes we're looking at the collapse of civilisation, the extinction of most of the planet's flora and fauna, and human beings reduced to subsistence living in small pockets of remaining habitat. Getting better at coping is not going to fix that.

Maybe they could have held the meeting somewhere that was generally accessible without bulldozing a new road through the rainforest?

The cover on my driver's seat pad wore out after about two years (20,000 miles) but that wasn't uexpected for something fairly cheap from Aliexpress. I contacted the seller and they sent me a replacement piece for £22. The cloth seat underneath was pristine when I removed the old cover. I don't...

That would be "midnight" you're referring to? /pedant

I think most of the people who have these tariffs also have home batteries. I don't care a button what price ticket they put on the daytime use, because I hardly ever use any.

We're in a different situation in that we don't have any coal-fired power stations any more, and we are definitely not a super-solar location. It's generally fairly cloudy here. (Wind, though, we have rather a lot of. Also tides and waves.) I guess we'll just have to see what they decide to do...

That all sounds about right, and the figure you mention feels about right to me too. Even at this time of year it's not that common to get a day where the generation is less than 1 kWh, and it would take two or three of them in a row to cause concern as regards the battery not being able to...

Yes. That suddenly appeared towards the end of my run-in with Octopus. I think I caused it!

I was wondering about something like this, but it sounds more complicated than John really lets on!

I suppose he's embarrassed. Thanks for the update, I was wondering how this was playing out.

That I had not heard about. We'll see what happens. If they make it uneconomical to export then we'll just have to pump the Aussies for advice.

It's not many days I get less solar than that. Today was dull but I still got 2.1 kWh. (On Ne'erday this year I only got 340 watt-hours, but that was exceptionally bad.) If that's about all it takes, what with some days being better, it should be fine. If there was a prospect of a prolonged...

I love my car and have no intention of changing it. I knew if was cheap and cheerful when I got it, and it has surpassed all my expectations. The software is pretty much OK now, just a couple of minor quibbles remaining. My dealer was a nightmare but they did actually do things in the end...

I thought I was getting one that would have to be manually switched over and I was OK with that, but when he was showing me the finished product it turned out that the switchover will happen automatically. I hope I don't get a nasty shock when I get the bill! I'm slightly hazy about the...

Precisely. It had occurred to me to do something like this, at various points over the past 15 years or so. I have no idea how the power from that would be fed into the house and what it could support anyway. My former singing teacher had a generator but I never asked her how it interacted with...

I was looking at portable batteries, but I don't think they're really what I want, or what I would need. This whole exercise is intended to avoid the need for paraffin heaters and calor gas cartridges! Also, I don't need a lower power kettle, I just need to switch most other things off for the...

It absolutely does sound like the CCU thing. Are you sure it's an SR?

For what it's worth, I'm not aware of any SR ever showing up with the CCU problem. It seems to be restricted to cars with the 64 kWh battery that don't have a rear wiper. But this is absolutely ridiculous for such a new car purchased from the motor trade.

If the X-Power had been available when I got my car I'd have been very tempted. But at the time I didn't know when it would become available, or how much it would cost. But realistically I prefer the SE trim to the Trophy trim, and Caliban suits me fine. I do occasionally tell Christine that I'm...

More toys to play with - or hopefully not to play with, as this is an emergency back-up system. This village was once notorious for lengthy power cuts, I'm told, but over 20 years ago the grid supply was upgraded and run underground. In all my time here I haven't had a single really worrying...

If it's any consolation, a neighbour of mine has a green X-Power and she's over the moon with it.

It seems a shame to reject the car and go back to square one just because some people can't shuffle paperwork. If you're worried that the breakdown during deliver is a harbinger of things to come, you do have some time to test it out before you make any irrevocable decisions.

Just for information, if you see an action you think a moderator should take, the best thing to do is to report the post and make your suggestion in the report. We'll get to it and get back to you. Moving posts, merging threads, that sort of thing is fine to report. It doesn't have to be a...

Octopus are their own worst enemy sometimes. I genuinely didn't know about the slots being moveable when I signed up - I couldn't find a dicky-bird about it in the T&Cs when I looked. The first time I did a Smart charge I looked at the slots, said that's fine, and configured my inverter...

Hope full recovery. Soon.

Jings, my phone takes better pictures than my camera.

Cha bu chòir.