MG5 LR & OHME Home Pro charger

[MartinReid]

I'm looking to make contact with MG5 EV Long Range owners who use an OHME Home Pro as their home charger as they might be able to give me some advice.

I've searched the MG5 & MG5 Long Range EV Forum and think the following members might be able to help.

deviousrich
MonsterMonster
Kett
mikeb

Sincerely and in good faith

 

[Gomev]

I'm looking to make contact with MG5 EV Long Range owners who use an OHME Home Pro as their home charger as they might be able to give me some advice.

I've searched the MG5 & MG5 Long Range EV Forum and think the following members might be able to help.

deviousrich
MonsterMonster
Kett
mikeb

Sincerely and in good faith

Ask away.

 

[thingaby]

I'm looking to make contact with MG5 EV Long Range owners who use an OHME Home Pro as their home charger as they might be able to give me some advice.

I've searched the MG5 & MG5 Long Range EV Forum and think the following members might be able to help.

deviousrich
MonsterMonster
Kett
mikeb

Sincerely and in good faith

I'm not the man to help you but I'm looking forward to this thread. I am a ZS Lux/Trophy owner with an Ohme Home Pro. So far I can only use the Ohme as a dumb charger. The car takes care of the charging scheduling and the charger shows random results. Last night I put a small charge in the car and the charger showed I had used minus 5%.
Ohme customer support has been very responsive in my quest to get the charger to talk to the car but stymied me with a question about the car's telematics. A fellow forum member showed me what sort of thing/box I should look for and I think I have found two possible boxes BUT they are behind the fuse box and so obscured that reading the labels is impossible.
My car is going into the garage again next week in an ongoing attempt to sort out the software so I will ask them to clarify the telematics question in their dialogue with MG.

 

[Kett]

The MG5 has no API that will talk to the Ohme Home Pro. So the way forward is to plug in and then do some maths. If you are at 30% and want to charge to 80%, the use the slider in the Ohme app to a 50% charge. It will then stop charging at 80% without any further intervention.
If you have a cheap overnight tariff, then do the same thing, but then change the end time to be the end time for your tariff. It will pause the charge and automatically kick off charging at the right time.
It may sound clunky, but this has proven 100% reliable.
The Ohme app shows a graph to confirm what you have set. So attached picture shows me saying I want 50% for 0700. I left it plugged in and it started overnight as expected. I have a flat rate tariff, but articles suggest overnight charging is more likely to be windmill power overnight.

 

[MartinReid]

Thanks to everyone for your contributions

Kett has partly answered one of my questions..

For this thread car = MG5 EV Long Range (ordered but not yet delivered)
Changer = OHME Home Pro fitted in the garage (considered but not yet ordered)
I'll number my queries to help later contributors.

(1) Without using a mobile phone or app, If I connect the charger to the car can I see the state of charge of the battery on the charger touch screen?
(1a) Is the car listed on 'select car brand' for the charger?

(2) (SIM service) As the charger is a sealed unit, what are your thoughts on what will happen when the 3 year warranty and free SIM service expires.

(extract of email from Help@OHME) All of our chargers come with a 3 year warranty and 3 years free SIM services, after which costs may apply. We're working to keep this free but we don't have confirmation on this just yet I'm afraid.

I'll leave it there for now and look forward to seeing any comments.

Sincerely and in good faith

 

[MonsterMonster]

I'm looking to make contact with MG5 EV Long Range owners who use an OHME Home Pro as their home charger as they might be able to give me some advice.

I've searched the MG5 & MG5 Long Range EV Forum and think the following members might be able to help.

deviousrich
MonsterMonster
Kett
mikeb

Sincerely and in good faith

Okay, what do you want to know? (edit, I wrote this before your reply and posted after)

I've only charged a few times using the Ohme Pro. It's okay but I think a lot of the smart functionality is lost with not being able to talk to the MG5.

The feature to modify the target via the screen isn't intuitive. Bizarrely it waits trying to communicate with the car even when at initial setup it knows it is not possible. I know the app can be used but I'd rather just plug in and enter the details on the screen without getting my phone out in the rain.

An oddity is that when specifying add x miles or y% charge it's seems to be based upon relating to a theoretical maximum of 250 miles or 100% charge at 61kwh. In this cold weather the car might have a range of 200 miles at 100% charge, so it skews the target. It would be better to tell it what the current range and charge is so it can work out more accurately how to add whatever charge to get to say 80%.

I need to play with it a bit more as I might be missing something with the app.

 

[MonsterMonster]

Thanks to everyone for your contributions

Kett has partly answered one of my questions..

For this thread car = MG5 EV Long Range (ordered but not yet delivered)
Changer = OHME Home Pro fitted in the garage (considered but not yet ordered)
I'll number my queries to help later contributors.

(1) Without using a mobile phone or app, If I connect the charger to the car can I see the state of charge of the battery on the charger touch screen?
(1a) Is the car listed on 'select car brand' for the charger?

(2) (SIM service) As the charger is a sealed unit, what are your thoughts on what will happen when the 3 year warranty and free SIM service expires.

(extract of email from Help@OHME) All of our chargers come with a 3 year warranty and 3 years free SIM services, after which costs may apply. We're working to keep this free but we don't have confirmation on this just yet I'm afraid.

I'll leave it there for now and look forward to seeing any comments.

Sincerely and in good faith

Unfortunately, no you cannot see the state of charge on the screen. Because...

The Ohme Pro cannot communicate to the MG5 as MG has not provided means for external communications. It is said the Ohme reverts to a dumb charger but I'd rather describe it as semi-dumb or semi-smart as it can be programmed to do something according to a desired schedule.

I read somewhere that it costs about £10 to renew the sim but this might have been another make.

 

[smokie]

I did ask them a couple of years back what would happen when the "free sim" expired. They didn't know and mused that it would probably remain free.

 

[MonsterMonster]

Ohme support seems very good. There was a problem with the app and it was fixed within a day or two.

 

[thingaby]

Okay, what do you want to know? (edit, I wrote this before your reply and posted after)

I've only charged a few times using the Ohme Pro. It's okay but I think a lot of the smart functionality is lost with not being able to talk to the MG5.

The feature to modify the target via the screen isn't intuitive. Bizarrely it waits trying to communicate with the car even when at initial setup it knows it is not possible. I know the app can be used but I'd rather just plug in and enter the details on the screen without getting my phone out in the rain.

An oddity is that when specifying add x miles or y% charge it's seems to be based upon relating to a theoretical maximum of 250 miles or 100% charge at 61kwh. In this cold weather the car might have a range of 200 miles at 100% charge, so it skews the target. It would be better to tell it what the current range and charge is so it can work out more accurately how to add whatever charge to get to say 80%.

I need to play with it a bit more as I might be missing something with the app.

The MG5 has no API that will talk to the Ohme Home Pro. So the way forward is to plug in and then do some maths. If you are at 30% and want to charge to 80%, the use the slider in the Ohme app to a 50% charge. It will then stop charging at 80% without any further intervention.
If you have a cheap overnight tariff, then do the same thing, but then change the end time to be the end time for your tariff. It will pause the charge and automatically kick off charging at the right time.
It may sound clunky, but this has proven 100% reliable.
The Ohme app shows a graph to confirm what you have set. So attached picture shows me saying I want 50% for 0700. I left it plugged in and it started overnight as expected. I have a flat rate tariff, but articles suggest overnight charging is more likely to be windmill power overnight.

Thank you for this answer. I will stop trying to get the bells and whistles to work (that I don't really need) and be happy that it does the basics that I do need perfectly well.

 

[MartinReid]

OK thanks everyone.. I'll summarise before I continue.

(1) Question ANSWERED... No you can't see the state of charge on the charger screen as the car doesn't have API (Application Programming Interface).

'Kett's' work-a-round is mirrored in OHME's web page (here). Which poses the another question (1c) can you do this via the touch screen rather than the app? 'MonsterMonster' partly answered this but I'm not sure if he did eventually have to revert to the app to set his 'schedule'. Also I think the £10.00 renewable SIM must be another make as the Home Pro is s sealed unit. 'smokie' is correct the (excellent) customer support did suggest they were working to keep the SIM service free in the future. But what's to prevent them just turning off the SIM support and leaving me with a dumb charger?

I'm thanking everyone for there thoughts on this matter as I cast around for alternative charger.

Sincerely and in good faith

PS I attach for members reference the OHME Home Pro 'product manual' that they sent to me.. It is more of a 'installation manual' rather than a users manual I asked for.

 

[deviousrich]

Sorry I'm late to the party, but yes I have an ohme Pro.
Works fine when you get to understand how it works (target % rather than schedule) and integrates well with electricity suppliers tariff

I've just set mine to "charge to 100%" every night but only use cheep tariff rates.
Therefore whenever I plug it in it will charge for the 4 hours I have cheep tariff for

I would say ohme customer support seems excellent, I have been in touch with them a few times and they are responsive, always follow up to check everything has been resolved.

I got mine on the octopus £499 installed deal which I consider to me an absolute bargain