Octopus Go Intelligent new 6 hours charging limit

[Chris H]

On the app they give some scenarios.

I’m not sure I understand. Can you share some examples of how it works?
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Imagine you need a 5-hour charge (that’s what most people need).

Scenario 1: we schedule all of the 5 hours outside of the off-peak period (eg. between 2:00-4:00pm, and between 8:00pm-11:00pm)

You get off-peak rates for your home and for your car between 2:00-4:00pm and between 8:00pm-11:00pm
You also get off-peak rates for your home between 11:30pm and 5:30am (you always do)

Scenario 2: we schedule some of the 5 hours outside of the off-peak period (eg. between 8:00pm-11:00pm) and some during the off-peak period (between 12:00am-2:00am)

You get off-peak rates for your home and for your car between 8:00pm-11:00pm and between 12:00am-2:00am.
You also get off-peak rates for your home between 11:30pm and 5:30am (you always do)

Scenario 3: we schedule all of the 5 hours during the off-peak period (eg. between 12:00am-5:00am)

You get off-peak rates for your home and for your car between 12:00am-5:00am
You also get off-peak rate for your home between 11:30pm-12am and 5am-5:30am, as always
What if the charging session lasts more than 6 hours, for example 7 hours?

That’s unusual, but if that’s the case, the first 6 hours of smart charging will be at off-peak, and the last one billed at peak rate regardless of what time of the day it is scheduled.

The whole point is that Octopus do the scheduling, not you.

 

[LenEV2016]

The whole point is that Octopus do the scheduling, not you.

Yeah I know that, they always have. The only thing you control is % and the time it needs to be ready by

 

[Rolfe]

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

 

[Rolfe]

Yeah towards the end of January

Handy. So I'm OK for the night of 21st/22nd December.

How many more kWh's would you need over the 42kWh you can put in over 6h? Presumably you'd only be looking at an extra 20p or so per kWh compared to the IOG rate?

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 that.

Do you have the option to preheat the battery on the MG4? I have on my i3 and makes a huge difference to pre heat the battery and the car before departure, usually whilst on charge.

Safe journey and a very Merry Christmas to you all

Oh yes, I will certainly do that too. Usually if I set it to pre-heat the battery before 5.30 (and it does it, it doesn't always work) then, if I ask it again to pre-heat an hour or so before I'm due to leave, it says it doesn't need any more pre-heating.

OR. Only plug the car in during the day for emergency top ups and don't leave plugged in - which defeats what Octopus are trying to achieve,
OR. Only plug in at night to take at advantage of the 6 hours without go over.

I do the latter normally. I have the Zappi schedule set to run 11.30 till 5.30 and just plug in whenever I need to charge. Just now and again I'll ask for a Smart charge at 11.30 to be done by 5.30, to keep their T&Cs happy.

 

[Tig170]

... to be fair to octopus I just plug in as an when, and it works seamlessly, never had a peak rate (boost?) charge, and still only paying around £700 for just under 10Mwh / year

 

[johnb80]

I do the latter normally. I have the Zappi schedule set to run 11.30 till 5.30 and just plug in whenever I need to charge. Just now and again I'll ask for a Smart charge at 11.30 to be done by 5.30, to keep their T&Cs happy.

Careful what you say here, you know the Octopus Grass's are around!!!!

... to be fair to octopus I just plug in as an when, and it works seamlessly, never had a peak rate (boost?) charge, and still only paying around £700 for just under 10Mwh / year

There are some people on here with house batteries that have an issue with this, when Octopus sets a schedule during the peak times it can drain the house batteries then leaving the house with peak rate for the rest of the day.

 

[LenEV2016]

Careful what you say here, you know the Octopus Grass's are around!!!!

Who's that very curious

 

[GaryMG4]

... to be fair to octopus I just plug in as an when, and it works seamlessly, never had a peak rate (boost?) charge, and still only paying around £700 for just under 10Mwh / year

10! I just checked ours, a little over 4 so far this year. TBH smart charge has worked fine until the last couple of months. I would turn off smart charge if I just wanted to use the solar excess during the day but the rest of the time it worked flawlessly. Since they started with the odd short charges I've been getting unable to control your device messages, one overnight failure because the car seemed to reject the on-off-on charge at 2:00am.

 

[tsedge]

Who's that very curious

A while back we had a passing visitor who is very close to Octopus who told a bunch of us that we were "abusers" (or words to that effect) of IOG. He was very passionate about how a small group were jeopardising Octopus' great work by their bad behaviour.

It seems as if he reported John to Octopus as soon after an exchange they contacted him to discuss his account. John had done nothing wrong and Octopus confirmed that.

Nevertheless, it was disturbing to some of us that this occurred. I had planned to leave Octopus anyway (due to bad customer service when we got our smart meter / transferred to them) but in the end I didn't.

I don't care if they read what I post about them because:

a) I'd move tomorrow to another supplier anyway, it is just the hassle that stops me.

b) I don't believe I am doing anything wrong according to their Terms and Conditions, which I've read carefully.

c) I'm hoping they listen to my comments and suggestions and improve the product.

 

[Everest]

10! I just checked ours, a little over 4 so far this year.

Doesn't sound excessive to me - depends on how much you drive and/or use electricity around the house. Just checked... we're similar to @Tig170 having used 9.8MWh so far... but fortunately we generated 10.5MWh from solar in the year to date

 

[Gomev]

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 get there.

If you were going to be away that day and following night could you, if necessary, dump some of your battery into the car prior to leaving as you could recoup that quite easily through non-usage at home ?

 

[Chris H]

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

It's the scheduling by them that is the whole point of IOG and the reason they call it 'intelligent'. They can schedule it when energy is cheap for them, thus allowing your car to get charged outside the normal 6hr cheap time and still only get charged at the cheap rate. If you don't want that, and only want to schedule the charging yourself then don't get IOG, just get the Octopus Go tariff instead. Easy

 

[Everest]

If you don't want that, and only want to schedule the charging yourself then don't get IOG, just get the Octopus Go tariff instead. Easy

but just be aware that the GO tariff is 8.5p/kWh and only 5h per night.

 

[tsedge]

It's the scheduling by them that is the whole point of IOG and the reason they call it 'intelligent'. They can schedule it when energy is cheap for them, thus allowing your car to get charged outside the normal 6hr cheap time and still only get charged at the cheap rate. If you don't want that, and only want to schedule the charging yourself then don't get IOG, just get the Octopus Go tariff instead. Easy

Octopus Go is only 5 hours at a lower-rate and costs more, hence why people use IOG for 6 hours fixed schedules.

IOG is two products in one:

• A fixed 6hr low-rate night tariff.
• A flexible ("intelligent") car-charging piece based on slots of their choice to give you additional low-cost charging outside the fixed hours.

Then the car-charging bit is also further complicated by needing to either:

• Talk to your car to determine how much charge you need.
• Ask you to set (EVERY TIME!) the delta +% charge you need if your car is not supported (which a lot of people don't realise they need to change since you can set and forget).

This is why people get so confused: it isn't straightforward.

If it was JUST about being intelligent, it would simply offer you up to 6 hours low-rate night tariff in flexible short slots ONLY: no fixed times, no need to know your charge percentage. Simples.

Don't blame the people using it, blame Octopus for:
a) Making it over-complicated (hence all these discussions).
b) Making it confusing to use (hence all these discussions).
c) Not taking into account people's other setups, like home batteries / solar (hence all these discussions).

 

[mg4mc]

a) it's not really is it. Lots of people me included just set the percentage, plug-in, job done.
b) Only confusing when people try and make it work how they want it work rather than how Octopus want it to work.
c) isn't the issue there the systems (like Rolfes) which are not setup to allow for charging - battery current sensor not located in the right place?

 

[tsedge]

a) it's not really is it. Lots of people me included just set the percentage, plug-in, job done.

An awful lot of people just plug their car in and leave the delta percentage alone. It isn't at all obvious you have to set it every time.

If you should set it every time, why doesn't it prompt you before scheduling your charge? It is a bad UI Octopus have done nothing to change for years.

b) Only confusing when people try and make it work how they want it work rather than how Octopus want it to work.

Octopus can easily stop people using like this if they want to, they've done nothing so clearly that way of usage is fine and it isn't contrary to the Ts&Cs.

If I'm paying for something, of course I want it to work the way I want it to work. I don't work for Octopus.

c) isn't the issue there the systems (like Rolfes) which are not setup to allow for charging - battery current sensor not located in the right place?

Again, it is a very common situation, so should be accounted for in the product.

 

[tsedge]

I'm trying to be constructive here, so here are my recommendations for Octopus, if they find people are not using this product the way they would like it to be used:

1) Change the delta (+%) UI to always require it to be set (pick from nothing set) each time before scheduling a charge.

2) Monitor whether people actually set it correctly and if they are consistently inaccurate (minus a tolerance), automatically contact them and warn them to be more accurate. Move persistent offenders to the Octopus Go tariff.

3) Require that your home charger be permanently connected to Octopus while you are using the service, so you cannot schedule charges independently of Octopus' slots. Monitor this and add warnings / automatic tariff shifting. (At the moment all that seems to be monitored is a 90-day inactivity period after which you get an email warning you'll be transferred).

4) Make it explicitly clear in the Ts&Cs that you must not charge independently of Octopus' app while using this tariff.

5) Provide a simple way for people with battery/other setups to say "I do not want to receive flexible slots outside these set hours (X to Y)", so they can use the system more conveniently.

 

[EVsince2016]

I'm trying to be constructive here, so here are my recommendations for Octopus, if they find people are not using this product the way they would like it to be used:

1) Change the delta (+%) UI to always require it to be set (pick from nothing set) each time before scheduling a charge.

2) Monitor whether people actually set it correctly and if they are consistently inaccurate (minus a tolerance), automatically contact them and warn them to be more accurate. Move persistent offenders to the Octopus Go tariff.

3) Require that your home charger be permanently connected to Octopus while you are using the service, so you cannot schedule charges independently of Octopus' slots. Monitor this and add warnings / automatic tariff shifting. (At the moment all that seems to be monitored is a 90-day inactivity period after which you get an email warning you'll be transferred).

4) Make it explicitly clear in the Ts&Cs that you must not charge independently of Octopus' app while using this tariff.

5) Provide a simple way for people with battery/other setups to say "I do not want to receive flexible slots outside these set hours (X to Y)", so they can use the system more conveniently.

That's a tad ruthless!

So, me with solar who has to switch IO off to use solar because they don't have an integration solution yet. What do I do?

When IO loses comms, what do I do?

Internet down, then what?

I have a granny charger, could add a second charger.

If you do not use smart charge your charger will self-destruct in 10 seconds 👹

 

[tsedge]

So, me with solar who has to switch IO off to use solar because they don't have an integration solution yet. What do I do?

You could set hours during which you would be guaranteed not to get slots from Octopus, so you wouldn't need to manually switch it off. (This was suggestion #5).

Edit: In case I didn't make this clear enough, it would work as follows:

You'd be able to set multiple hour ranges up in the IOG app that would restrict the hours you'd be offered charging slots.

If you have solar, and your main production is (say) 8am-6pm, you could set IOG to never give you a charging slot during that time. Or whatever you need not to interfere with your solar configuration.

If you have a home battery, which you charge at night on the low rate between 11.30pm-1.30am (for example), you could set IOG to only give you charging slots between 1.30am and (say) 7.30am. Then you set your battery not to discharge during those hours.

If you have both, you could combine more than one hour range for IOG slots and use both.

This isn't perfect by any means, but it would stop the obvious problems and not require anything more than simple scheduling features.

When IO loses comms, what do I do?

The monitoring obviously wouldn't be minute-to-minute... but say, if it hasn't been connected for a few days, that would be a reasonable length of time for a warning.

Internet down, then what?

For most outages it wouldn't matter (see above), if you had a persistent problem with your internet, you could simply tell them that and get more time.

 

[LenEV2016]

I'm trying to be constructive here, so here are my recommendations for Octopus, if they find people are not using this product the way they would like it to be used:

1) Change the delta (+%) UI to always require it to be set (pick from nothing set) each time before scheduling a charge.

2) Monitor whether people actually set it correctly and if they are consistently inaccurate (minus a tolerance), automatically contact them and warn them to be more accurate. Move persistent offenders to the Octopus Go tariff.

3) Require that your home charger be permanently connected to Octopus while you are using the service, so you cannot schedule charges independently of Octopus' slots. Monitor this and add warnings / automatic tariff shifting. (At the moment all that seems to be monitored is a 90-day inactivity period after which you get an email warning you'll be transferred).

4) Make it explicitly clear in the Ts&Cs that you must not charge independently of Octopus' app while using this tariff.

5) Provide a simple way for people with battery/other setups to say "I do not want to receive flexible slots outside these set hours (X to Y)", so they can use the system more conveniently.

Seems fair to me, most of should already be covered by their fair use policy