Which at home charger?

[Bam Bam]

what is the advantage of having the charged compatible with home solar? I do not have solar panels but not sure why is important to have the charger integrated if I install them in the future. Apologies as I guess this can be trivial for the people who has solar panels...
My understanding is that the power from the solar panels will be stored in a home battery and from there you use it at home or you sell it to Octopus/NG/SP... I guess that the compatibility would be to connect the battery directly to the car but not sure.
Thanks again!

Sorry for causing unnecessary confusion! I just meant that the Zappi is the best charger to have with solar (it can work out how much is spare and put it in the car), so if you are planning to get solar it might be worth thinking ahead and prioritising the Zappi.

Usually people get a home battery with the solar but if you can fit a lot of panels on your roof you might fill up your battery quite quickly on a sunny summer day and you could then potentially put the rest in a car.

We have Octopus Intelligent Flux, where Octopus control our home battery, which provides generous payment for export, but doesn't have a cheap period overnight for car charging.

Sorry for muddying the waters further, but seeing a few comments from others about charger regrets it is worth thinking ahead when selecting one.

 

[johnb80]

I don’t call 9 p a kWh paying over the odds do you

Comparing 7.5p for 6 hours and more to 9p for 4 hours, yes, youre paying over the odds in this situation.

I imagine almost any charger would be fine for the standard Go tariff but you mentioned Intelligent, which only works for a few cars (not MG, but VW) and a few chargers (not Rolec at present).

The charger has to have a basic scheduling feature - a timer for GO to operate in the 00:30 to 04:30 window. Intelligent works by Octopus controlling the schedule (additional times to the 23:30 - 05:30 window) either by talking to your EV or the wallbox.

Kraken controls our house battery updating the settings every 30 minutes or so - it is an amazing thing!

Octopus have done an amazing development but need the co operation of other manufacturers to make work with the third party products, car manufacturers like VW, BMW, JLR and many more have integration, EVSE like MyEnergi, Ohme and Wallbox have also done the work.

@sapixx - do you still have the ID4? I don't know how it works if you've got one compatible car and one non-compatible car. You might then be able to get the intelligent tariff but you should check with Octopus whether there might be problems charging the MG.

If you have a compatible car and a non compatible one you run the non compliant one of a schedule 23:30 to 05:30 and the compatible one with no schedule. Or, you use a compatible wallbox, job done!

Not aware of the features, just that it seemed to have the same sort of features, looked nicer and was cheaper when I was looked (before the Givenergy one came out). The prices might have got closer together since.

Aye, Zappi is not the best looking unit for sure, it is robust and reliable though.

British Gas is doing midnight to 5 am at 7.90p and 29.65p peak... best to shop around, I guess

The major disadvantage is in your first two words.