Charger recommendations for Octopus energy

[RichR]

Cool - so it controls the Zappi now, excellent. Might give IOG another go then. Gave up last time as my car was still on ME2.6 (which doesn't work with IOG) and Octopus were sorting our export tariff out at the same time which seemed to confuse matters.

[Aragorn]

Controlling the car is IMO a nicer solution as Octopus then knows the cars actual SoC and can properly schedule the charge.

The various charger implementations seem a bit of a bodge as neither the charger nor octopus actually knows how much charge the car actually needs, and that creates some uncertainty.

[snalbansed]

Yes, that's the drawback - you tell it what car you have (and therefore battery size) and then ask for a % increase. So it's not nearly as accurate or "plug and forget" as controlling the car.

But, on the plus side, it doesn't care what car is plugged in and therefore works for my mum's Zoe (though it assumes a battery size from the first one), and it works with the charger set to eco+

[snalbansed]

Oh, and it doesn't need Skoda's backend to be working, though I think that is more stable than it used to be.

[Ken3966]

I have had my car nearly 9 months and have topped up the charge virtually every night when at home, even if only a few % needed.
All on Octopus Intelligent.
I can only recall at most 2 or 3 times when the Skoda server failed causing an issue.
Once it was the opposite and car charged to 100% although originally set for 80%; does it sometimes do this to balance the battery cells by design?

Only once has it caused an issue as 100% was needed for a trip away that day and didn’t top up overnight, but after realising I did get to 97% before setting off, albeit at peak rate.

[RichR]

For me, not relying on controlling the car is an advantage for two reasons - firstly I have very poor mobile signal at my house, so often the car can't connect to Skoda, and secondly I have the Zappi in ECO+ mode which means that most of the time it does not supply any power to the car, unless the solar panels on my house have filled my house batteries and are supplying more than the house is demanding and so would otherwise export to the grid. That usually means that even in the sunniest of summer days the car is only getting 3kW maximum from the charger (as I have a 3.6kW inverter). If I want to charge the car at 7.4kW, then I schedule the Zappi to switch to Fast mode for a period, which will pull from the grid and supply the car immediately. This is something I only tend to do in winter or if I want to top the car up to 100% because I know I'm going to be doing a long journey the next day.

It all depend on how you like to charge really - and things like Octopus Intelligent give more options that people can take.

[XAPBob]

Controlling the car is IMO a nicer solution as Octopus then knows the cars actual SoC and can properly schedule the charge.

The various charger implementations seem a bit of a bodge as neither the charger nor octopus actually knows how much charge the car actually needs, and that creates some uncertainty.

It does mean that you don't get the car starting to charge for a while.
And you're not limited to one vehicle, or one type of vehicle.

I have it put a few percent each day - and that works very nicely, with the opportunity for cheap power each day.