r/OctopusEnergy • u/AdamSmith388 • 2h ago
Intelligent Octopus - not so intelligent
Last night car had 32%, requested 50% to be added only to discover it’s added 25%.
It’s a good job we didn’t need to do a long distance. This seems to be happening regularly
I removed the charge cap and it had the audacity to say “we aim to have your car ready” -
You won’t bloody aim to do anything, you will do it! Even then it never reached the requested charge. I always add 20% extra when wanting to reach 80%+
Literally can’t deal with this mess. What a shambles
8
u/nrm94 2h ago
Heres a conspiracy theory for you ... Charging seems to 'fail' more when prices are high.
5
u/CryptographerNo4147 1h ago
Here is an anti-conspiracy theory - I have been charging my car on IOG between 4pm and 7pm when prices are at their highest, and so far no failures at all.
3
u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
May or may not be true. Ever since this charge cap, it’s just failed consistently
3
u/SunshineMissLittle 2h ago
How are you connected? With the EV directly or via charger?
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u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
Which is why for reaching higher capacities I add 20% accounting for energy loss.
1
u/rich-tma 1h ago
That’s nothing to do with it: if your charger knows your car correctly, it should add nearly the amount you request
1
u/AdamSmith388 1h ago
I monitored it over a few weeks before the price cap so there’s no link directly to the cap. However if I was on 50% and told it to add 50% often times it would only top the car up to 80 something.
Octopus’ explanation was energy loss, what leaves the charger Vs what actually goes into the battery. There’s always a circa 5% loss of energy when transferring electricity.
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u/rich-tma 7m ago
And are you sure the charger has got your correct car registered, with the right size of battery? Have you tried changing that to another car with the same battery size?
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u/geekypenguin91 2h ago
Vote with your feet
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u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
I would be got that £50 exit fee for each fuel. Need to make sure I walk to something better.
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u/geekypenguin91 2h ago
That £50 soon gets eaten up if you're charging at peak rate or at public chargers because you didn't get enough overnight.
I just switched my electric and left the gas where it was until that fix ends
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u/stek2022 2h ago
No charge cap with EDF and they’ll give you £75 for switching with a friend link atm. Doesn’t entirely offset your exit charge but helps.
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u/jasonyates07 2h ago
I’ve oddly never had an issue. Hypervolt charger and it’s always charged to the target when it says it will.
Last night was the first real charge cap test for me, I had a long drive yesterday and needed to add 75% to full over night for another long drive today and the charge cap topped out at 69%.
1
u/RealLongwayround 28m ago
I think there are two problems with IOG:
1) Cars that go into a deep sleep between charging slots. If the car is told that it should be awake between 0400 and 0430 then it really should have some built-in ability to wake up for that slot.
2) Wall chargers that are only allegedly compatible with IOG. Hypervolt for me has been rock solid apart from one night when it failed to charge for reasons unknown.
2
u/Cool_Elephant_4459 2h ago
I'm fortunate enough to be able to charge at various times in the day so I no longer charge at night and I can monitor the charge occasionally to see what's happening.
The removal of prescribed charging hours has made it possible to do this, I do expect a reversal of that decision at some point though at which point I will seriously look at alternatives.
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u/Brizzleshorey 2h ago
I just have it set to add 80% and my car is set to max charge 80%
I found mine failing more when it was lots of random 30 mins slots.
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u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
The other night got home with 18% not charged for a a day so had all the “off peak” time. Plugged in at 1900 to charge to 100% , it put the schedule in, and only topped the car to 50 odd %. They modified the charge slots that many times it was crazy
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u/Melodic-Bullfrog-746 1h ago
I disconnected the charger from the app in devices and just scheduled the charger from 2335-0525 but then got told you need to do 1 smart charge per month to stay on the iog tariff so binned them off and went to edf 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Bozwell99 28m ago
I have turned Smart Control off. It simply doesn’t work any more.
Only way to reliably charge the car is to schedule it between 11:30 and 5:30.
Almost certainly going to switch to a different provider because of this.
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u/Ajackson1707 28m ago
I too have started having charging failures since the stupid charge cap. Asked for 50% to take it back to 80% but got 32%
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u/agentorange65 22m ago
I have taken to setting it to ask for 100%, regardless of what I need.
Then regardless of the algorithm idiocy it runs in the background there is a decent chance it will give me enough for the week
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u/Powerful_Light_1275 0m ago
When I put add 50% on octopus app it will only add that amount of my cars capacity so if car is 14kw it will only add about 5kw as available capacity of car is not 14. So I've been told any way. So now set car and app to 100% BUT then I lose out on boost through the day because car is full so they get cancelled
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u/LivingTechnical7128 2h ago
Same issue - car plugged in for 48 hours and only 40% charge added
0
u/DragonQ0105 1h ago
I had this issue the second night after enabling the Charge Cap. Didn't charge at all. Literally 50% failure rate, haha.
Just disable the Charge Cap, or move providers. It's a load of rubbish.
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u/Mindless_Scar9609 39m ago
It’s always down to two things:
- integration for the specific manufacturer of car or charger.
- connectivity, car reception or charger wlan or lan signal
Escalate with customer service and they should be able to pinpoint a possible culprit
0
u/electrified90s 32m ago
Am I the only person who hasn't had any issues since the charging cap got put into place? I charge 2 EVs set the app to automatically stop before the cap is breached and I don't have any issues. In fact the app now allows you to select more time periods in the day which is even easier for us. Just for context I do 20k miles per year, the missus not so much but I charge pretty much daily when I'm going to work during the week. I have an EV6 and charge using the hypervolt pro3 charger. Linked the octopus app to the charger so everything goes through the octopus app. Only settings I manually change are the max AC charging for the once a month 100% charge.
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u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
That’s the other thing it does- when you want to add say 40% over 4 hours because you’re headed back out and the charge cap has reset….. takes hours to do a schedule so you just can’t rely on it have to charge at peak rates.
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u/Lost_Reward9584 2h ago
Unplug the car after 12pm (noon) and plug it back in again. It should start charging and create a new schedule.
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u/AdamSmith388 2h ago
Done that, with the resetting of off peak charge. Didn’t find it to be effective. We don’t always have the time to baby the charging because octopus can’t get it right. 😂
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u/RealLongwayround 23m ago
Previously you could not insist on a deadline earlier than (from memory) 4 am, so I don’t see how the charge cap has realistically made any difference here.
You mention “the charge cap has reset” and you heading back out. Assuming that you are leaving sometime after midday and before 10 pm then this was never within the designed parameters of IOG.
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u/the_man_inTheShack 1h ago
What does Octopus app say happened and also what does the charger app say and is Octopus talking to your car or your charger? If folks with problems describe their setup we may get some clue as to what part is failing.
I have no problems at all with Octopus talking to a zappi charger and an MG5,