Please excuse this long and tedious post, but I can't find an answer to these questions anywhere!
We have just bought our first EV (Zoe50), and we need a suitable tariff. We currently use Octopus Flux (great in summer, less so in winter), but will need to change to Octopus Go or Intelligent Octopus. Go is straightforward but only provides four hours of cheap electricity. Intelligent provides six hours (23:30 to 05:30) but Octopus can charge outside of this whenever the car is plugged in and it has some extra cheap electricity available. This may be great for most people, but if you have battery storage at home, the storage will be drained when the car is charged outside of the six hours! Therefore:
If Octopus schedules charging outside of the six hours, does it tell you on the App (or does it appear on the Ohme App)?
Can you cancel the schedule once it is plugged in without upsetting Octopus? (There is nothing in the Ts&Cs to suggest that you should not.)
If you ask for less charge than can be delivered in six hours (in my case, about 42kWh), are there any circumstances in which it will charge after 05:30?
If it does charge after 05:30, can you stop it without upsetting Octopus? (Again, nothing in the Ts&Cs.)
If anyone can shed some light on this, I would be most grateful. I have spoken to Octopus a couple of times but have been unlucky enough to speak to people who know less than me!
I'm new to this myself but I have a ZE50, Ohme Home Pro and Intelligent Octopus.
I have a schedule set up to charge the car to 80% by 7am.
When I plug the car in, say at 4pm, the Ohme app generates a charging schedule and displays it in the app. E.G. last night it showed that it would begin charging around 2am.
According to the Renault app (which is not working properly at the moment) charging stopped a couple of times during the night. Not sure if that's load-balancing or external factors. If it had scheduled a charge outside of the cheap 6 hours, it would have shown in the app but would have still been charged at the cheap rate.
Once the car is plugged in you can deactivate the schedule if you like, and do what you want. The car tariff is independent of the house tariff, which always runs between 2330 and 0530.
The car will charge after 0530, and charge you at the higher rate, if you ask it via the Ohme app to supply power while the car pre-conditions if you plan to use it immediately at, say, 7am. You can specify whether charging should restart for up to 1hr prior to departure so the car can warm up without draining the battery. Because you are requesting this outside of the auto scheduling, you're charged at full rate for that time. \
Hope that makes sense.
I'm actually having real problems with the Ohme charger because my mains supply voltage is way out of spec (up to 260V). The Ohme trips out at 254V so it's pot luck whether a charge will start automatically or not for me. I can manually override it by boiling the kettle, which lowers the voltage, then manually starting a charge. This then keeps the voltage down and the car will charge to 100%, but at the expensive rate.