Luckypants

There has been a lot of issues between Intelligent Octopus and OHME chargers reported recently. I've seen this in the VW and Skoda FB groups and EV forums. Not sure what's going on. Often these sort of issues are caused by people over complicating the IOG charging process by setting schedules in the charger and car or having both charger and car defined as devices to Octopus. With IOG you should only have one device defined and no schedules set up - then let IOG schedule your charging. My Wallbox Pulsar charger is my defined IOG device and it runs almost perfectly. I've had one issue of the charge not starting.

Recently a fella was convicted of a murder on Anglesey in part due to the telematics of his car placing it at the scene. It was found burnt out on the night in question, but the crucial data had been uploaded already. It was a diesel LR product. This has nothing to do with EVs....

Did you manage to get on-board with Octopus or do you have 'the wrong sort of meter'?

All the talk of building extension cables and cross sections for your granny charger.... just buy a granny charger with a long enough cable in the first place. My granny charger has a 10m lead as I knew if I needed to use a 3-pin plug socket it was likely I couldn't get parked close up. The 10m cable is downstream of the control box, so that can usually be kept somewhere dry if being used. No 3-pin plug connections in the middle of a drive to get wet. I've never struggled to reach a socket the dozen times or so I've used it.

As others have said, a 2.3kW granny charger will provide plenty of heat over time. Your point is valid however, as my car will use around 5kW at max heat early on so not quite half would be met by the granny charger but still better than the ICE car that relies 100% on it's fuel tank to warm up your car. A proper wall charger will meet 100% of the power need for pre-heating. But people do do it, especially if the windows are frozen over.

I've stopped trying to keep up with new hubs opening, due to there being so many. I don't worry about needing a charge at any stage these days even though I rarely charge away from home. However a little landmark for EV charging - there are now over 1000 hubs in the UK and Ireland.

The truth about EVs 🙂 The only thing he mentions I slightly disagree with is 'losing range due to pre-heating' The same is true of ICE vehicles, if you run your engine to to preheat / defrost your ICE car you are losing range and quite a bit of it too. Also, if the car is plugged in to the charger you lose no range as it draws from the grid to heat the car.

Probably caused by a difference in voltage between your properties. Around here we have 248-250V as a rule, very close to the maximum allowed by the regulators so my charger often gives 7.8kW and never under 7.5kW (should be 7.3kW at 230V)

That battery report seems off. It states 1212 days standing time (which I assume is time parked up) but standing time fully charged of 2177 which is the entire life of the car more or less. Either someone messed up the report (unlikely as its software driven) or someone has been messing about with the BMS stats IMO. For comparison my 2021 ID.4 has 54376 miles (87000km) on it and I measure my battery SoH (by charging from 2% to 100%) to be 93%. 77kWh battery.

You say you have the basic headlamps in your previous post. These "LED Headlights (Standard): The Elroq SE 50 comes standard with LED headlights, which provide efficient and bright illumination." The final paragraph in the image posted by @Steve153 states no adjustment is needed to drive abroad. Its all in your manual if you read it.

Read the last paragraph in the image posted, the bit that "applies to headlights without adaptive functions" which you have.

If you don't have a charger installed yet, consider getting one that integrates with Intelligent Octopus Go as this takes your car out of the equation. It also means any visitors can charge at the off-peak rate.

For those who have been told their car will now have 135kW charging instead of 175(?)kW, here is Bjorn Nyland's 1000km challenge in a Cupra Tavascan with the same MEB 135kW battery. It shows a flat charging curve which leads to very rapid top-ups up to 80%. I don't think its something to be worried about.

A slight benefit from PodPoint. The latest version of the PodPoint app allows you to link your Tesco Clubcard to get points when charging at Tesco. £1=1 point like other Clubcard promotions. Sainsbury's have been offering Nectar points on their charges for a while. A small benefit, but significant that incentives are starting o be offered.

Agree, without home charging running costs are much higher. For my car to cost similar to diesel per mile (at current prices of 139.9ppl) I'd have to be paying about 53p/kWh on public chargers. The local council slow chargers are 49p, so works financially just about but massive hassle to go into town for a 5 hour charge. Depreciation has been a bit scary on mine too, probably lost £22k over 4 years. One thing seems to be that many people view 54k miles as high mileage for an EV, but wouldn't blink at a diesel with that mileage at 4 years old. This seems to depress it's value. I hope as cars age people will come to recognise they are equally capable of high mileages. However, with home charging and with solar, my cost per mile last month was 1.85p! Much cheapness.

Ionity are starting to get more competitive but not near Tesla yet. Electroverse tends to skew my view a little as I get the IOG discount on Ionity. Just did a little checking, Tesla have 194 SC sites in UK, so 116 open to all means more than half are available for general use. They must be putting pressure on the other networks with their pricing. It'll be interesting to see what happens on Anglesey with regards pricing. The new SC site is 53p/kWh IIRC and the majority of other rapids on the island are 70+p/kWh. As its a small place, I wonder if the existing rapids will suffer reduced volumes due to the Tesla chargers being easy to get to? Will this force the council (majority of rapids provided by them) to reduce prices?

Tesla have opened more Supercharger sites in the past week. All open for non-Tesla. Anglesey (Gaerwen) 12, Swindon 16 and Faversham 16. Eurocentral in Glasgow has reopened with 18 stalls. There are now 116 SC sites open to all, making Tesla one of the largest and cheapest CPOs.

Tesla have officially reopened the Eurocentral supercharger, with 18 stalls.

This is one I'm not sure is warranted. The idea is to reduce congestion, which EVs do not do. The ULEZ charges are about reducing pollution, so reductions there are fair enough. It won't affect me, just expressing my opinion that it's not 'fair' EVs get a reduction when they are part of the congestion issue.

Much cheapness

I have no idea, but to those of us living here it seems grossly unfair given the amount of cheap renewable energy generated right on our doorstep. Thank you. It's not here to provide Birmingham and Liverpool with free water either, but that's the reality.

Thats a good consumption figure. I'd be ecstatic with 4.4m/kWh - my average is more like 4 and overall 3.8 April through September. Winter average is 3.4 m/kWh.

Actually that seems fair, given that Intelligent Octopus Go is a BETA product. No manufacturer will approve a BETA product to access their systems. As has been mentioned before, the problem with IOG not charging is often down to conflicting charging schedules being set manually by the owner in the car and/or charger. Clear any schedules from both and allow IOG to do it's thing. If you have a home location set up in the car, make sure to clear that too.

He doesn't seem anxious to me. 🙂 He knows what the car is capable of due to the miles he puts in. I've arrived home with less than 5% on several occasions but probably would not go as low as he does, just because I know I need 2-3% to make it up the hills to my house. Having a charger waiting at home is a very comforting thing.