Hi all! Just got an Elroq and an Ohme Pro.

Just wondering if anyone has similar on Octopus Go (non intelligent)?

Im giving the charger my first go tonight, and seeing as how the battery is at 92% from collection, I figured id try the pre conditioning.

So in ohme I have it set to charge the car to 80% by 5:30, so as it is above that presumably it wont charge. I have enabled the pre condition option in the ohme app so presumably if say the car was charging to 80% it would add a bit more charge to compensate for the ore conditioning usage.

I wonder though, if the car drops below the target % will it automatically add more to bring it back to 80% automatically? For example say the battery sits at 82% I say charge to 80% by 5:30 in the app, it wont be looking to put any charge in. But with pre conditioning enabled, and a pre condition time set in the Škoda app of 5:30, will the ohme charger be smart enough to recognise if the battery drops below 80% and start charging?

Also, will the pre conditioning pull energy from the charger or the battery if there is no battery charge scheduled?

Many thanks.

Hopefully I’ll be able to answer the last question tomorrow, I’ll get to see if the pre conditioning uses battery or ac power.

Hey Nismex

As far as I'm aware you only need to use pre conditioning when DC charging, as home charging is much slower.

I'd assume that pre conditioning would pull energy from the battery as you'd normally enable it on your way to a DC charger.

I have the Ohme ePod & don't believe you can set a target %, you set the % you'd like to top up by.

Also if battery care is enabled on your Elroq, it wont charge beyond 80% to optimise battery life.

Cheers, Paul

Sorry I meant the cabin pre conditioning. In the ohme app you can link the app to the car to get the actual soc of the car, so it changes the top up by % into charge to % as far as I know, e.g

Apologies got the wrong end of the stick 😂

Haven't paired the car to the charger as it seems it can complicate IOG charging or played with cabin preconditioning.

I'm sure someone with far more knowledge than I will be along soon with the answer to your actual question 🤣

Enjoy your Elroq👍

Cheers, Paul

So I’m a little further on in understanding the charging (cabin pre conditioning) feature.

On the Ohme app, cabin pre conditioning is simply the charger turning on the charging regardless of the battery soc. for the selected amount of time, 5 minutes through 1 hour iirc.

I think as well it’ll only do this within the cheap price cap if you have it selected.

The only thing I need to check now is whether cabin pre conditioning from the Skoda app, in the absence of Ohme having a charging or pre conditioning schedule, uses the AC power or whether it’ll use the battery.

Skodas site says it’ll use AC power but I’ll have to test this.

If you use cabinet pre conditioning (which is basically turning heating on if cold, or running the a/c if hot) then it will use mains power if it is plugged in. If not plugged in then uses some of the battery.

The basic idea is can get the car comfortable temperature before disconnecting so don't hammer the range by having lots of battery energy used to heat or cool the car initially, instead (after disconnecting) just using enough to maintain temperature when driving.

However if you are on a smart tariff (cheap overnight EV tariff) then the home app tries to only use the cheap tariff, you need to switch from smart tariff to max charge now, if you want it to charge regardless of time of day.

The max battery percentage can be set in e-manager on the car, it will default to 80%, but can be set higher to 100% (and from memory 90%). When Ohme reaches this (in smart charge mode) it will stop charging.

Depending on your tariff (mine is 7 hours midnight to 7am) it will sometimes regulate the charge rate, and seems to have some behind the scenes interface with the electricity grid to avoid everyone turning on and off at same time, mine usually turns on between 00:04 and 00:06 rather than starting seconds after midnight.

I once came home very late from a trip with battery down to low (something like 8%), and smart charge couldn't actually top it up fully by 7am, so smart charge wanted to restart charging after midnight (avoid the 17 hours daytime rate), so will do clever things. Of course can override it by using max charge if don't want to wait.

Because of this talking to the grid, it sometimes seems that it is charging rather randomly, sometimes running at 7.4kw, sometimes much lower rate. So I suspect it is dependent on usage elsewhere. I now have an immersion heater timer and that heats hot water tank during cheap EV hours, so even I in a small way are affecting load on local electricity supply.

I don't have Octopus, but I remember when I changed by electricity tariff (with Eon) to EV tariff, part of the change was moving to half hourly smart meter electricity instead of the the every 24 hours (I think regulator is pushing for this anyway), but of course as I was going to get different rates at different times of day this seemed logical. Don't see this as a problem if you are smart with your tariff choice.

Hope this helps, there are basically three controls affecting the charging: the max battery percentage (which stops it when reached), the tariff chosen and what you have app set to achieve during cheap smart hours, and in the background the grid loading (which happens but you have no sight of it).

Thank you @SurreyJohn appreciate the info.

I think I’ve got the hang of it now.

Last night the battery was at 65% I asked Ohme to charge to 80% by 05:30 with 30 minutes cabin pre conditioning.

It set the schedule to be at 80% by 5:00 and then the 30 minutes of pre conditioning before 05:30.

I had the target temperature plan set for 22c at 05:30 in the Skoda connect app. When 5:00 arrived the Ohme had finished charging to 80% and was sat saying scheduled.

Then at around 05:15 the car started the cabin pre conditioning (it seems to know how long it needs to heat to the target temperature versus the exterior temperature).

I could then see in the Ohme app the car was drawing 1.2-1.4 kWh for the pre conditioning. So it seems to be working fine straight off mains power presumably.

Cheers for your advice and help!