This is very specific but there may be something in here that helps someone else with the same problem, or parts of it.

Setup:

1. Octopus Energy

2. Hypervolt Home 3 Pro charger, installed by Octopus

3. Fox ESS Solar and house batteries (20kw), with Emergency Power Supply (EPS) to run the house in case of a power cut

4. Skoda Enyaq 85x Sportline

Solution for a successful overnight charge:

1. Octopus app: recognises the car, but its smart charging is set to off. Stops it confusing the

2. Hypervolt: Set to "plug and charge" on the Super Eco mode which uses surplus solar power, but is manually switched to scheduled charging in Boost Mode in the small hours if the car needs a charge.

3. Fox ESS: Mode Scheduler set to Force Charge the house batteries from the grid at 500 watts per hour at the same schedule as the Hypervolt. This stops the Hypervolt draining the house batteries to charge the

4. Skoda: charging location set to home (otherwise it won't charge at all), charging method set to "charge immediately" with no schedules set in it. This lets the Hypervolt do the work.

It took a few days to work this out, but I got there in the end.

For anyone who's interested, there's a more detailed write-up on my personal blog.

@Aspman weren't you having issues?

18 hours ago, Lee01 said:

@Aspman weren't you having issues?

Yes a few times, not the same setup and I don't know if the VW and Skoda software are the same.

The last time after an update was something incredibly stupid.
The "Automatically unlock charger" option was switched from "No" back to "Yes" by the update.
What that meant was that when the smart charging finished a session (which might only be a few minutes) the car unlocked the charger and it wouldn't start charging again until the charger was removed and reseated. So we were only getting minutes of charge a night. Been fine again with that off.

Previously was the VW software going to sleep and not waking up for smart charging. We found that unpairing the car from the Octopus app and charger app helped.
The VW software is unreliable so better to leave it set to take charge charge anytime and leave the sequencing to the charger.

On 24/07/2026 at 16:45, Harry_Payne said:

This is very specific but there may be something in here that helps someone else with the same problem, or parts of it.

I have the same combination of batteries (Alpha ESS), Hypervolt charger and an Enyak 85. I am on Intelligent Octopus Go and it took a bit of setting up to get it to cope with the varying charging schedule on IOG. I prioritise charging the house battery using solar or off-peak energy so that I can export any excess solar production, since we pay 8p/kWh for off-peak energy and we get 12p/kWh to export.

I use Home Assistant and there is an integration for the Alpha ESS inverter. Unfortunately the API the Home Assistant integration uses does not include the Charge Now / Discharge Now switch that the Alpha ESS app does, but I can set schedules, so I just set a schedule that ensures that the battery is set to charge whenever Octopus schedules the car to charge. This ensures that the battery does not discharge into the car but also uses the cheap rate to top up the battery charge. If the battery is already full then any solar production goes into the car. I leave the Hypervolt charger on Plug and Charge / Boost Mode and leave IOG to sort everything out with the car.

This morning Octopus had scheduled the car to charge between 9am and 12pm, so I got an additional 3 hours of off-peak energy to charge the car, top up the house battery and get a load of laundry done.