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The budget is about £6k. If I were spending £13-15k I'd have another Ioniq without hesitation.
Even the most recent 23kWh batteries will be around 10% down on capacity
Compared to a Leaf that isn't bad. But there is some confusion over the battery life reporting, because there are conflicting sources. On Leafs there's a battery health display on the dash that has 12 bars, so losing one bar doesn't seem too bad (which is what many have). If you plug in an OBD2 and read the health it reports anything up to 80% as 12 bars, but there's some suggestion that isn't the whole story as it doesn't seem to affect range by 80%. And other manufacturers aren't necessarily reporting in the same way.
The car would only be used for local commuting so range isn't important at all. So I'd rather have a 22kWh car with a healthy battery than a 41kWh with a less healthy battery, because of future longevity.
Is there a battery health display on the Zoe? Do they have active battery cooling? It sounds like they do.
The more recent 41kWh is far more likely to have a healthy battery because it is newer, has had lower charging stress as it only had a 22kW AC charger for a 41kWh battery and Renault have got better at making batteries with better battery management. They've always used high quality cells from LG IIRC for the period you are looking at.
The Continental 210 23kWh Zoe had a 43kW charger, that really wasn't a good idea, avoid.
The more recent 41kWh is far more likely to have a healthy battery
Not in budget though.
Not overly bothered about not being able to fast charge as it's extremely unlikely to ever need it.
Got the iX up to 2.9m/kwh this weekend. Yay.
I think I'd risk 2 trips to FoD in it on one charge providing I didn't do much other driving between.
@villageidiotdan
I'm on Tracker V1. Tracker is an average of Agile as far as I can tell, I guess Tracker might be better for families where you have to consume at peak times (and don't have an ev), Agile might be better if you can shift your usage to take advantage of cheaper hours. Agile might also be good, over say Octopus Go, if you have a car charger which can cherry pick the very cheapest 30 min segments thru a night, like the Ohme charger. so in the example it might charge 03.00-04.00 and 4.30-05.00
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Agile might also be good, over say Octopus Go, if you have a car charger which can cherry pick the very cheapest 30 min segments thru a night, like the Ohme charger
So you're saying do the same thing that Go does, but manually, and it will save cash.
If only I knew someone who knows about IT automation and can write software.
Sorry Don't know what you mean, Agile doesn't do the same thing as Go and the ohme charger cherry picking the cheapest times is not manual.
It seems to me that Go is a similar mechanic to Tracker in terms of guaranteed pricing, Agile is more of a gamble and to a greater degree relies on your input, if that's what you mean by 'manual'
Got the iX up to 2.9m/kwh this weekend. Yay.
My Corsa e seems to be averaging 4.4m/kWh, over 300+miles.
Around town nearer 5m/kWh.
Octopus are fitting an ohme charger tomorrow and the other half has chosen to go on the Intelligent octopus tariff. The 7.5p KW between 11:30 and 05:30 should be good enough.
Daytime cheap electricity isn't a high priority at the moment so it should be fine.
Oh I'm thinking of Go then. The charger picks when the electricity is cheapest for Octopus, but you pay a guaranteed price for any electricity that goes to the car.
Agile is more of a gamble and to a greater degree relies on your input, if that’s what you mean by ‘manual’
With these low prices on Agile Octopus I really should install a smart plug on the immersion heater then use IFTTT to integrate with Hive to heat the hot water. Gas boiler is normally a much cheaper way to heat water than electric but not recently. Apologies for drifting off topic.
Edit - no that won't work!
Saw my first EQE on the road yesterday. Nice (also quiet).
With these low prices on Agile Octopus I really should install a smart plug on the immersion heater then use IFTTT to integrate with Hive to heat the hot water.
Ooh good idea. I have a timer switch ready to install for overnight water, which would save me a bit over gas, but on Agile I could heat water much more cheaply.
Edit – no that won’t work!
Why not?
Oh I’m thinking of Go then. The charger picks when the electricity is cheapest for Octopus, but you pay a guaranteed price for any electricity that goes to the car.
That’s Intelligent Octopus. For me that would be 29.9ppkWh during the day, and 7.5ppkWh between 11.30pm and 5.30am and/or whenever IO decides to charge the car. Controlled by Octopus using APIs.
Octopus Go is 29.9ppkWh during the day, and 9.5ppkWh between 12.30am and 4.30am. Fixed period and fixed prices. Basically a modern version of Economy 7.
Agile price varies every half hour and you can pick the times to do stuff when it best suits you and the price.
Now, for me, Agile is working best as I’m a pretty heavy user during the day but can timeshift stuff like washing and don’t use much in the expensive 4pm to 7pm period of Agile. Agile rarely exceeds 20ppkWh during the day at the moment, so instantly being more cost effective than with IO or Go at this time. I’m flexible about when I charge my car as a I don’t do regular daily mileage, so I can charge whenever it’s really cheap or negative. I’ve not paid anywhere near the off peak prices of IO or Go per kWh all year. If I was a heavier user at peak time, and didn’t have an EV, then Tracker would likely be the cheapest.
Ultimately you need to work out what works best for you. There is no answer of ‘which is best’ out of IO, Go, Agile or Tracker. The one thing that is clear, is that if you can, avoiding the standard ‘Flexible’ tariff is something everyone should be doing!
Why not?
On second thoughts it would work. I looked a bit further into IFTTT for the charger with the idea I could use it to pick the cheapest slots during the night for charging the hybrid and avoid doing it manually, but although Agile Octopus and Hive play together via IFTTT there isn't support for the Hive car charger and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fit a smart plug onto the charger.
Ah, specifically via IFTTT - I don't know much about it. I'd write my own script probably.
Didn't we have a thread about how useless a smart dishwasher would be? Would be ideal for this!
I use Intelligent octopus with my Ohme charger. IO basically allows the Ohme App to decide the pricing windows.
If I plug in my car at 9PM and tell the Ohme App I need 80% charge added by 5:30AM, Ohme works out that isn’t possible in the window and starts charging straight away, which triggers an extended cheap window as well.
Got our ID4 about a month ago. We’ve been using the trickle charger to pretty good effect as we’ve not had much in the way of long journeys planned.
We were planning on getting a Ohme installed (and then look at the various Octopus tariffs).
The local Council have decided that we can’t have our drive any more and are going to put a parking bay in front of our house (they’re doing the same to 75 other houses on the estate) - so scuppers that plan.
Okay - plan B then while we work out what to do - run the charger from our 3-pin to the car in the parking bay. Except, ‘no’ says they council as that breaks the highway act of 1980.
There are some lampposts with integrated chargers in around the area, though naturally not in the area they’re taking the driveways away.
So - how easy is it to run an EV with crap local infrastructure?
I used an Octopus Agile IFTTT recipe with a Philips Hue compatible smart plug to turn on and off a dehumidifier based on Octopus Agile prices. It was a few years ago tho so can't recall exactly how I did it
If they are removing driveways I'd be tempted to complain and ask them how you're going to charge your EV now? It might work, you might get your own lamppost.
I run a 15m cable from my Ohme to my car if that would work?
@shinton. have you considered a Shelly wifi switch for your car charger? (
I'm happy on tracker at the mo but plan to add one to my old podpoint car charger to make it smart in case I quickly need to move to a peak:offpeak tariff.
Ta - they're definitely going about this very backwards, considering they've been banging on about their green credentials.
Loads of complaints have been going in - what they're doing is an Experimental Traffic Management Order. Basically, do the actions, then consult over the following 6 months. Sounds more like asking for forgiveness rather than permission. There doesn't seem to have been any consideration for EVs in the area. A couple of miles or so down the road in Richmond... different matter of course.
We can probably get by with the 3-pin charger and lead out to the car in front - but if they get shirty about a cable across the pavement, then we're a bit screwed. I'd thought about getting one of those cable ramp things to help prevent trips etc, but still sounds like they'll object.
The (few) Local charging lampposts they have put up are 78p/kWh - so, you know. Ouch.
Okay – plan B then while we work out what to do – run the charger from our 3-pin to the car in the parking bay. Except, ‘no’ says they council as that breaks the highway act of 1980.
If you have a guaranteed place which you will park in, you could have a trench dug across it and then have it grated with the cable under the grating. If you proposed this to them, they'd have to come up with a good reason as to why not. They can't simply say "no".
The local Council have decided that we can’t have our drive any more and are going to put a parking bay in front of our house (they’re doing the same to 75 other houses on the estate) – so scuppers that plan.
I’m sure I’m missing something but I don’t understand how they can unilaterally take your drive away from you?
So a privately owned cable in a section of Public Realm..suspect that’s not going to happen without a wad of insurance indemnities and the like.
Didn’t we have a thread about how useless a smart dishwasher would be? Would be ideal for this!
It seems that all the "smart home" devices are not playing catch up on this. It's seems an obvious market move for someone like Google to get into generation, charging and use management devices...
Started the swop from Scottish Power to Intelligent Octopus on Sunday, all moved over successfully this am. It then took about 10 mins to setup the car and charger to be controlled by IO. Seems pretty intuitive, and it's currently telling me that it'll start charging around 4am tomorrow to have it at 100% for 0700 (based on the car being at 74% at the moment.
have unplugged it now as going out shortly, so will plug it in this evening and let it do its magic with six hours of cheap, green energy from 11.30 pm to 5.30 am at 7.5p per kWh. 🙂
Still waiting for our 'type 2' arial to be fitted to our smart meter. We don't have a strong enough 2G/3G signal outside for the standard SM to operate. We're on an old Economy 7 tariff (moved to Octopus) which is working well enough for overnight charging, but we want to move to intelligent if we can.
We have an ICS charger which may not be compatible, but we won't know until we can get the SM talking to the grid.
One thing I do like about the ICS charger tho is you can point it's OCPP output to a HACS inspired integration in Home Assistant. Once we get live stats from the SM, I can add an 'octopus' card that will show real time pricing/charge costs with a bit of script-y jiggery-pokery I'm looking forward to writing.
Good stuff. I had no real issues with mine, except getting the car and charger on the same page. I had to disable scheduled charging on the car altogether, and then it got a bit confused when the charger stopped at 80% or whatever I'd asked for. And the car would stop charging at 100% slightly before it reported that to the charger so the charger then complained that the car had stopped unexpectedly. I had to mute some notifications from those apps.
They recommend you leave the car plugged in all the time, in case there is a windstorm on a sunny day and they have a load of excess power to get rid of.
Currently we went the other way. Schedule on the car, that starts the charger at midnight or whenever. Only issues with this is sometimes the charger needs to be manually 'unlocked' in the morning as it didn't the 'I'm done' memo from the car and it makes the stats a bit odd in terms of charging time - basically charger considers charging to start when cable is plugged in not when current is drawn.
Maybe this has been covered before - if so apologies for the repeat!
I am thinking of buying our first electric car (candidates - MG4, VW ID3 ... others?). We moved into a house with a Chargepoint charger that was installed in 2014. I have now discovered that it is locked and I don't have the key (yes, I should have checked). First question - the point was installed in 2014, is it worth tryinhg to make it work or has the world moved on since then?
In case I am not able to make it work (and what would I have to do to bypass the key?) and I need to replace it, what should I be looking for, and who installs these things? Specialist company? Local electrician?
Basic advice much appreciated !!
Our Easee charger was installed by the car lease co, but I had been chatting to our local electrician who supplies and fits them too. i think as long as they are legit and registered etc. Modern chargers are wifi and Bluetooth and the charger App talks to the car and the energy company, not sure if 10 yr old tech would do that.
A question for everyone: We have a Mini Countryman PHEV (~10kw battery). We are on Intelligent Octopus and charge via a 3 pin plug from the outside socket. The Octopus app is set to charge it to 100% and have it ready by 7am. Its always plugged in by 7/8pm and the app tells us that it has mapped the charge for that night.
Some nights it gets to 100% charge and some nights it doesn't get beyond 75 or 80% and we can't work out why it doesn't fully charge. Other than the usual household stuff, there is nothing else drawing power in the wee hours.
I've tried setting the charge limit to 95% to see if that gets it to its full 95% but it still doesn't max out all the time.
Any ideas?
@DrJ - I have an old chargemaster charger of that sort of vintage from when I had an early hybrid, and it works fine, albeit in a dumb way only - It is 3.6kw rather than 7.2 so the charge speed is quite slow for a modern large battery car so you have to factor this in.
My issue is I've just switched to a EV tariff for overnight and the scheduler sw in the car doesn't work it seems (ioniq 5) so I'm going to try that Shelley wifi relay that someone posted about earlier. Ideally I'd get a smart charger fitted but at ~£1k that's a lot of (non-discounted) electrons.
the scheduler sw in the car doesn’t work it seems (ioniq 5)
It worked on my Ioniq, so it should work for you - but the app was a bit confusing. Worth persevering, maybe speak to a dealer. If it's actually broken then you should because it'd be a warranty issue. I can perhaps help, I think the apps are all the same.
@DrP does your Leaf have a battery health display like the older Leaves do?
Ioniq5 isn't compatible with Intelligent Octopus at the moment though, you need a compatible charger.
yeah - it's in one of the menus in the HUD.
Additionally, I bought leafspy pro and a BT OBDII plug, so can interrogate it a bit more.
WHen I bought the leaf (used) i didn't have the leafspy, and it was on 100% battery health (older leafs have 12 bars, newer ones are jsut a 0 -> 1 guage).
Currently my 40kWh leaf is about 92% state of health.. (which is still showing as 100% on the bar)
Leafspy is cool as you can change features - i've only added auto-door-lock at 15mph so far.
DrP
Just agreed to collect a 2019 Leaf tomorrow evening!
Boondock isn’t it because Intelligent Octopus only guarantees 6 hours of cheap charging each night? If you’re only charging on normal mains power it is going to charge very slowly. Sometimes intelligent octopus will give you more than 6 hours in a night but not always.
Thanks - could be - its all a bit opaque - the battery often needs a full charge so maybe there isn't enough time/ cheap leccy in the system. Bit annoying but not end of the world stuff. Cheers.
I have mine set to 90% (Model 3) and often 6 hours wouldn’t be long enough to get it to that. When it feels like it, Intelligent Octopus schedules more than 6 hours in a night - assume when there is surplus. At other times presumably when there is less surplus it only gives me the basic 6 hours.
Intelligent Octopus gives you 6hrs overnight for your whole house plus all the power going to your car. Or did I get that wrong last time?
11.30pm - 5.30am for the whole house cheap. When you plug the car in it decides when to charge - often the same 6 hours but sometimes different and often if the car will take it gives you more than 6 hours at the low (7.5p) rate.