Viewing 28 posts - 1 through 28 (of 28 total)
  • EV Home Charge Point advice / opinions
  • beamers
    Full Member

    Morning all, I’m now the proud custodian of a leased VW ID.3. Great car and streets ahead of the petrol burning Seat Leon which it has replaced.

    I’ve been looking at getting a charge point installed at home and have identified a couple of options.

    One is the Zappi, the other is the Pod Point.

    Costs after the grants have been applied are £680 for the Zappi (installed by a local electrician) and £299 for the Pod Point (via Pod Point direct).

    The Zappi appears to be much more advanced, it can be connected to a solar panels and / or domestic wind turbine (we currently have neither with no plans to install them). At less than half the the price the Pod Point seems to be the obvious choice. Am I missing something?

    WWSTW do?

    B.A.Nana
    Free Member

    If you’re going to go for a Time of Day tariff like Agile Octopus (or at least want the option to try it out at a later date), then Ohme is set up for it (ie cherry picking the cheapest 30min segments) and is also one of the cheaper EV charger options.
    https://www.smarthomecharge.co.uk/chargers/ohme/wall-charger/

    B.A.Nana
    Free Member

    £299 for the Pod Point (via Pod Point direct).

    Where are you getting that price from? even the podpoint website you link to states ‘from £449’ (that will be no upgrading required to you consumer unit and straightforward cable routing within a certain distance).

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    beamers
    Full Member

    £299 for the Pod Point (via Pod Point direct).

    Where are you getting that price from? even the podpoint website you link to states ‘from £449’ (that will be no upgrading required to you consumer unit and straightforward cable routing within a certain distance).

    The quote is for £549 with the OLEV grant applied. I’m in Scotland so can claim a further £250 Energy Saving Trust grant which brings it down to £299.

    I’ll take a look at the Ohme option.

    sidders34
    Free Member

    I’ve got a Wallbox pulsar plus installed as I wanted tethered. Works well and app very easy to use to schedule charging to save on Octopus Go.

    Drac
    Full Member

    I have a Pod Point works well, I mean it plugs in and charges the car so not much more to it. The app allows me to see the Costs and set a charge routine so it will charge as off peak times.

    matt303uk
    Full Member

    I’d say the PodPoint or Zappi will be miles ahead of the Ohme unit with regards to build quality, the Ohme unit is more like a smart cable and even has a cable entering the top of the unit when screwed to a wall so I’d be wary of mounting one exposed to the elements.

    simon_g
    Full Member

    Friends are happy with Podpoint. It’s a bit of an ugly lump but working well.

    Zappi is really nice though, meant to be really nice quality build, not the greatest looking but at least you can swap fascias to match surroundings. It does lots of clever stuff – solar, PIN lock, limiting charge speed if house demand is too high, etc.

    I’d probably go podpoint though if it was somewhere discreet.

    I have an Ohme cable and it’s good, but their solution is just the same cable hardwired in, with the box part attached to the wall. I think it’s OK if it’s somewhere sheltered (some sort of meter box would be ideal) but not where it gets direct wind/rain.

    GrahamS
    Full Member

    If you’re going to go for a Time of Day tariff like Agile Octopus (or at least want the option to try it out at a later date), then Ohme is set up for it

    Interesting, does that do something beyond just telling your car when to accept the charge?

    i.e. Is it somehow “live” information or just a different way to set an overnight charge timer?

    matt303uk
    Full Member

    Agile pricing changes every 30 mins and is published at 4pm on the preceding day, so smart chargers can use that to schedule when they enable charging at the cheapest times. I’ve a mixergy hot water cylinder and when electric is cheaper than gas or if my electric price goes negative it heats up from the emersion heater rather than the gas boiler.

    simon_g
    Full Member

    Ohme you set up with your tariff info, if you’re on Agile it pulls in prices so it knows exactly what it’ll cost.

    You set up your car – if you have app/API access it can get current state of charge from that. If not you have a manual step to tell it how much charge you want when you plug in or it assumes 100%.

    You set a schedule (eg charge to 80% by 7am) or override manually, then it figures out when is cheapest to add charge to get to the level you want. If you’re being tight and don’t need the charge, it can be “only charge below x pence” instead.

    I think Zappi has similar built in now.

    GrahamS
    Full Member

    Interesting thanks. We’re on Octopus already and looking to get a charge point soon too, so this is good info.

    beamers
    Full Member

    Cheers all. Some great information above.

    Looks like we will be going with Octopus in Nov so I think the Zappi might be worth the initial outlay.

    I’ll try and squeeze the installer for a better price.

    devbrix
    Free Member

    Just had a Zappi installed and seems OK, very unexciting. I’ve changed from Octopus Agile to Go as the prices have appeared terrible this year on Agile (am I alone in this?) compared to last year and charging the car is easier now on Go with a fixed time schedule, as well as putting timers on on washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer and bread maker to come on then. Partly chose Zappi as will be looking at solar/battery in the future.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    I’ve changed from Octopus Agile to Go as the prices have appeared terrible this year on Agile (am I alone in this?)

    Ah. I was going to change to Octopus for the Agile tariff, but perhaps I shouldn’t bother.

    To other Ohme users – am I being dense or what? It seems to have the option to add a certain %age of charge, rather than charge to a target %age. This doesn’t seem to make sense as I want the car at 80% every morning regardless of how far it’s been.

    matt303uk
    Full Member

    Agile has been a bit rubbish this year, I’m still sticking with it for now but wholesale prices have been quite high, a mix of low winds and a couple of nuclear reactors being down for maintenance.

    Unless your car has an app (and one that Ohme know the API for) the Ohme cable has no way of knowing what the current charge level of the car is, the communications between the car and charger for AC charging is just a PWM signal to tell the car what’s safe to pull from the charger and the car then just slaps a resistor and diode between that and ground to turn the power on. BTW if you only ever charge a car to 80% you’ll probably unbalance the battery pack, an occasional charge to 100% is needed to balance the cells.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Ah.. well the car has an app but if Ohme don’t know how to use it then that would explain the issue. Although I was able to select my car in the Ohme app.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Ah..I’d set up the app before I got the car and before I had a Blue link account. Added the account and now it knows the state of charge even when it’s not connected! And I can set a target charge percentage as I wanted to.

    The car and Blue link let you set a charge limit and a charging schedule but you can’t change the target on a schedule, so you can’t say for example 80% during the week and 100% at weekends. Ohme can though.

    matt303uk
    Full Member

    Cool, glad you got it sorted.

    djglover
    Free Member

    Does the £680 include the myEnergi hub? You’ll need that to use the app and your account.

    I have a Zappi, I have solar panels and Octopus Agile. The export rates for Agile make it worthwhile. Today I have a net export, so negative bill.

    The Zappi is not without drawbacks, the backend system resilience is not what it needs to be and there can be times when the service is down.

    I worry somewhat about the longevity of the service. Zappi only works as long as myEnergi stay in business and its a lot to pay for a dumb plug if they go bust. There is a lot of cost of operations to cover with new sales as there is no subscription.. so the business can never stand still with a portfolio of chargers unless they have monthly fees.

    Overall in the last 2 weeks I’ve probably used 50% solar and 50% import to charge the car, netting off at 8p per kwh so 2.3p per mile 🙂

    beamers
    Full Member

    Does the £680 include the myEnergi hub?

    It does indeed.

    I’d not considered the long term stability of myEnergi as a business. Good point.

    djglover
    Free Member

    Its a reoccurring problem for connected home businesses, fine whilst your growing exponentially but not so good when things tail off but you have big AWS monthly fees and marketing costs to pay! seen it time and again with things like British Gas HIVE trying and failing to implement monthly fees for connected heating products. My assumption is subscriptions will come..

    beamers
    Full Member

    Mmmm

    Pod Point looks like it could be the winner for me.

    northernremedy
    Full Member

    Fwiw we have just pressed go on a charger.

    My criteria were:

    – As future proof as possible, so 22kw capability a bonus, reckoning on potentially 3 phase upgrade in our lifetime (or not, but it’s there).
    – Reviews. Some pretty hit and miss stuff out there on the quality of installs and after sales engagement.
    – Company engagement pre order. How helpful were they, how much care did we get in to explaining the install and checking compatibility.

    Based on that we’ve paid a bit more for an Andersen. 22kw capable. Not linked to an energy company, but capable of linking to octopus go to hit cheap tariffs. Fantastic pre sale engagement checking our electrics, desired location etc. It’s nicer to look at, which is useful on the front of the house in a conservation area and any potential awkward neighbours.

    I took the view of its there for the next 20+ years and will only become more important in our lifetime as EV’s become the norm. So an extra couple of hundred will be recouped within the first year, and becomes insignificant over 20 years.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    I called Ecotricity to switch to the cheaper overnight tariff, and the poor chap on the phone barely had an idea what I was talking about. He got me to click through the website for some reason, I didn’t follow. I think he was WFH and didn’t have access to his systems.

    It’s not cheap anyway – 19.59p daytime and 11.53p overnight, for an unspecified period (he didn’t know) and a 37.7p standing charge.

    So I just put in a switch to Octopus.

    devbrix
    Free Member

    Overall in the last 2 weeks I’ve probably used 50% solar and 50% import to charge the car, netting off at 8p per kwh so 2.3p per mile

    If you don’t mind me asking a personal question, how big is your array djglover?

    phiiiiil
    Full Member

    My assumption is subscriptions will come.

    I would agree. I had an Owl networked energy monitor; this worked for a few years before they announced that it would require a paid subscription. I nearly bought a Tado thermostat until they announced that various features including the geolocation would require a paid subscription.

    It might be fine for businesses that can extract revenue out of their customer base some other way, but I can’t see how domestic EV charging could do this. I’d be amazed if EV chargers requiring online services didn’t become subscription based at some point.

    djglover
    Free Member

    If you don’t mind me asking a personal question, how big is your array djglover

    5.2kw. If I hadnt been at work today the car would have had 14kwh charge from solar.

Viewing 28 posts - 1 through 28 (of 28 total)

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