The electric car *charging* thread

^^^ you might need to increase the amount of charge you want remaining when you reach your destination to get it to plan in a bigger top up?

If we had this in the UK would that reduce public charger costs or would Musk go to  £0.79p.

https://insideevs.com/news/739114/tesla-volvo-polestar-nacs-supercharger/

We DO have it..several tesla chargers are open to all.

DrP

I finally have a home charger after 29 months of driving an EV (Ohme), and will be having the smart meter installed on Thursday so can swap to an EV specific tariff. I’m on a standard Octopus tariff right now.

Is Octopus Intelligent still the go-to?

If you get to a charging station and all the chargers are occupied, is there an etiquette on where to wait? Or do you just stop in a random spot and glare at anyone who arrives after you?

If you get to a charging station and all the chargers are occupied, is there an etiquette on where to wait? Or do you just stop in a random spot and glare at anyone who arrives after you?

Ideally get out, talk to people and find out who is last in the queue then you’re after them. It can be pretty chaotic though and relies on a fair bit of co operation and communication, as the charging bays rarely have anywhere for an orderly queue (presumably as the operators don’t want to pay to lease any more space than they have to).

There really is a need for some form of queueing system – ideally a smart app based one rather than a physical queue.

If we had this in the UK would that reduce public charger costs or would Musk go to £0.79p.

yep – as DrP says it’s already here – 42 out of the 140 Tesla chargers are open to all already.

The ones local to me are 61p peak / 52p off peak, but with an £8.99 monthly membership become 47p peak / 40p off peak. Membership available 1 month at a time so maybe good for occasional periods away from the home such as summer holidays etc.

Is Octopus Intelligent still the go-to?

Yes, Intelligent Octopus Go is the one unless you have solar

Yes, Intelligent Octopus Go is the one unless you have solar

You should have a look at Tomato Energy as they are very significantly cheaper than IOG for unit and standing charge.

Not slick as they don’t have the marketing muscle, in depth usage analysis or of Octopus but very cheap for EV charging at 5p per kWh between midnight and six am. I moved from IOG early this month and went very smoothly. You do get billed for actuals via DD which I prefer as well.

Is Octopus Intelligent still the go-to?

Yes, Intelligent Octopus Go is the one unless you have solar

As a generalisation I’d say IOG is more a fit and forget sort of tariff, because prices/times are set, altho you can make it work more in your favour if you shift washer, dryer, dishwasher, dehumidifier etc etc into off peak rate. So yes if you don’t want to get involved and/or have a busy family/work life.

Agile Octopus works well if you are prepared to put a bit more time and effort into it. The more time and effort, the more you’ll save. It’s also a bit more swings and roundabouts, this week the Agile prices are high due to the weather, but previous few weeks we had loads of cheap prices and lots of those were negative prices.

The Ohme charger works with both tariffs, with Agile it can cherry pick the cheapest times to charge your car.

Have finally had to jump to a PHEV as the contract on my MHEV expired, so i’m now driving round in a 2025 V60 T6 PHEV.

BUT, costs of home chargers are astronomic here, and no grants, most are looking at minimum 8-900 quid and a 4-6 month wait to get it installed.
A mate has had a poke around in my garage and the 16A 3 phase socket is now fully commissioned and legal to use (it was installed 25 years ago to a different standard), and i know you can get type 2 cables that plug into a 16A/3 phase socket. But does anyone have any recommendations of one they’ve used?

Any tips ?

Yeah don’t slavishly follow ABRP, it doesn’t know how much charge your car actually has at any given time. Many cars will actively route you based on how much charge you have and what chargers are free (e.g. Hyundai). This means that if you stay longer at a particular place it might readjust the schedule.

Or, you can just stay longer at Tebay anyway – there’s nothing to say you must leave when ABRP says to leave. However it’s not good to tie up chargers when you are only trickle charging at 95%, so if it’s busy you are strongly advised to go and move your car to a normal parking space when you get to 80-85% or whenever your car starts to slow down.

I use ABRP to get an idea before I go, so I know what’s available, then I just do what the car tells me.

If you get to a charging station and all the chargers are occupied, is there an etiquette on where to wait? Or do you just stop in a random spot and glare at anyone who arrives after you?

You could just drive to the next charger. You did arrive with contingency didn’t you? 🙂

My current car (Prius) is now 6 years old, and the lease company are wanting it back; company policy is pushing me towards a full EV instead. One of the prereqs appears to be that I need to have a home charger installed as part of the arrangement, and there’s an offer of one from E-ON which is coming out at £790 or so. It looks to be a ‘VESTEL EV04’ from what I can make out, but also has the E-ON name branded onto the front too. The spiel on their website suggests that it’ll work with any supplier, which is currently Octopus in our case. Anyone know if that’s the case, or am I missing something and will end up with two wires that won’t splice together? (I accept that it’d probably make sense to switch to one of the smart/clever Octopus tariffs like IOG if or when all this comes to fruition)

If you get to a charging station and all the chargers are occupied, is there an etiquette on where to wait? Or do you just stop in a random spot and glare at anyone who arrives after you?

You could just drive to the next charger. You did arrive with contingency didn’t you? ?

Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. Maybe I already drove past 3 full chargers so I no longer do. Regardless, that wasn’t my question, so do you actually have a useful contribution?

New EV owner and on the Octopus Intelligent Go for a whole 48 hours. I am surprised to see it is currently happy to charge for most of the day at cheap rate.

I’m 3 pin plug charging my Ioniq. Added 20kw over the past 2 nights averaging 18p/KW (agile tariff) Cheaper than installing a dedicated charger for the minimal miles that I do.

@thelawman

If you want to go on IOG you would need a compatible charger and/or car. If I was starting all over again, I’d be looking at chargers that work with IOG  and other tariffs ie Agile Octopus.

So, a couple of questions for IOG users:

1. Does the cheap rate extend to the rest of the house electricity use when the car is charging?

2. Does the whole house get cheap electricity overnight, so running the dishwasher/ washing machine in the early hours would be beneficial even if the car was not charging ?

TIA

Yes & Yes

Yes & Yes

Thanks.

Is slowing down the charge rate to extend the duration of cheap house electricity a thing ?

TIA

Is slowing down the charge rate to extend the duration of cheap house electricity a thing ?

Yes, some people do it.

I haven’t done it.

Is slowing down the charge rate to extend the duration of cheap house electricity a thing ?

I think it’s against the T&Cs

I would never consider running a dishwasher, washing machine or tumble dryer at night just to save a few quid, far too risky!

I would never consider running a dishwasher, washing machine or tumble dryer at night just to save a few quid, far too risky!

Username checks out

Thanks for that @banana
I guess what you’re saying then, is that not all wallbox units are created equal? Is that right?  In which case I suppose I’m probably better off getting a wallbox through Octopus, rather than risk the non-compatibility of one from E-ON. When asked, they’re duty-bound to say “Don’t know, but why don’t you switch to us as a supplier then?” and I just can’t be arsed with that conversation.
Not decided on a car yet, but last time I looked a couple of weeks ago on the lease company’s portal, the options included various Nissan Leafs, Cupra Borns, ID-3 & ID-4, a couple of small Volvos, Kia E-Niros. Might have been one or two others, I genuinely can’t remember now, but they were mostly smaller EVs rather than some of the huge Mercs, Hyundais, Audis and the like. I’m too far down the scale to get a look-in at those, even if I wanted one (which I probably don’t)

I got a zappi charger through a local installer. Octopus put in my smart meters (octopus were unresponsive when tryingtoget them to do the charger – they came back to me 2 weeks after my local after my guy had fitted). It all works together without any probs. I am now on ? intelligent ev tariff, and all my leckie is cheap between 23 30 and 5 30. So the dishy and washing machine do their thing in the early morning. Tried to get the kettle to use overnight as well, but Mrs epic not ready for a cuppa at 5

Depending on the amount of charge left, it takes longer than that 6hr window for tha car to get to full charge….

The octopus website lets you check if your car and/or charger are supported by IOG

https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/

Has anyone got a bi-directional home charger? We’re going to be getting an EV in a few months but seems sensible to be able have V2H or perhaps even V2G capability (the car supports both). Trouble is, I can only see mention of a very small number of chargers and no idea if the costs will stack up. We’re also planning to get circa 6kw of solar next year hopefully too. No sure I understand enough yet to make sure we’re approaching it correctly.

Any advice or tips?

I am in no way an expert on this, but as far as I can tell, it’s not really a thing yet. There aren’t any compatible chargers in the UK atm – there were, so not sure what happened there??

I think there are questions over whether the benefit outweighs the additional wear on the car batteries as well.

Added 10kw at an osprey charger in Welshpool today whilst have a chat with a bloke who was charging a Nissan leaf from 2013. He was happy with his car and mentioned his boss (maybe ex) made ev home chargers, Fast Amp somewhere nearby.

Ioniq covered 200 miles in 5hrs averaging 5mile/kWh with a cabin temp of 20.5°c. another good performance by the car.

Cheers. Thats the feeling I’ve got also. The Wallbox Quasar 2 is the only one readily turning up on searches, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet.

V2H technology must be there e.g. home batteries, but there’s nothing concrete documented and the EV manufacturer just says it’s compatible, nothing more.

It’s a fair point on battery degradation, feeding back to the home or grid must have an impact, but guess that could balance with elements such mileage travelled and the proportion of rapid and ultra rapid charging used. Perhaps selfishly, it’s one reason why we’d be leasing.

Just returned from a long trip north. Unexpectedly had to take the Tesla when the diesel estate wouldn’t start! It did add quite a bit of time to our journeys up from Cheshire to Dundee and then to 60 miles North of Inverness but managed the trip fine with a bit of patience.

Main issue is ours is a 67 plate and only has Type 2 charging. Never been a big issue before as we rarely charge away from home. However Tesla have upgraded many of the Superchargers and we had a long gap between Charnock Richard to Eurocentral on the M8 which meant charging to full and sitting at 60 to get there. All the type 2 chargers I could find were AC so hitting a max of 50 miles added an hour no matter if it was 22kw or 43kw as it’s reliant on the car.  Obviously have booked it in to have the CCS adaptor fitted now!

Talk to me about electric hire cars and charging. Surely the driver isn’t expected to have all the cards / apps to hire an electric car?

(Genuine question, we hire cars for 30k of miles a year, looking to go electric possibly)

Intrtrersted but struggling to see what the use case is the use the EV to power the house/powerwall

Talk to me about electric hire cars and charging. Surely the driver isn’t expected to have all the cards / apps to hire an electric car?

I think you can mostly charge with contactless. If you need an app it only takes a few minutes to download and register. Probably you can plan ahead what payment methods you will need for specific chargers.

Talk to me about electric hire cars and charging. Surely the driver isn’t expected to have all the cards / apps to hire an electric car

Look into getting an Electroverse card ?  Might be easier if you are with Octopus ?

Tesla chargers (some can be used by non teslas too) do require an app but may be its set up to the car and you just get charged by the hire company (plus/minus a handling fee)

Most others I’ve looked at are contactless though as you are in Scotland some more rural ones might need a Chargeplace Scotland RFID card. As its business may be worthwhile contacting them to issue cards to charge to account.

Talk to me about electric hire cars and charging. Surely the driver isn’t expected to have all the cards / apps to hire an electric car?

(Genuine question, we hire cars for 30k of miles a year, looking to go electric possibly)

I’ve only charged an electric car twice, both times the chargers took contactless card payment. Though when I hired a Polestar from Hertz (was by far the cheapest car for some reason), it came with an NFC fob that worked at Shell (or Esso maybe, I can’t remember) chargers. The money came off the card I registered at Hertz and it was discounted by about £20.

@thelawman

In the position your in (starting from scratch) it makes sense to me to choose a compatible charger rather than car, then you can have any car you want now and in the future, you won’t be tied to choosing compatible cars (I’m assuming with it being a company car it might be renewed every 3 years or so). Choose the right charger now and it should be good for many car cycles I’d expect. The link thepurist gives above should be good to check whether charger brands/models you’re looking at are compatible. You don’t have to use octopus to install, just decide on the charger. You could use an independent installer who installs the charger you choose.

If you want me to suggest something then I’d personally probably go with an Ohme (I’ve had their smart cable in the past *not available any more* so familiar with them) they’re reasonably priced and do everything you’d want.

struggling to see what the use case is the use the EV to power the house/powerwall

I’d think it’s the same use case as having a home battery – charge at cheap rate then draw from battery/EV when prices are higher.   Even a modest EV will have far more battery capacity than typical home setups. I’d think that V2H would be no more stressful on the car battery than regular driving – 70 mph at 3.5miles/kWh would be 20kWh drawn in an hour. The only times we get close to that sort of house load is when there’s a free leccy hour and we do as much as we possibly can – normally, even in winter, a heavy day of use for us would be 12-14 over the whole day.