Intelligent Octopus

I had to speak to Octopus, as my car was doing the same. They reset the activation protocol and I started from the beginning again. It worked that time.

Quick question about this.

How does Octopus differentiate between power to the car and your normal domestic use? As in, can it supply the house with leccy 24 hours a day but only charge the car when it's cheap rate? I don't get how it knows the difference!

We don't have a household battery.

So assuming I were to plug an EV into a wall box every evening I'd be better to set the car to only charge at the overnight cheap rate hours? 6 hours is enough to fully charge something like a BMW i3 I think.

It's a bit of a faff if you try and get all 3 apps linked together, I have Ohme, Octopus and the BMW app but I've cracked it now after some trial and error. Also ignoring when BMW tells me it's paused charging as it's working between the Octopus windows.

What is really surprising is the amount of times I've plugged in the car and been given lots of cheap charging slots earlier in the day or late evening. I've had nights when I've got the cheap leccy rate from 7:30pm to 5:30am the next day.

I guess you just have to experiment depending on your setup.

I've yet to drive the i3s but it's the only EV I'm interested in just yet. I'm with Octopus so if I did get the car I'd have them supply an Ohme wall box and change to intelligent go once my current fixed deal ends in September.

You plug your car in when you're not using it, anytime of the day.

Octopus will activate the car to start charging as and when cheap rate is available. So it makes sense to plug in as early as you can each day as it'll more often than not charge the car straight away or at least for 2-3 hours outside of off peak rate. During the time the car is charging your entire household usage is cheap rate too.

And then, even if the car is already fully charged by the time you reach the guaranteed overnight cheap hours, all your house is cheap for those hours anyway.

You could easily average 10 hours per day cheap rate if you charge every evening with a granny charger. And it's not hard to move most household usage into those same hours.

Great thanks, I think I get it.

Ideally I would like to just plug the car in when not using it so that it's got plenty of charge when needed. But I wouldn't want to be paying peak rate if say I plugged it in at lunchtime.

Sounds like it'd work fine.

Newlad, wild guess here so I bear no responsibility, have you tried a boost / bump charge on the octopus app?

Thanks, that's good advice.

Having previously been on Intelligent Octopus (and prior to that the straightforward Go), I decided to change to Agile at the start of March to see how it went - knowing that if it wasn't suitable I was only tied into it for a minimum of one month.

My decision was partially influenced by being in the eastern region of England that benefits from the free electricity Power Up sessions, and that minimal changes would be needed to household behaviour as we rarely cook during the peak Agile 16:00 to 19:00 period and we were used to putting the dishwasher and washing machine on during cheap periods (either scheduled cheap period or triggered cheap periods). The house has no solar panels or house battery, just normal usage and an EV.

The results so far are that the usage charge for Agile (ignoring the standing charge) for the month of March has cost me £52.20 for 377kWh of electricity excluding the refund for the free electricity given during the Power Up sessions (usage for March was slightly lower than normal as I was away for the first week), which equates to just under 14p/kWh.

By contrast Intelligent for the same period based on the cheap rate being limited to ONLY the hours of 23:30 to 05:30 would have cost £84.25, which equates to 22p/kWh.

However I knew from previous experience with Intelligent that plugging the car in during the day would often trigger a cheap period which covered the whole house, and that and that from bills when using Intelligent (before the Power Up refund) resulted in a cost that averaged around 16p/kWh - and this shows the danger of online calculators or apps that claim to be able to show the cheapest rates, in that fail to take account of triggered cheap Intelligent periods because it would simply be impossible for them to do so.

So 14p on Agile vs 16p on Intelligent - not an awful lot in it provided you can plug the car in during the day to trigger cheap periods, and likely cheaper than Agile if you do cook during the peak Agile 16:00 to 19:00 period, and of course with Intelligent you are not exposed to the potential risk of prices spiking up to 100p/kWh that you are with Agile.

For now I will be staying with Agile, but will be keeping an eye on the Intelligent price to see where it goes now the overall price cap is coming down.

For completeness, but not relevant to most people, once the £17 for the free electricity used during the Power Up sessions was taken into account my unit cost was down to 9p/kWh - not too bad.