Yes, always full 6 hours 11:30 to 5:30, for household usage, battery, immersion heater.

Then however many hours the car needs at whatever time Octopus chooses.

Tethered. Makes it so easy.

 

Re the IOG hours, exactly what Red Lake said.

What's better, tethered or not?....,or is it purely personal preference?

It’s purely personal preference. Mine is untethered and I’m not inclined to change, but I only charge once or twice a week so for me the very small extra effort is outweighed by the neatness.

 

Not only will your battery and charging have the full 6 hours to charge up simultaneously but also you'll often be able to charge outside of the set period while paying the cheap rate.

For me tethered is a stupid, untidy and expensive to maintain option which some like because they have nowhere else to keep a cable or like saving a couple of seconds.
Cable too short, cable too long, cable damaged all cost money to rectify regardless but with a socketed chargepoint (like my ePod or Indra) it's trivial to plug a different cable in and know you're good to go.
With a large number of tethered units it's much more involved and costly to swap a cable inless you're happy to DIY.
My GE Car Charger (as they call it) is tethered so the downsides are plentiful and it has never really seen any use.
I used to use a wallbox pulsar plus which is a tethered unit and although it can be made to look neat and to not take up much more space than needed it was often a chore coiling the cable up in the rain but from what I've read just dropping it on the ground and running for shelter is often a solution for some.

I much prefer untethered.


HTH


Gaz

 

Will I be able to charge the battery for 6hrs and the car battery simultaneously with Intelligent Octopus?

Yes - if some of the car charging slots coincide with the fixed 6 hour cheap period, that's not a problem - you can charge your car and house battery at the same time. It's something I do routinely on regular Octopus Go, and IOG won't be any different.

 

For balance, I much prefer tethered. In my case the cable wraps tidily around the charger, is always there and ready to plug in, takes seconds to unwind and connect or disconnect and put tidily in its place! Standard 5m length easily enough to reach either car. No digging around for a separate cable, unrolling it, connecting both ends (and trying in the dark to connect the wrong ends together), then having to put it away again when it's finished with. Your situation may of course differ!

 

Yes you can charge both at the same time. You will need to think of a way of preventing your batteries being drained if IOG decides to charge the car at other times.

 

You will need to think of a way of preventing your batteries being drained if IOG decides to charge the car at other times.

Good point. I've been caught that way before!

 

Do you need to charge it to 100% each day?

 

On flux , in winter, it's good to have plenty of available battery. In "summer" not so important.
IOG may change this.

Many thanks for your response.

 

For balance, I much prefer tethered. In my case the cable wraps tidily around the charger, is always there and ready to plug in, takes seconds to unwind and connect or disconnect and put tidily in its place! Standard 5m length easily enough to reach either car. No digging around for a separate cable, unrolling it, connecting both ends (and trying in the dark to connect the wrong ends together), then having to put it away again when it's finished with. Your situation may of course differ!

I fully agree! Tethered is much easier to live with. Sooner or later the cable will fail, and when it does I’ll replace it myself. Those who aren’t comfortable with electrical work can pay an electrician, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour, so under £100. I’d pay that annually to avoid having to deal with an untethered cable every day!

The 5m cable that comes with my Zappi is long enough to charge my 5.3m long van.

Yes you can charge both at the same time. You will need to think of a way of preventing your batteries being drained if IOG decides to charge the car at other times.

I fitted a new consumer unit for my Zappi, split the tails with Henley blocks, and fitted the battery CT after the split on the main house side. That way it doesn’t see the Zappi, so won’t discharge when the car is charging. It cost about £100 all in, and an hour of my time. I believe @Jeremy Harris rigged up his battery inverter to Home Assistant, but I’m more confident with hardware than software. Here we see the battery charging from solar, while the Zappi is charging from the grid in an extra slot.

 

Here we see the battery charging from solar, while the Zappi is charging from the grid in an extra slot.

Does your setup also allow you to use solar to charge the car outside the cheap rate slots?

Not a common usecase, perhaps - particularly if you have a long range EV, or if you can export solar at 15p. But would be nice to have the additional flexibility.

Would that require separate inverters for solar and battery?

 

I like the out-of-the-way cable routing, handy having usefully placed cable "hooks" on the van!

 

Hi
I use Flux from about April to mid October then change to Go October to March. Reason, the better export rate
on Flux more than compensates for the very occasional times I charge the EV from the grid at the slightly more expensive Go rate. One call to Octopus usually does the changeover.

 

Is your charger in a garage or outside? If outside & its wet you dont need to mess with a wet cable to stow if tethered. I think you can get longer than the standard 5m cable with a Zappi. Granted your Leaf owning friends cannot charge.

 

I’ve a 7 meter tethered cable + another spare 7mt cable for each car which came with the new cars and which have yet to be taken out of their packaging.
Still got another cable sat in the boot of the Soul EV sat in the barn, not to mention the 2 V2L adapters for the latest cars and 3 Granny chargers. 🤗

However, in well over 3 years I’ve only charged at home or on another private 7 KWh EVSE tethered cable and I fully intend to keep it that way. 🤣

 

Thanks for that Frank.

Do you you get advance notice if the car charging period is not 23.30 to 05.30?

 

Yes. But sometimes the slots change afterwards.

 

By far the easiest thing to do if you have not yet had a chargepoint installed is to have it fitted so it's first in line for power from the meter.
With nothing before it (CT clamps or GivEnergy AIO [long story]) the charge going into the car will come from the grid or if you have excess solar being exported that will be used up with the remainder coming from the grid. If you accept that you might not be earning 15p on export then the times you're likely to charge when the sun shines will be more limited.
However, if you have a FIT contract with deeming then just charge whenever you like and are given a slot.

Gaz

 

By far the easiest thing to do if you have not yet had a chargepoint installed is to have it fitted so it's first in line for power from the meter.

Gaz

That won't work if there is nothing to stop the battery "backfeeding" the EVSE, so you'd need to put the EVSE between the meter and the battery inverter, with the battery inverter set so it can't "export" back to the meter. But does it really matter, if the car goes on charge outside the period then it may use some battery, but you'll get that back at 7p overnight. Note while we do occasionally get slots outside the core period most of the time the charge schedule is actually in the core offpeak time.

 

unless you have 3phase supply wont charging a Battery and an EV at the same time top out at 7-9-11Kw max load for the property ie not 2 x 7kw but then most batteries dont charge above 5kw maybe

 

We regularly charge one of the cars and the house battery at the same time in winter. Often the hot water will be charging overnight as well. I have an 80A fuse on the supply, which is a standard (for this area) one of 15kVA max. The hot water draws about 2.8kW, the main charge point about 7.4kW, and the house battery about 3kW. The house loads at night are typically a couple of hundred watts. The worst case off-peak total is about 13.5kW, so around 58A, which is no big deal, really. The hot water will usually only be drawing power for around an hour to an hour and half, and is set to come on at 04:30, towards the end of the off-peak slot (which ends at 06:30 in winter) and by that time the house battery is almost always fully charged to the set limit, anyway (it and the car both start charging at 23:35, just after the start of the off-peak slot), so in reality it's rare for us to ever draw that max of ~58A, and if we do it will only be for a short time.