i am an Octopus customer and have been quite happy with their service, as a customer you can get a home charger, I'm not sure how they are offering 10% discount on public charging but with Electroverse you can get up to 8% discount from participating networks.
My charger is connected via split tails, one set of tails powers my garage and charger, with the Ohme Home Pro you get a CT clamp and the charger can be configured so it will dial back if a certain threashold is breached.
If you have solar/batteries or are considering getting them you might want to look at something like a Zappi which is more suited to that type of installation.
Are you already an Octopus customer, if not you can shout out for a referral code on here and get a £50 credit for joining, same thing with Electroverse where you can get a £5 credit.

 

I wouldn't be all in with the idea that it's bound to work better.
My experience of octopus is nothing but positive, the deals are great and integration with my Ohme box has been very good.
The box installation however is another story... Revolving around the fact they they will use a local contractor to put the hardware in.... And by local I mean nationwide if they are the cheapest.
And because they are the cheapest, quality of workmanship is not in their vocabulary.
I'd recommend you get a known, local electrician you can get hold of in need of problems to do the hardware.
Sign up with octopus and sleep easy.

 

I think that the OP means Octopus EV... where you buy the car and EVSE through Octopus. I have never heard of anyone doing this. But I am very happy with Octopus as a utility supplier.

 

Yes this is exactly what I am looking at.

 

We didn't get overnight car through Octopus but they did supply and fit our Ohme EVSE, no problems and it was an Octopus electrician that installed it.

As others have said the Electroverse card will give you discount.

 

I had cheap night charging years ago - then they upgraded my meter to a smart meter around lockdown. I've got an EV again, and now I'm told I can't have the cheap overnight rate again as the new meter isn't compatible, and I'll have to wait. No idea how long... 😖

 

I beleive you'll find that is a load of old tosh, I'd keep badgering them to sort it out.

It is remotely possible they fitted a SMETS1 meter which some suppliers have difficulty integrating into there systems, its more than likely they have fitted a SMETS1 which is compatible but coverage in some areas can be difficult although there are usually ways round this.

Your provider likely doesn't want to spend the time required to get you connected to the smart network.

 

The Mrs has an Octopus EV car through her work's salary sacrifice. Because it is essentially a company car it is all in on everything. While the headline price is steeper than market, after everything it was less expensive than what we were seeing privately at the time. Because we already had an EV and EVSE we tool the Electroverse credit instead of the charger (it isn't worth quite as much on paper). At the time they were offering a charger and 4000 miles of IO Go charging or 4000 miles of Electroverse credit. The former was nominally worth £900+£70 (or so), while the latter is just £600.

The other benefit of having there car is access to the special IO Go for their ev customers. It isn't a huge amount of money, 6p/kWh off peak vs 7p/kWh. For us, on the cars it is about £37/year. If you do more miles it improves. Of coure we also save on household usage too, but all in all it is probably only about 0.5p/kWh cheaper averaged over all our usage.

 

The deal I’m looking at isn’t salary sacrifice but a private PCH essentially.

 

Wow this is way off topic.

 

The only slight spanner is that I was planning on getting my home consumer unit upgraded for the EV charge point to be directly wired. All by a local sparky co. As far as I can see, Octopus only do their standard install as part of this deal, and that is a small consumer unit fed from a split of the meter tails. But I suppose that means I could park the CU upgrade until later on.

That’s actually a better way to install it! If you get home storage batteries, which will pay for themselves quickly when you have a tariff with cheap rate at night, you’ll want the charge point to be separate. I had to rewire mine, moving it out of the main CU to a new mini one, so I could put the CT clamp from the battery around the other leg, so it discharges when the house draws power, but is blissfully unaware of the car charge point. The battery is set to charge at night at cheap rate, and discharge the rest of the time, so I can run the house all day without buying peak rate electricity. The car will always charge at cheap rate, so should always draw from the grid - if it draws from the battery, there won’t be enough left for the house, so you’ll have to pay peak rate in the evening, negating the whole point of getting batteries.

 

Yes this is a good point, not considering batteries now but who knows later on! I think I prefer using local sparky, they do it how you want, I think the octopus contractors will be on limited time and easiest install.