[BigAl]

Has anyone else received and invite for the beta trial for the new Pod Point App with home scheduling v3.8.0.

I updated yesterday and at the moment have not tried, I will report back in the next few days on how it went.

I guess if the trials go well than this will be out for general use, which is great as you can now schedule your charge times without using the car for this. It could potentially stop people from using your charger when your not in, thus removing the option for a key to disable the charging circuit. 😁

 

[wyx087]

That's a very nice feature. I hope they provide an API for local access so I can control my car's charging via my home automation.

Does it have to be a smart charger? I don't see At Home tab in my pod-point app. My one was installed late 2017, they didn't say it's a smart one.

 

[BigAl]

That's a very nice feature. I hope they provide an API for local access so I can control my car's charging via my home automation.

Does it have to be a smart charger? I don't see At Home tab in my pod-point app. My one was installed late 2017, they didn't say it's a smart one.

Not sure on older Pod Points, I thought there all classed as smart chargers, only way to find out is give them a call and quote your PSL number.

Mine was only installed in November 2020.

It’s a beta app, I had to sign up to try, this was after I called them and they added me to the list, that was around January.

 

[Hedley Wright]

I wonder if this will work with the Agile tariff?

 

[BigAl]

You never know what the future may bring, I had mentioned this at the time when I asked them about the schedule charging & locking the charging point via an App, which they have been working on for many years.

As long as they can communicate with your supplier and get the rates, I can’t see why such feature cannot be created, but knowing pod point and there road map it could be many years away.

Goods news once the schedule charging has been released to all users, after the beta testing, you could schedule the cheap charging times manually, being the rates are normally published 24 hours beforehand.

It’s not ideal but it’s a work around until they sort the issue out, depends how good the technician are.

 

[dk6780]

I'm signed up for the Beta testing (it is confirmed on Google play) but haven't received the invite for v3.8.0 yet so am still on the stable 3.7.0.
It looks a step in the right direction to allow for off-peak and hopefully they will continue to add in more features in the future.

 

[BigAl]

I’m using IOS so maybe it was released a little earlier...

 

[b789pilot]

I'm on v3.8.0 (iPhone). I'm finding it a little bit flakey. When plugged in waiting for a charge, the light on the PodPoint goes either white or red. The car goes to sleep. About 2-3 minutes after the scheduled start of charge time the PodPoint comes alive and the car wakes up and accepts the charge. However, the day before yesterday, I scheduled an overnight charge of 2 hours so as not to fully charge the battery and it didn't come on. Yesterday I scheduled it again but this time it did work but didn't switch off, fully charged the car.

Anyone else got any experience with the app to update? I wasn't given any contact details for feedback.

 

[BigAl]

Charged twice by using the schedule within the pod point app, seem to work ok, I noticed it doesn’t start straight away, normally 5 minutes later, for example mine starts at 20:30, but kicks in at 20:35. If I use the car timer instead it works dead on 20:30 with no delays.

 

[dk6780]

Charged twice by using the schedule within the pod point app, seem to work ok, I noticed it doesn’t start straight away, normally 5 minutes later, for example mine starts at 20:30, but kicks in at 20:35. If I use the car timer instead it works dead on 20:30 with no delays.

@BigAl

Any chance of an update on your experience with this? There is still no sign of anything on Android. 😢

 

[b789pilot]

I can testify that over the last few days the PodPoint charging has been a bit of a disaster. A couple of days ago, every time I tried to set or adjust a schedule, the app would tell me that I can't overlap schedules and to try again or contact support. I checked every schedule and none were overlapping (going over midnight). I called PodPoint and the person I spoke to could see my schedules and was able to delete or adjust them. All of a sudden, one of the schedules was set for 23:30 - 02:00 although not active. I was able to adjust that schedule so that it did not go past midnight and all was well again.

Yesterday, I started getting a new message which was again preventing me from adjusting or creating schedules. The message this time was something similar saying that the start time should be before the end time. This is extremely frustrating as it prevents me from scheduling anything properly as it either immediately goes on to charge as soon as its plugged in and I cannot use the cars schedules charge start time.

For now I've reverted back to the standard app without the scheduling.

 

[dk6780]

Thanks for the update - it doesn't sound good. I'm amazed that they are finding it so difficult!

 

[Aleras]

Shame it's not working this would be great if they roed it out. I am waiting for a Pod Point to be installed.

 

[b789pilot]

It’ll be good when it works properly. Just a few bugs to iron out. What’s rubbish is their tech support or rather, lack of it.

 

[Troon]

I hope they provide an API for local access so I can control my car's charging via my home automation.

I sent feedback to the address in the email (app.feedback at pod-point.com) asking exactly that:

It would be very helpful if the charge start and stop could also be controlled via an API of some sort (REST? MQTT? Simple HTTP?), to allow use with home automation projects such as Home Assistant or IFTTT.

Personally, I would use this with Home Assistant and my LEAF to allow me to charge to a given battery percentage within the Octopus Go cheap period: it would allow actions like "start at the cheap time, finish at the end of the cheap time or 80% state of charge, whichever comes first".

The car has charge timers, but I cannot set a target state of charge, nor do I have any other method of automatically stopping the charge at the moment.

and got this back:

Thank you very much for your feedback, the details you have provided certainly are very useful; we often use customer feedback to help inform our next development for the app. The information you have provided will help us supplement the Charge scheduling feature.

UPDATE: looks like there already is an API, but it's protected with a secret key.

 

[Aleras]

This is open to everyone now but it didn't work for me when I tried last night. I plugged in an the car started charging but it wasn't in the scheduled time slot.

 

[dk6780]

Currently working for me. The UI is a bit clunky but there are worse and after three years waiting I'm grateful for anything.

 

[wyx087]

Thanks for the updated. I see the feature in my Pod-point app, even though I thought my charger is too old to be supported (installed end of 2017). I'll have to give it a try and report back.

I sent feedback to the address in the email (app.feedback at pod-point.com) asking exactly that:

and got this back:

UPDATE: looks like there already is an API, but it's protected with a secret key.

Nice to see another Home Assistant user. Your Email is exactly what I've been thinking. But from their reply, they doesn't seem to understand concept of localised access and control (core ethos of HA). Would be nice if we can simply access the pod-point local IP and issue commands to it like controlling a wifi plug.

The API looks more targeted towards public charge points with names like "claim charge" and "payment", I don't see anywhere that says start or stop charging.

 

[b789pilot]

I've found that the schedule only works for the midnight to midnight period. I had noticed over the last few days that after setting a sample 1 hour charge to come on in the evening, the next morning when I arrived at the car, it was showing as charging and the battery was full.

So, last night after having scheduled the PodPoint to charge for an hour earlier in the evening, I went to the car just before midnight and watched as the PodPoint went from the standby mode when waiting for a scheduled charge with the light green light to start charging the car and the light went to the solid green state. I unplugged the car as I didn't want it to fully charge again and the PodPoint light went to its normal blue/flashing magenta state.

I then set a schedule for later tonight (same 24 hour period midnight to midnight) and the PodPoint went into its standby mode with the light green light. So, even though originally only one schedule had been set and after that schedule had finished and the app stated that the next scheduled charge was an hour less than 7 days away, it still flipped at midnight back to its normal mode and if I'd left the car plugged in, it would have been fully charged which is not what I wanted.

I'll try again tonight with a one hour charge to top up after today's school runs but I'll also schedule another charge for Thursday night and see if it behaves as it's supposed to do.

In theory, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you have only one charge scheduled with your PodPoint, it shouldn't be able to charge outside of that schedule. When I was beta testing it and somehow I had a schedule set to cross over midnight (23:00-02:00) it bricked the app and I couldn't get it to change anything as it kept telling me that you can't schedule over two days. It took a few phone calls and emails to the PodPoint tech team to fix that as the schedule could only be changed or deleted at their end.

 

[Troon]

The API looks more targeted towards public charge points with names like "claim charge" and "payment", I don't see anywhere that says start or stop charging.

Yeah, agreed: with the current API it'd be a question of fudging the charge schedule and hoping it takes effect quickly enough. I ass-u-me that the schedule is stored in their servers and the unit is sent a start or stop command at the appropriate time. It might be possible to snoop on that via the router to see what's being sent, although it's probably encrypted.

As you say, it'd be good to have local network start/stop control without the bodge of flipping a contactor to rudely interrupt the charge or modifying the device with an ESP to provide a "person-in-the-middle" (PC version) in the control signal.

I suspect the reply was a standard form letter rather than a personalised response.