[Simon..Hewison]

Is it possible to sign up to Octopus Intelligent without an Ohme charger or compatible car? So, just using schedule charge between 11.30pm and 5.30am to get cheaper 10p rate?

I realise you’d have to state that you have an Ohme charger to sign up when you don’t have an EV on the compatible list, but other than that is there any other checks. If you never plan to use the smart charging capability, does it matter to Octopus?

Thanks, Steve

Have they publicly defined the API that they require? Clearly they'll want to be able to signal cheaper rates to the charge point, so the OHME integration that appears to allow any car to work with it could be done by any regular OCPP compliant charge point, not just Ohme with some proprietary method, if it's appropriately configured.

 

[Simon..Hewison]

Correct. The Ohme works a bit differently to a standard charging point in that it talks to the car in the same way that a rapid charger does.

Not so. the standard AC pilot signal can't do that. CCS, Chademo, GB-T and Tesla proprietary supercharger use different methods to communicate between the vehicle and charge point.
Chademo and GB-T use CAN bus, CCS and Tesla use variants of Powerline networking. None of these require the Internet to be connected anywhere.

The Ohme works by connecting to your car manufacturer's internet-facing API, which in turn will try to communicate via cellular data to your car, to wake it up, and report back on the state of charge. This clearly means that both the Ohme unit, and your car need to have Internet connectivity at the same time, and it also means that the OHME smart charging functionality that this works with cannot work sensibly if you have multiple vehicles, or multiple Ohme chargers, because the signalling goes over the Internet.
From the Ohme website: 'Some car manufacturers provide an API (Application Programming Interface) which allows access to information about your car via your manufacturer’s smartphone app.'

There is the new Plug & Charge protocols, which can use CCS-like signalling for negotiating AC charging, but at present very few cars actually support it (VAG MEB platform is one), and you'd need the support from both the charge point and the vehicle, but at least that way, you could tell which one of your possibly compatible cars is physically connected to which one of your compatible charge points at potentially different locations. This would increase the complexity of a standard home charger by requiring something akin to a powerline modem in there, as well as running a full IP protocol stack on that interface (in addition to any local, or 'cloudy' networking it does). This therefore increases the price point of the charge point.

 

[Simon..Hewison]

I thought PnC was also DC only? Interesting to see its on the AC side too.

It's there to support AC bi-directional charging.
Not all AC charge points use the J.1172 style pilot signalling. Teslas do something weird for the destination charging, because Teslas know how to switch protocols to their own proprietary stuff, which seems to be loosely based on the CCS style signalling over powerline. Plug & Charge for AC works in a similar fashion.
Most cars these days already have the powerline modem hardware needed for CCS, so it makes sense to re-use it for AC signalling.
Of course, most AC charge points today don't have the powerline modem hardware installed to support it, they can only cope with the J.1172 style pilot signal.

Once it's there, and once vehicles support it by default, and once charging networks support it by default, then things should be a lot smoother.
An advange of Plug & Charge over other authentication methods is that it's digitally signed, the car provides certificate digitally signed by a mobility service provider that says that for a given expiry time, the driver is in good standing. That certificate is held offline by the car. A charge point can query it, and confirm (even if offline) that the signature was good at the time it was issued, and even if the car is offline, there's no connectivity to the charge point, the charge point can accurately record who's been charging (or discharging), so that when connectivity comes back, the pending transactions can upload.

Of course, I'm a bit bitter about it, because Peugeot decided not to implement Plug & Charge, and even if they did, and if the cars already on the road have the hardware. it would probably only be on cars leaving the factory. They can't even get around to releasing a simple dashboard software fix to display state of charge. They're claiming it's a hardware difference.

Part of being able to do bi-directional charging in public is the charging network knowing which vehicle's owner they should reimburse for energy removed from their battery pack, hence Plug & Charge will identify the contract owner through the vehicle.

 

[Simon..Hewison]

Interesting insight thanks.

One thing, I'm sure its in the specs, but how does Plug and Charge play with multiple companies/apps offering different rates to the same charger? Say with my Enyaq (and V3.1 which has PnC), I rock up to Ionity (which supports PnC), I can charge using either my Skoda PowerPass (Elli), Octopus Electo-whatever or Bonnet. Is there scope to be able to pick which one would be used for PnC? At the moment, Skoda are saying their implementation will only work via PowerPass. AFAIK, and I've not seen it in the wild, you can install the cert from the SkodaConnect app which I assume is somehow linked to PowerPass. Would be ideal if you could plug in and it was like hey, you've signed up with these 3 providers, which one do you want to use, but I'm also wondering if they've missed that trick with it and you can only have one cert and whoever Ionity sign up with is who you're left with if you want to use PnC. PowerPass being VWG, its likely only to work in their little world rather than a real standard to open up operability like it should.

A car can have multiple contracts loaded, and you can choose which one to present, much like you can with Google Wallet or Apple Pay when using contactless payment.
Whether Skoda or the rest of VAG have implemented as such or have tried to put in some Tesla-style vendor lock-down is another matter.
Sorry, you can only buy your petrol via a SkodaFuel card, or such nonsense.
Powerpass is just a rebranding of Elli, so I bet you'll find that Elli will work.

In most cases, for things like card payments the choice of payment methods for most stuff is fairly irrelevant, just debit or credit - you have to pay for it sooner or later, but there's some nonsense like if I pay using my credit card, they'll sting me silly fees if ever I dare to pay in a currency other than sterling, whereas my current account debit card just charges the inter-bank buy rates for Euro or USD.