Chris

It turns out that Intelligent Octopus GO is a tad … flaky … when it attempts to control a domestic EV charger’s overnight schedule. I registered my Indra charger in my Octopus app and allowed it to begin setting schedules. I noted that having signed in to Indra via the Octopus app in order to allow this to happen, it then became impossible to set schedules directly in the Indra app (fair enough).

However over 3 weeks, Octopus would, on average, once a week, simply not charge the car at all. Thankfully my daily mileage is so low the car can easily go 3-4 days without a charge and if need be I could manually charge it in an hour, so no big deal, but even so, not working as advertised.

I have to say however that I’ve found Octopus support via Twitter to be absolutely brilliant. Responsive, happy to discuss details and deal with tons of screenshots of various apps and timings of things that worked and didn’t. It really feels like this is a mission for them, that they want to get right.

At the moment, at their request, I have de-registered my charger from the Octopus app and am using my Indra charger app directly to schedule overnight charges. Once we have a couple of weeks’ data we will be able to rule out a fault with the charger (of course they’re not perfect, their first instinct was to blame Indra, but at least they’ve still been prepared to engage and test that idea). So far, scheduling directly with the Indra charger’s own app has worked flawlessly.

And, also worth noting, while you are meant to have a compatible device registered with Octopus in order to get the super cheap Intelligent GO overnight rate (7p) as opposed to the slightly less cheap and fewer hours regular GO overnight rate (8p), they have intervened to manually keep my account on Intelligent GO for the duration of our experiment. Altogether I’m pretty impressed with the way they’re bug-fixing what is still a fairly new product.