Which brand of charger do you have at the moment, @batpred?

We went with MyEnergi and got their Zappi. We’ve been impressed with almost everything about it, so I would happily say it’s acting like an adult. In particular:

• It integrates very well with the solar array, providing three charging modes; fast (the full 7kW for a predictable timescale), Eco (that will throttle charge up or down depending on how much our solar is producing, but maintaining at least 1.4kW since that’s the lowest charge rate it’ll handle) and Eco+ (same as Eco, but if solar drops below 1.4kW it’ll pause charging altogether)
• The app does allow for scheduling, boosting and so forth, but to be fair we never use it since…
• …there’s a very good Home Assistant integration that allows us to perform a number of sensible automations such as setting the home battery’s minimum charge level to 90% whilst the car is charging so that leccy for the car cones from either the solar PV or the grid, but not the battery.
• It’s one of the few chargers that is supplied with a physical ethernet port so you can lock down your wifi better.
• It integrates well with TOU tariffs if you want to use the app that way, although we do it through Home Assistant.

When the installer did their initial survey, they requested an isolator switch be installed. Octopus sorted that promptly and admitted MyEnergi are one of the few installers to be that fastidious. For me, wanting peace of mind that the work’s been done safely, that was a real plus point.

There are only two minor gripes I have with it. Firstly is that you can’t give it a fixed IP address; you can only give it a static lease. Secondly is that they still haven’t managed to turn off the demand side response meaning the charging may be sometimes delayed by 10 minutes unless we go into the app and hit “ignore and charge now anyway”.

As for being kind to the grid, we have another HA integration to pull the current carbon intensity of the power being generated for our region. We are able to include that in our automations as we see fit.

Thanks for sharing. 🙂 

To be honest, right now I have a much better sense of what matters. I believe that I have things ready in my HA to be able to drive any dumb socket (or a wifi enabled consumer unit switch by the way..) to charge a car (readers, use a qualified electrician). But I will not be able to give it the care and attention it would need. The goal is to buy one ready to use. I appreciate the extent you go on carbon intensity, we just use price as a proxy.

Behaving like a grown-up appliance, ahem have to admit this was vague. What I mean is one that you can just do the minimum typing needed and you can rely on it. Like you plug the socket. Swipe a card or similar, off it goes. Next morning, it is ready. 😀 

So I should share my experience with my leading brand charger (will omit the name as I assume they grew out of beta testing it with clients so aggressively; but it is not a chinese brand):  

• Reliability: for a long time, it was not charging reliably. I call them, they ask all the obvious questions. But keep talking about their suspicion it is a GSM or 5G of whatever issue. Then they started talking about disconnecting from my BMW API, reboot, program again. This cycle repeated for what felt like over 10 times and maybe three months. 
• Do what it says on the tin: when I set a price, a time for the battery to be ready and it does not tells you quicky: yes or no. It takes ages to get back to you, eventually it confirmed that it will charge to the 80% I need. It then forgot to adjust the time the battery will be  ready. Little things. You close the app, go to sleep and the next morning, I would have to be lucky if my partner is not using the fossil fuel car! 
• No “beta features” that turns us into lab mice testers: halfway though the problems, they alerted me that using agile tariff and/or being able to get the battery level were beta features. Since this was 6 months into what I thought was a ready product (but they must have tagged me as "guinea pig 123"). And I would need to get an electrician to send it back, they must have assumed I was essentially that little mouse inside the cage.. And they could decide to ignore reports, no matter how extensive reports they requested .. The business case was simple: no need to feed the mice, as they after themselves in the wilderness; we just decide if and when we pay attention to them. And they better not make any noise anywhere..
• It thinks my driveway is under the 5G mast: my charger is completely wireless, via 3g or whatever. A great excuse, most problems were blamed on "connectivity". 
• The charger was essentially deceive the BMW/Mini API security protections: When I asked their "floating" helpdesk (home office with no ability to reach out to the product/technical team), they kept saying it is a problem with BMW, their API is rubbish. It started to stink after a few weeks. And so a new friendship with BMW was established...

I will spare you the details of when they had real struggles with handling the Octopus Agile, when the look and feel was changed: a shambolic rollout. You would think with a London base, they would know that agile development still requires testing, attention to customer communication..  But no need for it, just go double heavy on marketing. And keep the little mice in cages. 

If all I had was loosing 10 minutes of charging.. 😉 

Posted by: @batpred

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To be honest, right now I have a much better sense of what matters. I believe that I have things ready in my HA to be able to drive any dumb socket

This is what I do, but I have a very simple economy 7 like tarrif (EON Next Drive) so the settings are trivial.  EV-rated 13A wall socket, 'granny' charger, Shelley 16A relay, HA.  The Shelley relay can do timing without external control, but before I got the Next Drive I had a more sophisticated automation running on HA aimed at mopping up excess solar, so I stuck with HA to automate.   Currently there is no point in trying to mop up excess solar, Next Drive night time import 7p, export 15p, so its best (and simplest) just to charge (and do anything else that is possible) at night and export during the day.

Posted by: @jamespa

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Posted by: @batpred

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To be honest, right now I have a much better sense of what matters. I believe that I have things ready in my HA to be able to drive any dumb socket

This is what I do, but I have a very simple economy 7 like tarrif (EON Next Drive) so the settings are trivial.  EV-rated 13A wall socket, 'granny' charger, Shelley 16A relay, HA.  

Thanks! My consumer unit collection is ready with the WiFi switch and suitably typed  RCBO. It is very easy and tempting to just spend £150-200 on a safe charger that my ha could drive as a dumb socket. 😁

But part of the goal is also to help calm the ones screaming on Facebook since end of September. This is about their mini not being ready for their morning commute. Shame on the ev charger company. Perhaps the shareholders see value to have their mice.

But for the moment that fossil fuel car of ours is a good backup....it used to run out of battery . Now it has a solar panel for peace of mind! 😉

I sense the Wallbox could work  Like the zappy, I believe it works on cable or WiFi. And if I am not mistaken, it could even handle agile rates... Technically, the question is whether they implement the car API connection as per iso standards CarData.

They may not allow that simple rule of two levels of charge.. But the company ethics seemed to eliminate lab features or treating paying customers as mice.  Commuters have a low threshold for both of them, I believe..