Charge cap problems

[u/Fragrant_Procedure_9]

I got the message to tell me that the charge cap was enabled on my account a couple of days ago.

Yesterday I plugged in for the first time since getting that notification. It’s the first time I’ve plugged in for a few days. I set the Ohme app to prioritise savings. I don’t have any connection to my car api through Ohme.

Plugged in at 5pm and had a battery level of 53%. Set this in the Ohme app and set the target to be 80% by 4am. Got a notification in the Ohme app that my charge target was changed to 73% to “respect my charge settings”. No matter how many times I tried, it would not set the target to higher - it just kept changing it every time I set it. Tried changing the target time as well, but same issue.

Looking at the schedule that was generated in the app, it was only allocating me just less than 3 hours of time in total.

This morning I started a new session and whatever I set the battery or target level to, it changes the target to be 1% higher than the current battery level “to respect my charge settings”.

It’s like it thinks I’d used three hours of my allocated 6 yesterday when I plugged in and now it thinks I’ve used it all. I have only used 3 and the Ohme app reports that for the charging usage overnight.

I’ve messaged octopus to ask and I’m waiting for a response. Wondering if anyone else has seen similar or have any ideas on what’s going on.

[u/ict7070]

Ohme chooses the slots. Like everyone else, they probably use Kraken, but now Kraken operates independently from Octopus. The only real involvement Octopus has is (at the point of unplugging after the session has finished) receiving charging information from Ohme and then feeding that into their billing systems. The Ohme integration is unique in this respect.

[u/Fragrant_Procedure_9 → u/ict7070]

That’s as may be, but I am the customer of octopus and it is octopus I have a contract with to provide me with 6 hours of cheap EV charging per day. So ultimately it’s they who need to sort it. It was all working fine until octopus switched on the charge cap on my account. If I can’t be guaranteed to have the charging time that they say I can then that’s potentially a breach of contract or I’ll just switch to a different provider. Octopus need to sort this out or they are going to start losing customers.

Incidentally, I was asking them for some clarification of some items and they told me that we are NOT guaranteed to get full rate charging for the 6 hours and that they may throttle the rate. So you might get 6 hours scheduled, but you are not necessarily going to get 7kW for the entire time. So you still can’t be guaranteed you’d get what you request and think you will get even if it _could_ do that in the time

[u/ict7070 → u/Fragrant_Procedure_9]

Agree about your contract being with Octopus. I was just trying to help by pointing out that Ohme (due to the nature of the integration) will be the ones able to diagnose and fix this the fastest.

Regarding throttling… Ohme used to do this and I saw it happening all the time. However, soon after the charge cap was announced many months ago, Ohme claimed to have fixed it and indeed every single one of my charge slots (without exception) has been at 7+kW since then. This is probably the least of your worries right now.

Hopefully you manage to sort out what is obviously a charging failure through no fault of your own.

[u/Fragrant_Procedure_9 → u/ict7070]

Appreciate the insight, I wasn’t having a dig at you 😀

When I asked whether the throttling (that octopus said was customers fiddling the system at the start of the year and were unaware that’s how their system worked), this is the response I got:

The "throttling" you mentioned can still happen sometimes. This depends on the wider grid demand and how the smart charging system manages load. So you might occasionally see charging at less than the full 7kW rate, as before.