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EV general discussion

lordrobs said:
If you aren't going to bother load shifting / scheduling around the cheap slots and don't have a home battery to charge then the difference is so small I think many people would do better to just stick with a standard off peak rate.

Electric driving is so cheap anyway that the extra couple of pence saving equates to about £30 for someone doing 7500 miles a year. Add in base load savings and you might push that to £50 a year if comparing Octopus intelligent Go verses standard Go.

If it's set and forget then that is a decent saving. If you find yourself faffing about resetting chargers and fiddling about in apps daily then it would depend on the individual as to whether it was still worth it.

If/when Octopus start strictly enforcing the 6 hours of cheap rate charging then the equation shifts even more towards those offering the longest off peak rate verses the best off peak rate.
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The price difference is not huge but there is the added benefit of getting slots outside of the normal time also.

I don’t agree with the notion that you need to fiddle with apps every day, that is rather exaggerating the reality.

Just set the charge limit to whatever you’d normally set it to once and plug the car in. There is no more ‘fiddling’ than with a standard charger.

Even if you have charger control rather than car control, just set it to the max you can put in in 6 hours because that’s all you are getting anyway and leave it alone. Who gives two cares if you only need 10% and you ask for 70%, you might get an extra slot or two, happy days right?
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
The price difference is not huge but there is the added benefit of getting slots outside of the normal time also.

I don’t agree with the notion that you need to fiddle with apps every day, that is rather exaggerating the reality.

Just set the charge limit to whatever you’d normally set it to once and plug the car in. There is no more ‘fiddling’ than with a standard charger.

Even if you have charger control rather than car control, just set it to the max you can put in in 6 hours because that’s all you are getting anyway and leave it alone. Who gives two cares if you only need 10% and you ask for 70%, you might get an extra slot or two, happy days right?
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I don't disagree, but those additional slots don't necessarily gain you much unless you actively use them. I can only speak personally but between the full time working plus family life chaos I can absolutely guarantee that I wouldn't be changing my plans based on Greg's scheduling. I guess if they happend to fall when I'm cooking dinner or doing the panic "he hasn't got a clean shirt for school tomorrow" quick wash then it's all extra savings. To be honest the only consistent load shifting I do is delaying the dishwasher.

I said if with regards to the apps as I have no experience of them personally but I read on here people talking about setting charge settings daily. I also read about people going in to the app to see what slots they have and to make sure that charging happens at the right rate. The only comparison I do have to that is my daily routine of plug in and push the little clock button next to the charge port if I want to charge off peak.

The key points are that EV plus anything other than peak rate electricity = cheap as chips motoring. Secondly, that isn't reliant on intelligent charging or having a "smart" charger. That just adds the chocolate sprinkles to the icing on the cake in terms of cost savings.
 
tom_e said:
I think a lot of us have/are shifting to EDF recently.
Longer off peak, better rates, £5 credit a month for using intelligent charging and currently a £75 refferal bonus running.
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My concern with EDF is their customer service. I bought a house at the tail end of 2014, and it took them 18 months to send me a bill. Throughout those 18 months, the service and responses I received were utterly atrocious. That's even after going via the CEO escalation route.
 
@lordrobs some people are nuts but ultimately they can save a material amount of cash by being absolutely militant about manipulating the schedule to happen at peak times.

Meanwhile the vast majority of us just set the charge to 80% (or whatever your daily recommended charge amount is) and forget about it unless you need more than an 80% charge in which case you’d have to adjust something regardless of whether you are using smart charging or not.

Even if you have batteries, you quickly realise its way too much work to actually match up the schedules manually because they change throughout the time you are plugged in. So you either automate it which is set and forget or don’t bother and just charge them in the fixed off peak period.
 
ChrisD. said:
My concern with EDF is their customer service. I bought a house at the tail end of 2014, and it took them 18 months to send me a bill. Throughout those 18 months, the service and responses I received were utterly atrocious. That's even after going via the CEO escalation route.
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They use Kraken now which is the same system as octopus to run all their backend, billing etc.
 
ChrisD. said:
My concern with EDF is their customer service. I bought a house at the tail end of 2014, and it took them 18 months to send me a bill. Throughout those 18 months, the service and responses I received were utterly atrocious. That's even after going via the CEO escalation route.
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Unfortunately I don't think you'll find much good service these days, plenty of people complain that octopus cs has gone downhill, BG have been rubbish for me in the past.
So far the interactions I've had with EDF cs has been half decent.
 
bigmike20vt said:
they already are. they started rolling it out 2 or 3 months back
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Indeed it has, but not sure how much it really has any impact as I can get 6 full hours per day on top of the 23:30 to 05:30 off-peak rate, on an average week day if I plugged in a 19:00 I'd still get nearly all of my slots after this at cheap rate, until 23:30 when it goes cheap anyhow.
 
BYD under fire in Australia after investigation reveals its cars carry out surveillance and send that back to China and owners can't opt out of the surveillance

www.abc.net.au

EV brand BYD erases 'China' and 'surveillance' from its privacy policy

The original policy gave the company almost unlimited powers to collect data on its Australian vehicle owners and broad discretion on how this could be disclosed.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 
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Grim5 said:
BYD under fire in Australia after investigation reveals its cars carry out surveillance and send that back to China and owners can't opt out of the surveillance

www.abc.net.au

EV brand BYD erases 'China' and 'surveillance' from its privacy policy

The original policy gave the company almost unlimited powers to collect data on its Australian vehicle owners and broad discretion on how this could be disclosed.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
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I only skim read it but didn't that article say they had a policy in place that said they could capture data. When challenged they removed the policy which indicates it was something they threw in there but never acted on.

We have policies coming out of our ying yangs of stuff we "may" or "could" do to keep doors open but only a fraction are ever actually utilised.
 
lordrobs said:
I only skim read it but didn't that article say they had a policy in place that said they could capture data. When challenged they removed the policy which indicates it was something they threw in there but never acted on.

We have policies coming out of our ying yangs of stuff we "may" or "could" do to keep doors open but only a fraction are ever actually utilised.
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Imagine they're not the only one just like LG is not the only TV spying on its users and sending your data overseas. It's good to see companies being held accountable somewhat for their privacy breaches but we need better laws for this stuff
 
Maybe I should be more worried about this stuff but I can't really see what data my car would have on me that I really give two hoots about even if it went directly to Xi's chief minister for mischief and no-good.

Then again I sell the data that some people are so concerned about to Google for a few pence at a time via Google Rewards :p
 
lordrobs said:
Maybe I should be more worried about this stuff but I can't really see what data my car would have on me that I really give two hoots about even if it went directly to Xi's chief minister for mischief and no-good.

Then again I sell the data that some people are so concerned about to Google for a few pence at a time via Google Rewards :p
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I always make sure to say goodnight in Chinese to the unfortunate soul tasked with monitoring my phone…
 
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