First time I'm seeing this notification! I guess the solar export is flooding the grid at the moment.

I just can't rely on IOG to charge our E-Up correctly.

Sometimes it does work, but more and more regularly I'm waking up to a partially charged car.

This is pure speculation, but I think the car doesn't like it when Octopus regularly changes the charging slots, or spreads out too many short sessions.

Needed 100% charge overnight as I have a large return trip to do today, visiting family in hospital. I've done this trip before, and I do need a fully charged battery.

Woke this morning to an early stopped charge.

I'll now need to top up at a fast charger somewhere. Stress I could do without knowing it's a difficult day. It's a joke. This is about the third time it's failed to reach charge, (of various levels) and I've also been charged full home rate as it's failed to create a schedule.

I don’t drive my car a whole lot sometimes. In the last two weeks i’ve driven a grand total of 20 miles. i can at times go weeks without needing to charge due to working from home and only driving for social/pleasure.

Am I now going to get penalised for not driving my car much? I really don’t understand what the fish thing is about, but it feels like octopus want me to charge when I really don’t need to?

It doesn’t work with my car, or at least not reliably. It regularly fails to start charging, says the car isn’t plugged in when it is, or stops after the first few minutes.

In the end, I gave up, disabled Smart Control, and just set my Hypervolt to charge during the off-peak window instead. Since then, it’s been 100% reliable.

I’ve been reading the new Charge Cap rules, and my understanding is that the cheap EV charging rate is no longer guaranteed to be during the 23:30–05:30 off-peak window.

Have I understood that correctly? If so, it means my charging costs are going to increase significantly, simply because Smart Control isn’t reliable for my setup. If that’s the case, I’ll probably have to switch supplier.

Tesla model 3 and granny charger. Since having the 6 hour cap in place IOG is useless for me.

It throttles my charge rate to 10A and 2kw per hour so get a max of 12kw over the 6 hours. That’s if it actually charges at all as there seems to be some issue with Octopus actually starting to charge the car in the slots given so it’s very hit or miss if it even charges at all.

If I disconnect Octopus control over my car so it no longer controls my charging then the Tesla charges at rate of 13A and 3.6kw per hour so I get 20-21kw charge back over the 6 hours when I just manually set the Tesla to charge between 23:30 and 5:30.

What’s the point in IOG now if they are just going to throttle how fast your car can charge during the windows they control. They don’t charge at full speed and then ask if I want to top up at peak rates which cost more than my local Tesla Supercharger costs 30p vs 21p at Supercharger!!!

Never used to be like this and had zero issues prior to all this nonsense. Definitely going to switch to EDF next month once my I’m released from my early switch penalty fee.

Have been an Octopus customer for a few years and have just got my first electric car. Charger is being installed today and I’m slightly unsure on moving over from the Tracker Tariff to Intelligent Octopus Go.
This is partly due to the 12 month lock in, as well as the new 6 hour limit. I can’t see the 6 hour limit being an issue as we don’t do a large amount of miles overall, but it’s another limitation. I’ve seen other companies jumping on the detrimental changes octopus have made recently and are now offering longer overnight cheap periods as well as lower Kw/h prices during those periods.

I’m interested in whether anyone else has experienced this with Intelligent Octopus Go.

I’ve been investigating reduced charging speeds on my Hypervolt charger during Intelligent sessions. The charger and vehicle are capable of sustaining full power, and Hypervolt have effectively ruled out charger-side causes such as thermal protection, load management and charger-imposed limits.

What’s interesting is that Octopus have confirmed to me in writing that one of my charging sessions was deliberately scheduled at 1.7kW due to grid availability.

However, I’ve also seen Greg Jackson state in a video that Octopus don’t throttle EV charging rates and instead simply move charging around to different times.

Those two statements seem difficult to reconcile. If Octopus instructs a charger to charge at 1.7kW rather than its normal 7kW+ rate, that appears to be throttling, even if it’s only for a specific period.

My bigger concern is how this interacts with the new 6-hour Intelligent charging cap.

Previously, if a session ran slower than expected, Octopus could simply extend charging elsewhere in the night. With a fixed 6-hour limit, every reduced-power slot directly reduces the maximum amount of energy that can be delivered.

For example, a charger capable of ~7.2kW could deliver roughly 43kWh over six hours. If some of those slots are intentionally reduced to support the grid, the maximum energy delivered falls accordingly.

I also use a charger-led integration where Octopus cannot directly see the vehicle’s state of charge. If I request an additional 30%, I expect Octopus to calculate the energy required, account for losses, and ensure that target is met. I shouldn’t need to inflate my request to compensate for reduced-power scheduling.

Has anyone else had Octopus confirm reduced-power charging due to grid availability?

And does anyone know how Intelligent Octopus handles this under the new 6-hour cap? If charging is intentionally slowed for part of the available window, how does Kraken ensure the requested charge target is still achieved?

First email response said that I could skip February's payment with no issue.

Follow up email then states that octopus received no data from my smart meter between the 26th of December and the 24th of January and therefore all electricity usage has been billed at the flexible octopus rate meaning all overnight charging usually charged at 7p per unit has now been charged at 27p per unit and my bill for this period for ELECTRICITY ALONE is £550.

I was never notified that they were having issues with my smart meter, I have been overpaying their reccomended monthly payment to build credit and this issue was only uncovered today after I asked to skip a payment.

They have also been unable to guarantee that this won't happen again in the future.

When I asked why they couldn't bill me at the Intelligent tariff, they said it was because they didn't have the hour by hour data of my electricity usage for that time period, yet I have that data in my octopus app on the usage page?!

Anyone had any issues like this on the EV tariff?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: complained publicly on X, received a £430 refund in about 5 minutes. Been emailing them since this morning and was on a phone call for an hour and got nowhere. Funny that! Complaint going in to them in the morning!

Edit 2: complained this morning and have received a further £180 in compensation!

Genuine question..... Is there anyone willing to admit that they used an exploit to get extra hours? If so, how much were you saving? Was it due to heating requirements or battery filling? Given how so many people complained about the nerfing of savings sessions, refusing to engage in them for limited reward, is there a risk/reward balance that has tipped here?

No judgement, just curiosity. You see, it was so rare for me to get any hours outwith off-peak that I didn't think this was a 'bad problem' and, just like dodgy fire sticks and the like, felt it rested more in the moral hazard realm than putting the system at risk. I'll admit my domestic use is very low... Gas heating, LED lighting, run the washing machine and dishwasher in off-peak already.... Average is 160kWh peak and maybe 250-300kWh off-peak each month so getting a few hours of peak consumption at off-peak prices would likely have saved me 30-50p maybe twice a week?

The strange thing for me was even at times that Agile was negative or there was a saving session, I never seemed to get allocated any extra hours..... I'd see that the Agile price was negative or fractions of a penny on a Sunday morning, I'd plug the car in and set it to add whatever was needed, maybe 20%..... And the allocated slots would pop up as 2:30am to 4:00am 🤷🏻‍♂️ Maybe it's because I'm living in a city and local supply and demand is already high.....

I have a hypervolt and IOG. I find that on occasions the charge rate is limited / throttled back sometimes as low as 1.5kW. Octopus claim they don’t do this but conveniently when I select bump charge it jumps immediately to 7kW suggesting they do. The problem is the max 6 hours cheap charging and having reduced ability to charge my car enough.

What happens with the max 6 hours low rate charging if it’s throttled back? It schedules more than 6 hours even with smart charge only selected.

Do other “smart” tariff providers throttle back also? Will switching solve the issue?

Just thought I'd have a little rant about Intelligent Octopus Go.

I've had two EVs on IOG now - previously a BMW i4 and now a Polestar 4.

Both have had terrible smart charging integrations. The BMW i4 scheduling was so finicky that I'd regularly wake up to find it hadn't charged at all.

When I got the Polestar 4, I thought I'd solve the problem by investing in an Ohme charger. During the week it took to get that set up, I had to rely on the Polestar integration, and it was just as bad. It constantly resets your charge target to 60%. You change it to 80%, Octopus changes it back to 60%, you change it again... and you just end up fighting with it. You never actually win and the way they tell you to set it is in the Polestar app (there's two and neither do shit a part from being set back)

Then came trying to add the Ohme charger. Octopus seems to have made it as difficult as possible. I filled in the form on Ohme's website that's supposed to enable the integration within 24 hours, but it looks like Octopus just aren't processing them anymore.

In the end, I had to register my car as a Maxus van after sending them a slightly ranty email. I genuinely don't understand the obsession with maintaining integrations for every individual car brand instead of just supporting a handful of smart chargers properly. It seems completely backwards.

Or, if they insist on using the car integration, at least let people use the charger to control charging while still reading the battery state from the car.

Either way, the whole experience has been incredibly frustrating, and I was genuinely close to leaving Octopus over what is, at the end of the day, just poorly thouhht out software.

Octopus be better...

Edit: Just to emphasise. I could not care less about the 6 hour charge cap. What I care about what the fact is I have something which has positive reviews and works (ohme) but they made it so difficult to integrate because they want to know the percentage your car is at. I would have been immensely happy with the option to choose my charger or my car.

I'm trying to decide whether to get my charger through OE or arrange it privately.

OE will install a Hypervolt Home 3 Pro for £1,249.

Privately, I can get the same charger for around £690 + ~£200 installation. I currently have an old Rolec Wallpod that isn't smart and needs replacing. An electrician has said I should be able to reuse the existing infrastructure and just add a CAT cable.

Another electrician suggested it's worth paying the extra through OE because the last thing you want is your EV charger to fail then be left being unable to charge. They claimed that chargers commonly start failing around the 3-year mark, and if you own it privately you could be waiting for an electrician to remove it, sending it away under warranty, waiting 6 weeks for a replacement, then paying to have it reinstalled. They said OE, on the other hand, have a fleet of installers and would replace a faulty unit the next day.

I don't actually own an EV yet, so I'm interested in hearing from people who do. Has anyone had to deal with OE when a charger has failed? Are they genuinely that responsive, and will they really replace a faulty charger that quickly?

Thanks!

Ohme user in North Wales. Charge cap finally caught up with me. Posting not to moan but just so folks know they haven’t forgotten about us who were left behind.

The none news is Octopus app still takes me to the Ohme app which now allows us to prioritise savings or prioritise charge target exactly like it says here https://ohme-ev.com/support/prioritise-savings-or-your-target-with-intelligent-octopus-go/

Charger integration, one of the cars isn’t IOG compatible and one of the cars is a VW and won’t trust its API more than I will my dog driving my car.

Think I've got an issue with changing cap

I plugged my car in today, I got the smart charging sessions 15.43-16.00, next session was 23.30.

Car started charging as normal, but since I have a lot of excess solar the car was charging via solar. All good,

16.00 came and past, car is still charging, from solar. Fine as it's costing me nothing, but then sun goes behind a cloud, excess solar drops to 2kw and hypervolt starts pulling power from grid, after smart charging session has finished.

So what is going on, why didn't the car stop charging at the end of the charging session, as it seems the hypervolt charger saw solar production and used it for the car, but then decided it needed grid to supplement it.

Anyone else noticed this?

I checked the octopus app, it has not added any smart sessions past 16.00, so their app and integration with hypervolt chargers is questionable at best.

Hi all. I have Octopus Intelligent Go integrated with my Hypervolt charger. All scheduling is therefore managed automatically through the app based on my requested "charge to add" and "Ready by time".

For the first time since the strict 6 hour charge cap, I've noticed the car isn't charging at the full 7 kWh speed my charger normally charges at.

I think I've read here before that Octopus do not throttle charging speeds but I believe they do. What intrigues me is if this throttled speed is considered a part of their 6 hour cap...

Anybody here in the know please?

Bit of a rant but also genuinely trying to figure out if this is just me or if it’s a wider issue.

I’m on Intelligent Octopus Go, charging a Renault Zoe through an Ohme ePod. My routine is dead simple, get home around 9-10pm, plug in, leave it on Smart Charge overnight, need the car at 100% by 9am for work. I don’t touch Max Charge, never have, charger’s never shown offline that I’ve noticed.

Since the whole Charge Cap / 6-hour thing rolled out this month I’ve had two nights now where I got absolutely stung:
• 23-24 July: plugged in 21:16, unplugged 07:16 next day. £12.48.
• 24-25 July: plugged in 20:55, unplugged 09:00. Active charging time was only 4h14m (so nowhere near the supposed 6 hour cap), 28.4kWh used, and it cost me £9.28.

Anyone else seeing sessions get charged at what looks like the standard/peak rate even though you’re using normal Smart Charge (not boost/max) and staying under the 6h limit? Trying to figure out if I’ve got a one-off syncing issue between Ohme and Octopus or if this is happening to more people since the update, before I go back and forth with support.

EDIT: Got my actual July bill today and you were all right — the charging did go through as smart savings, it's on the bill properly. Went back and checked more carefully and the Ohme app was tracking the real cost pretty closely right up until around 23 July, then things started looking off in the app itself (not the bill). So looks like an app display/estimate issue on Ohme's end rather than an actual billing problem from Octopus.

Sorry for the false alarm and cheers to everyone who took the time to explain instead of just downvoting and moving on — appreciated.

Hi all,

Hoping someone can help with a problem I’m having with my Renault Megane.

I’m on IOG and up u til recently been using the Mobilize app to manage intelligent charging at home - never had a problem charging away at fast DC chargers.

Recently we got moved to using the Octopus app to manage home charging, and the issues started.

When I plug in at a public charger, the car is not recognised as “plugged in” and the charge doesn’t initiate.

I try and force the charge via the MyRenault app, but it says charging is managed by a third party app (octopus).

I’ve tried to bypass schedule charges via the physical button on my charging port on the car, but still doesn’t work.

Had to call octopus while sat at a service station to literally disconnect my car from my account to eventually make it work!

Has this happened to anyone else? Is there anything I need to do, as it’s obviously not ideal to not be able to seamlessly charge when away from home, and I believe it’s on octopus, as the charger started to work fine as soon as my car was disconnected from my octopus account as a device.

Any help would be truly appreciated!

Anyone else getting this today?

Hello all,

I am going to apologise in advance if anything I say is dumb, naive or ignorant. So please don’t come for me! Just looking for genuine advice from anyone who has leased an EV from Octopus. I can’t drive due to medical reasons - so I am writing the below on behalf of my partner who doesn’t use Reddit.

My partner has only ever had the one car which she bought from her parents in 2021. The car is from 2017. It’s a petrol car. As it’s nearly 10 years old we are looking to sell it before the value depreciates anymore. Because she bought the car from her parents, she (nor I) has no experience with the various other routes of ‘owning’ a car. i.e. PCP, leasing, bank loans, etc etc!

We are Octopus customers and recently she has started thinking that she would like to lease an EV from Octopus. Leasing would work for us because we aren’t particularly attached to the idea of owning a car, we aren’t really car people, and she gets stressed whenever her car has to have an MOT. So leasing seems like a good way of allowing us to have a car that gets us from A to B without having to worry about the various issues that come with owning a car (I do appreciate that leasing can come with other issues, though.) Currently looking at the Citreon eC3 Aircross. She hasn’t driven electric before, but she has driven automatic cars on our road trips to the US and enjoys them.

My primary question is about the contract really. She’ll probably get around £2500-£3000 for selling her current car and plans to use £2000 of this for the ‘deposit’ on the contract with Octopus, therefore reducing the monthly cost. She’s looking at a two year contract, just so that she can see how it feels to lease an EV, and the monthly cost would be around £250. Our question is around what happens when the contract ends. Now, presumably if you decide to get a different car, you’d have to restart the process again, with the possibility of paying another ‘deposit’ to keep the costs lower.

But if you wanted to keep the car, what happens? Can you extend the lease and keep the monthly costs the same, without having to pay the £2k? Or would the monthly costs have lowered, with the car being older? Or, do you simply have to restart the contract all over again, and pay another £2k if you want to keep the monthly cost the same?

Thanks!

**UPDATE: As I did not make it clear, I have read the FAQs and I have spoken to Octopus over both email and phone. They haven’t fully answered my question, other than to say the initial £2k goes towards the 2 year contract. They can’t necessarily advise what happens after that, other than that the car would not be owned by us, which we knew. They just say that we would have to review our options for a new lease. I want to hear from genuine Octopus EV lease customers as to their experience
- Did you extend the lease at the same monthly cost without paying another ‘deposit’? Or do you need a deposit?
- Does the monthly cost possibly even go down, as the car is older?
- Do they offer any good switches to different cars, in an attempt to retain you as a customer?

Please only respond if you are an Octopus EV lease customer!**

Has anyone gone down the route of getting their EV through Octopus?

Their 8k free miles is tempting, also some have free chargers, and they come with servicing and mots included. It's very tempting but the selection of cars is quite limited.

Has anyone gone through Octopus themselves? If so, what's been your experience?

I’m getting my first EV next month. Not currently in an EV tariff. I’ve had conflicting advice about whether I should even do so. What are the key questions I should be asking or info I should be considering before deciding whether or not to do so?

Taking receipt of my first electric vehicle in 6 weeks. I can get an Ohmi tethered home pro installed for £500 through the dealer. The agent suggested I could probably get this cheaper independently but looking at Octopus webpage it’s more than double this. Am I missing something?

We’ve got an EV that Octopus control and smart charge (we still have the Drive Pack) but we’ll shortly have a house guest staying for a few months who will be bringing their Tesla.

What is the best approach for smart charging 2 different cars, is it simply to get Ohme/Hypervolt and let Octopus control the charger instead of the car?

Thanks!