Wiki Everything you wanted to know about Intelligent Octopus But Were Afraid To Ask

Why write this post?
A lot of people are starting to get interested in IO. I don't think Octopus do a very good job of spelling out the benefits in their website. They have some FAQs, but the same questions keep coming up over and over on the forums.

What is it?
In a nutshell, IO is a split tariff that gives you a cheap off-peak rate for charging your EV and other electrical items in the household, including home batteries.

Isn’t that the same as Octopus Go or Go Faster?
The principle is the same, but in exchange for some benefits which we’ll explain, you allow Octopus to control the timing of your EV charge, so they can choose low carbon intensity and/or cheap wholesale priced time slots.

So I’m not in control of my charge? I don’t like the sound of that!
Well yes…and no. You’re in control of how much to charge and when you want the car to be ready, just like you would be normally. Within those parameters, you’re allowing Octopus to control which half-hour slots the car chooses to get to that target % charge. And you can always override IO if you want to “bump charge” through the day.

OK, but what are the benefits you mentioned for this trade off?
First of all, you get a larger guaranteed off-peak window for using household appliances and charging home batteries, etc. It’s six hours between 23:30-05:30. Go, for example, is a fixed 4 hour window.
In addition, when IO schedules your EV charging slots it sometimes creates schedules that fall outside of the fixed, six hour window. If that happens your EV charging and all your household use in these extra-slots is also charged at off-peak rates.
I have frequently had schedules give me seven or more hours of off-peak rates. On one occasion, I had a total of ten hours of off-peak rates.

Am I eligible?
You need a smart meter and a compatible car and/or charger. Since you’re reading this here, I assume you’ve got or are thinking of getting a Tesla. IO works with the Tesla API to create the charging schedules. The advantage of this is that IO will work with any* home charger. If you have a charger with smart features, you need to disable them so that the charger acts as a dumb switch. IO will control everything via Tesla’s API to start and stop your charging.
*Even your granny charger - but you need to tell IO what the max throughput is when you go through setup so that it can work out your schedules properly.

Some of this sounds too good to be true.
Phantom drain caused by having smart charging enabled in the Octopus app has been fixed as of 30th August 2022. One small side effect appears to be that schedules sometimes take longer to appear in the app after plugging in.

Further questions (to be updated in the main thread body once the edit timer on this post expires)

I have two EVs, can I charge the other while on IO?
Not with IO scheduling the charging, but you can charge any other car in the fixed 23:30-05:30 off peak window or at any other time at peak prices.

What are the rates etc?
Octopus do a decent job of explaining the peak and off-peak rates along with contracts etc. Head over to their pages to discover that.

I asked for a target % of x, but I got less than x.
There are two or three reasons for this.

The first, most common reason, is that Tesla reports battery % differently depending on where you look. The API (that IO uses) reports the gross battery %. This is generally fixed but can fluctuate very slightly. The Tesla app shows usable %. Apps like Teslamate and Teslafi can display both. Quite often, there is a delta of 2-3% which may be down to battery temp or other factors. This usable % will often be recovered as the battery warms up during a drive.

Some users have reported charging % being way off, perhaps 10% or more. This could be down to an error in the onboarding process. Some of the charger database entries incorrectly assume the charger you are onboarding is the 11kW version, without actually saying so in the charger description. The Andersen A2 was an early example of this. If you suspect this may be the case, the easiest thing to do is go through the on-boarding again and choose "Generic 7.4kW charger". It won't affect your functionality on IO in any way.

Lastly, it has to be mentioned that occasionally IO just craps out. It may be down to a comms error, a server error at Octopus' end, or just reasons. IO is a beta product and it's wise to expect one or two quirks from time to time

 

[jager122]

Unless you are load shifting considerably in the house, OVO seems a better deal now with the 10p rate for EV charging, and 33p for peak vs 45p on Intelligent Octopus...
The 60p daily rate is taking the piss too...

Thats interesting. Is there an easy way to calculate this i.e some threshold beyond which the OVO one would be better than the Octupus one, for example? I'm at the point where I need to choose but have no idea where I'd start to work out which one is best for my circumstances.

 

[Jwdrums]

Thats interesting. Is there an easy way to calculate this i.e some threshold beyond which the OVO one would be better than the Octupus one, for example? I'm at the point where I need to choose but have no idea where I'd start to work out which one is best for my circumstances.

Try this, I found it helpful to illustrate the differences depending on mileage etc Tesla Cost to charge calculator - TeslaEV.co.uk

 

[xreyuk]

IO didn’t charge my to 100% last night again,

Only scheduled enough time to get to 97%

As I have an LFP battery it’s annoying, it’s now nearly two weeks since I’ve been charged to 100% so probably going to have to try and bump charge it today seeing as scheduling overnight won’t get me there.

Have emailed them to ask why it’s happening.

 

[yessuz]

IO didn’t charge my to 100% last night again,

Only scheduled enough time to get to 97%

As I have an LFP battery it’s annoying, it’s now nearly two weeks since I’ve been charged to 100% so probably going to have to try and bump charge it today seeing as scheduling overnight won’t get me there.

Have emailed them to ask why it’s happening.

IO charges based on your current and desired SOC levels, Charge speed and "get ready by" time.

If you put it in charge 11 am, and needed 7 hours to charge to 100% bit app is set to be ready let's say 5:30, then it will stop charging 5:30.
Or if for whatever reason charge speed was lower - it did not reach level in time.

So what is you "ready by" time and when did you started, when finished charging and what was SOC at start?

 

[goRt]

IO didn’t charge my to 100% last night again,

Only scheduled enough time to get to 97%

As I have an LFP battery it’s annoying, it’s now nearly two weeks since I’ve been charged to 100% so probably going to have to try and bump charge it today seeing as scheduling overnight won’t get me there.

Have emailed them to ask why it’s happening.

Take it off smart charger and manually charge from 23:30 - 05:30

 

[browellm]

Or, don't get too hung up on missing 3%

 

[a900ss]

Or, don't get too hung up on missing 3%

I think the issue with this is that the LFP battery is suggested to be charged to 100% at least weekly for calibration.

 

[browellm]

I think the issue with this is that the LFP battery is suggested to be charged to 100% at least weekly for calibration.

Do that once a week then

 

[ajmorr.is]

Before I bought my Tesla I had a Discovery Sport PHEV and used that with IO also. It would regularly (ie, every single time) fail to charge to 100% even though it was set to, and there was clearly enough time to charge the small 15Kwh battery. It would do anywhere between 94 and 97%. I was in dialogue with IO support and they couldn’t come up with a solution, even though it was plainly obvious that Octopus weren’t scheduling enough slots to charge the battery fully. I ended up telling them that I was turning off smart charging until they fixed the problem.

 

[browellm]

I have a hypothesis forming about why IO isn’t charging to the exact % requested but I don’t know how to test it.

My guess is when IO polls the API for the battery %, it calculates a fixed number of kW required to reach the set % from the car’s net capacity, which is published by the API.

At this point, the API polling is done. It doesn’t go back and re-check regularly.

But when there are losses in a charging session due to needing the pack to be heated, cable losses etc., these aren’t being accounted for by the scheduler.

As I say, without speaking to a dev, I have no idea if this is plausible. But it seems plausible to me as it's often off a couple of points regardless of the target % requested, i.e. it not just a 100% problem.

 

[goRt]

I have a hypothesis forming about why IO isn’t charging to the exact % requested but I don’t know how to test it.

My guess is when IO polls the API for the battery %, it calculates a fixed number of kW required to reach the set % from the car’s net capacity, which is published by the API.

At this point, the API polling is done. It doesn’t go back and re-check regularly.

But when there are losses in a charging session due to needing the pack to be heated, cable losses etc., these aren’t being accounted for by the scheduler.

As I say, without speaking to a dev, I have no idea if this is plausible. But it seems plausible to me as it's often off a couple of points regardless of the target % requested, i.e. it not just a 100% problem.

The API used is the "streaming" API - once opened it pushes data every few minutes when the car is charging

 

[yessuz]

Well my guess is that IO for the calculation takes the max charge soeed (ie 32 amps x 249V

If your amos or voltage is below your charging rate is slower. Just a bit bit might be enough to have discrepancy

 

[browellm]

The API used is the "streaming" API - once opened it pushes data every few minutes when the car is charging

But we don't know what data IO is actually looking at within the API. "pushes data" could be anything, or nothing.

 

[Drew57]

My car is usually set to a Tesla target SOC of 90% and IO at 100% - it always shows 89% next morning which I'm OK with.

On one occasion I awoke just as the charge finished and it was actually 90% but went to 89% within 10-15 minutes. This correlates to when/if I charge on any 7kWh charger (ie a Pod Point or locally at our zoo) at the same target SOC then drive away, it almost always drops by 1% very quickly so I suspect it had literally just passed 90% rather than just before 91%.

If I really do need 90% I would set target SOC to 91% & when I used to do that on Go Faster in 2021, the car was always at 90% next morning.

 

[MrBadger]

IO didn’t charge my to 100% last night again,

Only scheduled enough time to get to 97%

As I have an LFP battery it’s annoying, it’s now nearly two weeks since I’ve been charged to 100% so probably going to have to try and bump charge it today seeing as scheduling overnight won’t get me there.

Have emailed them to ask why it’s happening.

There are a few possible reasons that I can think of. But I have seen this a few times with me and can document the conditions that cause it:

In our case it seem to be the BMS (battery management system) recalibrating itself a couple of times between IO scheduling the charge and the charge period completing.

On one case, between IO scheduling charge and first charge occurring, our car gained 2% of phantom battery (immediately after parking up), then another 3% phantom gain (in following 6 hours of sleep). BMS is all guess work so its not particularly accurate, which exasperated by a significant temperature fluctuations (in this case temperature lost over 15C between parking up and charge being 'completed'), BMS fluctuations up or down are not unusual.

IO chose a schedule of 23:00-05:00 to get from 44% to 60% at 10A.

23:00 car awoke, charged and reached desired 60%.

However, at some point after this charge completed, the 3% phantom gain was taken away, so car dropped 3% below the desired SoC. It did however, have one more 1/2 hour schedule in its pocket (which was not part of the original plan), which it tried to catch up, but being a short slow charge, it didn't manage to make up the shortfall in time. The result was a couple of % shortfall in the required charge.

Add in the fact that the app % is not the same % as the one that IO uses (something like TeslaFi shows both so the discrepancy is easy to see), the app would show a 57% SoC rather than the requested 60%. This discrepancy is sometimes reported in the app with a blue snowflake, but not always.

The issue is that IO did not react to the BMS behaviour quick enough, and a slow charge making catchup more difficult. Ironically we still had a 05:00-05:30 off peak slot that IO could have used, but it decided to use 05:30-06:00 instead and we lost a 2-1/2 hour off peak period that car was not charging but IO had though it had reached its limit (and where we subsequently lost the earlier 3% phantom gain). But it does look like IO might occasionally reschedule mid plan, eg we had a :30 minute slot added after original charge plan had completed at correct SoC.

What we actually got was:
16:xx ~0:27 2% phantom gain.
16:49 IO chose 23:00-05:00
16:52 + ~6:09 3% phantom gain
23:01 - car awoke at start of IO schedule. Car already at 49% - car did not start charging
02:13 Charge completed at '60%'.
02:24 car started sleeping
05:02 car awoke, SoC at 57%, ie 3% phantom loss.
05:24 - car started sleeping
05:32 car awoke based upon added IO schedule and charged for an additional 28 minutes reaching 58%

Charging complete. SoC 58% (a 2% deficit) and Tesla app would have been showing 57% (a 3% deficit).

It is important to understand that the %SoC in the IO app is not the same as the % in the Tesla App. There may well be a % or so of difference, sometimes accompanied by a blue snowflake it its particularly cold. This discrepancy is usually regained as the battery is used, so often not noticed if the car is driven.

 

[MrBadger]

Corrected error in post... too late to edit.

....
16:52 + ~6:09 3% phantom gain
23:01 - car awoke at start of IO schedule. Car already at 49% - car did not start started charging
02:13 Charge completed at '60%'.
....

 

[ajmorr.is]

Maybe this is related to my recent thread where I spotted a large discrepancy in the figures which IO, charger and car all reported during a charging session.

 

[Astrape]

They reset my ALCS manually every 6 months as the ALCS switches on GMT times for all months of the year.

Yeah mine has drifted off by an hour after they finally got it correctly aligned with IO, after first setting my night storage heaters to turn on between 11:30 am and 5:30 PM !

But why does the ALCS go wrong with the clocks change? If the ALCS is correctly set in the meter for 23:30-5:30, you would expect that when the meters clock changes, the ALCS would move with it. It makes no sense for the ALCS to ignore the clock change and therefore deliberately become wrong for 6 months of the year !?!????

 

[Astrape]

On the 6th of December I requested that Octopus align the ALCS setting in the 5 port meter with the IO tariff low rate. Ie make the night storage heaters come on in cheap rate 11:30 pm to 5:30 am instead of running on the economy 7 timing 12 am to 7 am.

It took them 2 and a half months to attempt this change and on Saturday they finally changed it. Now the storage heaters are on from 11:30 AM to 5:30 PM ie during the early afternoon.

Haha haha. Very funny Octopus. Try again. WIll it take another two and a half months.

Someone on this forum did give me the number of the meter team back in December so I could call them directly, which I will in future but since I had already emailled customer services I have been patiently waiting to see what the official channel does, not least so I can start a complaint and add my weight to other night storage heater users who need Octopus to be able to get it right. And of course I will insist they compensate me for all the periods when my heaters have run on peak rate since they have control of the ALCS switch and I dont.

So I contacted Octopus to correct my ALCS on 6th December and they finally completed the task on 7th March. 3 months to make a minor adjustment, including setting the exactly 12 hours out, and then denying that they were wrong for 3 weeks. I didnt phone the direct number, since they should be able to do this for any customer not just ones who happen to find a back channel.

2 weeks later of course the clocks change has made the sync wrong again. Who wants to guess how long it will take this time?

 

[Jonnymack74]

So my smart meter has always been on my old rate, despite being on IO. As a result it thinks I'm charging the car at the daytime rate so costs have been high on the smart meter but correct on the octopus app. Octopus told me this will be fixed at some point but not to worry as I'll be charged normally.

This week the smart meter now has me at 10p all day every day. While I've not doubt I'll still be charged normally via the app it does feel like I've gone back in time a few years looking at my daily leccy cost