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

 

[RedMod3]

Well that went VERY badly. I followed your instructions to the letter leaving Tesla on 100% (as instructed by Octopus) and IO at 80% which is our normal overnight charge level. I also set a 20% reserve on the powerwall because I knew it was going to be overcast this morning and didn't want to drain it to zero and have to run the house off the grid. Plugged the car in around 2145, cancelled the charge on the touchscreen and got a charging plan immediately in Octopus. It said it would start charging at 1am.

At 2335, I happened to check the Tesla app and noticed the car was charging. That's wierd I thought and stopped the charge as I could see that the charge plan was still scheduled for 1am.

The cat woke me up at 5:26am. Before turning over, I checked the Tesla app. The car wasn't charging but for some reason had charged to 90%, 10% more than we'd asked IO to charge it to. Strange, I thought. I moved the reserve on the powerwall back to 0% so the house would start taking from the powerwall instead of the grid once peak started at 5:30. Went back to sleep.

When I got in the car at 8:15, it was at 100%. I winced and checked the powerwall. As I suspected, it was on zero. 20% had been drained into the car and the car had taken the rest it needed to get to 100 from the grid.

On the phone to Octopus this morning, they told me to get rid of that Off peak end time 0530 setting under Schedule because it had screwed with IO. They've agreed to refund me for all energy consumed today (not just peak) because we've had both the car and the house running of the grid instead of the powerwall from 530am. They were adamant that ANY charge scheduling settings in a 3rd party app (Tesla, wall charger, etc) would create unexpected behaviour in IO.

So, your mileage may vary considerably from Pete's.

Interesting, which is why I always set the departure time as 05:30 in IO and don't try to get a schedule until 23:30.

In the 6 hour window, I only ask for 3-4 hours of charge so IO can deliver it when it wants. If I need more than that, I charge the car on consecutive nights. This way, I'm guaranteed to only charge the car between 23:30 and 05:30 and Octopus can choose which 3-4 hour slots it wants.

YMWV.

 

[Drew57]

On the phone to Octopus this morning ...they were adamant that ANY charge scheduling settings in a 3rd party app (Tesla, wall charger, etc) would create unexpected behaviour in IO.

Yes, that's what we early IO adopters keep trying to explain!

IO is really simple and reliable if people don't try and outsmart it.

 

[Cardo]

I must say the Zappi integration has been fantastic, thus far. It sits on Eco+, charges the car on PV surplus and IO adds whatever % charge I specify each night. It’s been faultless, so far.

I would prefer if I could set a target SoC, but I’ll take the current integration over the direct Tesla integration.

In relation to the Zappi beta testing, there appear to have been few issues, so it has been opening up to a fairly wide pool of beta testers. As long as there’s no big hiccups, I believe they’re planning to roll out to everyone, soon.

 

[Pete UK]

Well that went VERY badly. I followed your instructions to the letter leaving Tesla on 100% (as instructed by Octopus) and IO at 80% which is our normal overnight charge level. I also set a 20% reserve on the powerwall because I knew it was going to be overcast this morning and didn't want to drain it to zero and have to run the house off the grid. Plugged the car in around 2145, cancelled the charge on the touchscreen and got a charging plan immediately in Octopus. It said it would start charging at 1am.

At 2335, I happened to check the Tesla app and noticed the car was charging. That's wierd I thought and stopped the charge as I could see that the charge plan was still scheduled for 1am.

The cat woke me up at 5:26am. Before turning over, I checked the Tesla app. The car wasn't charging but for some reason had charged to 90%, 10% more than we'd asked IO to charge it to. Strange, I thought. I moved the reserve on the powerwall back to 0% so the house would start taking from the powerwall instead of the grid once peak started at 5:30. Went back to sleep.

When I got in the car at 8:15, it was at 100%. I winced and checked the powerwall. As I suspected, it was on zero. 20% had been drained into the car and the car had taken the rest it needed to get to 100 from the grid.

On the phone to Octopus this morning, they told me to get rid of that Off peak end time 0530 setting under Schedule because it had screwed with IO. They've agreed to refund me for all energy consumed today (not just peak) because we've had both the car and the house running of the grid instead of the powerwall from 530am. They were adamant that ANY charge scheduling settings in a 3rd party app (Tesla, wall charger, etc) would create unexpected behaviour in IO.

So, your mileage may vary considerably from Pete's.

Interesting. Mine works just fine. Every time. But I don’t stop the car charging during an off-peak change plan mid-way. I don’t have a Powerwall either.

Only differences to what I do and what you did is;

1) I set what I want in the car, ie 80% and 80% in the Octopus app. (that way the car will never go over the 80% set in the car). Instead of going to 100% or some other level set in the car.
2) I don’t stop the car mid way in the off peak period.

I reckon IO may possibly have changed your slots at some point and you possibly stopped the car mid way through a newly allocated slot. And then the car went to sleep, IO lost comms and didn’t poll the car, allocate a new charging schedule and/or got confused and gave up. *But* the plus was, the car charged anyway to meet your (100%) target before the off-peak time ended. (Which is at least good, no? That’s what you want it to do - if you’d set 80% in the car as well it would have been what you wanted!)
Or somehow IO lost control of your car and it just charged to 100% as instructed in the car and because you didn’t have a reserve on the Powerwall it just used that energy to fill the car until the powerwall got to your reserve of 0%.

I don’t know why IO ignored your target charge percentage of 80 and charged to 100%. That shouldn’t happen! Are you sure you had 80% set in the IO app? (And 80% in all apps if you have multiple users of the Octopus app) it’s worth a refresh to check. Seems like a communication error if so.

I don’t have a Powerwall or know what settings you have in it, so I’m just presuming what may have happened there.

I can’t say that setting 05:30 as the off peak end time in the car has ever messed with the IO settings for me (as Octopus suggest) nor that setting a 23:30 charge start time will mess with it either. Can’t recall any reports of that.

It’s just that there are some benefits for doing one of the other. Or rather to say, it illuminates unwanted behaviour (ie discharging your solar batteries outside the off peak times unnecessarily, or having to stop the charge when you plug in, or both (05:30 end time!) if you set one or the other.

Shame you had a problem. Maybe try again?

 

[yessuz]

Just WHY?

Read instructions.
IO never charge more than it is set in the car itself.

I leave IO atb100% and adjust the car only. And I adjust ready by time in IO app Never in 1.5 years it changed more than it is set in the car

Why you want to make things complicated!?

 

[kuruma]

Er.... you're on a forum of people who are early adopters of a niche energy product and wondering who wants to make things complicated? We all do. That's why we're here and not simply filling a tank with petrol each week.

Octopus will tell you to do the reverse of what you're advocating @yessuz i.e. to set Tesla at 100% and adjust IO only. However, their own instructions say that IO won't override the car so it makes more sense to stick Tesla on whatever you need to avoid the issue of it going beyond if you don't want it to.

@Pete UK my slots didn't change. When I saw it was charging at 2335, I checked IO and saw that the original charging plan was still in place. I thought it strange that the car had started charging so stopped it. According to Octopus, it ignored the IO set amount because the setting in under Schedule put the Tesla app in control of charging and therefore the Tesla 100% charge limit overrode the IO 80% limit. It didn't hit 100% before off-peak ended. It had stopped at 90% when I checked it just before 0530. Why it had stopped there is anyone's guess, but what happened next was that it got access to the PW when I dropped the PW reserve and then drained it into the car to make up the 10% difference.

Try again? Not likely!

 

[browellm]

so it makes more sense to stick Tesla on whatever you need to avoid the issue of it going beyond if you don't want it to.

As I have explained before in some detail, that's just about the worst thing you can do because it then schedules slots that are not CO2/cost/grid optimised.

What exactly, is wrong with using the tariff as intended?

 

[WllXM]

What exactly, is wrong with using the tariff as intended?

Maybe because the tariff doesn't manage to reliably and consistently do what's been advertised and there are still too many bugs within IO to trust it completely?

When IO will :
1) stop the charge in a matter of SECONDS when plugged-in outside a slot (because when it sometimes takes up to an hour, that too, is not CO2/cost/grid optimised AT ALL)
2) successfully deliver exactly (I'll allow a 1% margin) the requested SoC within the IO app, never going above it, but more importantly, never missing to start a charge also
Then I'd happily remove both my schedule and my charging limit from the car.

There is nothing worse than realising either:
- the car failed to charge overnight, it's time to leave the house in the morning, and the battery won't cover enough for the trip you had planned because the IO API acted out overnight
- you just wanted to top up overnight to 70% but for some reason, IO disregarded it, and filled your battery to 100%, which damages the cells in the long run as you know...
- IO never stopped the charge initially, so your car filled up from 5pm the night before at peak rate, meaning IO inadequacy just cost you a tenner 7hr*7kWh....
The last 133 pages of this thread are full of these examples...


So instead of blindly defending Octopus and admonishing every single user who set up a schedule, maybe you should consider these circumstances.
If you NEVER had any of these issues described above, well, you are extremely lucky, but again, judging by the massive amount of posts here by other users, you're far from being in a majority.

 

[goRt]

Maybe because the tariff doesn't manage to reliably and consistently do what's been advertised and there are still too many bugs within IO to trust it completely?

When IO will :
1) stop the charge in a matter of SECONDS when plugged-in outside a slot (because when it sometimes takes up to an hour, that too, is not CO2/cost/grid optimised AT ALL)
2) successfully deliver exactly (I'll allow a 1% margin) the requested SoC within the IO app, never going above it, but more importantly, never missing to start a charge also
Then I'd happily remove both my schedule and my charging limit from the car.

There is nothing worse than realising either:
- the car failed to charge overnight, it's time to leave the house in the morning, and the battery won't cover enough for the trip you had planned because the IO API acted out overnight
- you just wanted to top up overnight to 70% but for some reason, IO disregarded it, and filled your battery to 100%, which damages the cells in the long run as you know...
- IO never stopped the charge initially, so your car filled up from 5pm the night before at peak rate, meaning IO inadequacy just cost you a tenner 7hr*7kWh....
The last 133 pages of this thread are full of these examples...


So instead of blindly defending Octopus and admonishing every single user who set up a schedule, maybe you should consider these circumstances.
If you NEVER had any of these issues described above, well, you are extremely lucky, but again, judging by the massive amount of posts here by other users, you're far from being in a majority.

1. Octopus is using a reverse engineered Tesla API - if you read the docs you'll find that the api has infrequent updates when not driving, how would octopus intercept this???

 

[browellm]

Maybe because the tariff doesn't manage to reliably and consistently do what's been advertised and there are still too many bugs within IO to trust it completely?

It does though.

 

[browellm]

When IO will :
1) stop the charge in a matter of SECONDS when plugged-in outside a slot (because when it sometimes takes up to an hour, that too, is not CO2/cost/grid optimised AT ALL)
2) successfully deliver exactly (I'll allow a 1% margin) the requested SoC within the IO app, never going above it, but more importantly, never missing to start a charge also
Then I'd happily remove both my schedule and my charging limit from the car.

This is *VERY* funny. You've signed up to a beta tariff and all that goes with it.

 

[browellm]

127 pages are people asking the same question that's answered in the OP and 7 pages are people cocking about with schedules because they moaned about sleep issues when the system polled a lot and now can't be arsed pressing stop on the Tesla app when they plug in.

 

[browellm]

and filled your battery to 100%, which damages the cells in the long run as you know...

Surprised your car didn't just explode.

3% degradation on my car after 30 months.

 

[WllXM]

This is *VERY* funny. You've signed up to a beta tariff and all that goes with it.

Exactly, so you shouldn't mind a bit of beta testing and workarounds.
When it will be a finished product you can expect more serious user requirements. At present it's still very much trial and error, and to each his own, as long as it's not agains the tariff T&Cs.
Last time I checked, using a schedule to bridge the gap with IO shortcomings wasn't one...

 

[spon88]

Interesting, which is why I always set the departure time as 05:30 in IO and don't try to get a schedule until 23:30.

In the 6 hour window, I only ask for 3-4 hours of charge so IO can deliver it when it wants. If I need more than that, I charge the car on consecutive nights. This way, I'm guaranteed to only charge the car between 23:30 and 05:30 and Octopus can choose which 3-4 hour slots it wants.

YMWV.

This is how I'm doing it and so far so good. I dabbled with starting the charge at 11.30pm via the car app but this jiggered with IO - you have to let it do its thing and accept that it's a beta tariff and may cause a few glitches along the way. So no car scheduling.

Doing it this way also lets me manage my batteries (GivEnergy) effectively so that they don't discharge to the car. Currently I charge them to 100% overnight and allow any excess solar to export at 15p during the day. To keep the battery BMS(s) calibrated, every couple of weeks I discharge everything to about 15% where the bottom end calibration on GE kicks in to pull everything back into line.

It's a bit of a faff but it's only a couple of minutes intervention max and ensures everything works as expected. I may look at trying to automate some of this but frankly I've got other things to focus on at the moment.

 

[bhanorthy]

IO has been so unreliable past few weeks, charges failing to start, charges stopping at the wrong time, no slots generated.

Last night the car was meant to charge until 7am. I wake up this morning and Teslamte says it stopped at 03:34……

No car schedule set, no other 3rd party apps other than teslamate which has no control of the car.

It’s just buggy as hell. Why is there no button in app for “generate charging slots”. Why rely on the car being online and the API showing I’m plugged in? Upon that button press you could then poll the api to confirm it.

Yes yes it’s beta and yes I should expect weird behaviour. But waking up to a half empty car is incredibly frustrating.

 

[Epico]

IO has been so unreliable past few weeks, charges failing to start, charges stopping at the wrong time, no slots generated.

Last night the car was meant to charge until 7am. I wake up this morning and Teslamte says it stopped at 03:34……

No car schedule set, no other 3rd party apps other than teslamate which has no control of the car.

It’s just buggy as hell. Why is there no button in app for “generate charging slots”. Why rely on the car being online and the API showing I’m plugged in? Upon that button press you could then poll the api to confirm it.

Yes yes it’s beta and yes I should expect weird behaviour. But waking up to a half empty car is incredibly frustrating.

Still pretty new to IO but last night it charged 3% before stopping which I'm a little annoyed about. Had a charge schedule but it just stopped after half an hour, I've no idea why and now I can't even charge the car. The zappi just says charge delayed, I can't start a charge from the car and the octopus app fails to "bump charge", unplugged and replugged but nothing will get the car to charge. Good thing I don't have to go anywhere today

 

[TM88]

Still pretty new to IO but last night it charged 3% before stopping which I'm a little annoyed about. Had a charge schedule but it just stopped after half an hour, I've no idea why and now I can't even charge the car. The zappi just says charge delayed, I can't start a charge from the car and the octopus app fails to "bump charge", unplugged and replugged but nothing will get the car to charge. Good thing I don't have to go anywhere today

Can't offer a solution to your problem, but some info and things to try.

The "charge delayed" message from zappi usually indicate the car can't be woken-up.

Unplugging and replugging should wake the car up to start a bump charge, but zappi might need to be in FAST mode..

Not sure how long ago now, there was an issue where the Tesla app wasn't able to wake up the car. Can you see if the tesla app can wake the car up remotely? If not you might need to phyically wake the car up e.g. opening a door.

 

[Yuff]

Can't offer a solution to your problem, but some info and things to try.

The "charge delayed" message from zappi usually indicate the car can't be woken-up.

Unplugging and replugging should wake the car up to start a bump charge, but zappi might need to be in FAST mode..

Not sure how long ago now, there was an issue where the Tesla app wasn't able to wake up the car. Can you see if the tesla app can wake the car up remotely? If not you might need to phyically wake the car up e.g. opening a door.

It has been slower to react recently and the app doesn’t react as quickly as it used to.
However whin I plug in I make sure I have my schedules and don’t let the car charge until they show up. Sometimes there are within mins sometimes they take a while. I Normally find if I switch IO off, in the app, I get a schedule pretty quickly after switching it back on.
ok yes it’s a bit finicky but it saves me quite a lot.

 

[David T]

It has been slower to react recently and the app doesn’t react as quickly as it used to.
However whin I plug in I make sure I have my schedules and don’t let the car charge until they show up. Sometimes there are within mins sometimes they take a while. I Normally find if I switch IO off, in the app, I get a schedule pretty quickly after switching it back on.
ok yes it’s a bit finicky but it saves me quite a lot.

Agreed. Switching off and on in app seems to force through a charging schedule