The scheduled start from the car, with subsequent charging at 32A has only been an issue for a small number of owners as far as I have seen. Am I wrong here? I've certainly always had reliable timed charging at full rate. The only issue for me is the lack of being able to set a simple stop charging time.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Just spotted this opensource API scraper
- Thread starter Glan gluaisne
- Start date
The scheduled start from the car, with subsequent charging at 32A has only been an issue for a small number of owners as far as I have seen. Am I wrong here? I've certainly always had reliable timed charging at full rate. The only issue for me is the lack of being able to set a simple stop charging time.
I replied on one of those threads asking what model chargers people had, and whether they had them in smart mode. I mentioned that I've yet to have a single problem with my Rolec in dumb mode, in the 2-3 weeks I've had it, it has charged at 32A (as per TeslaFi) every time. I doubt there are individual car variations (although I guess nothing is impossible with Tesla), so my current assumption is that there is something else in play, like a "smart" charger, or a specific brand or model of charger, or a misconfigured charger (apparently chargers have pots to set the max current, and another one I've seen mentioned has a special installer app that connects via bluetooth to achieve a similar result) that is causing this problem. All I know is my completely bog standard M3 with a Rolec set to dumb mode has happily charged at 32A for a few weeks.
With regards to 4h not being enough to charge the car, sure, but I'm not sure it's worth getting het-up about. If a charge to your £50k car costs you £6 instead of £2.50 every now and again, is that really such a big problem? Sure, it would be nice that the car interface allowed finer control, but it would also increase complexity and there would be people that would mess up the config and maybe as a result not get their full charge when expected (which would then trigger support calls). User experience is a hard thing to get right, and I hope that Tesla have at least put some thought into that. One solution which I thought was pretty elegant, is that you are roughly aware of how much charge your car needs, and if you've just come back from a trip that left you more then 100 miles (28 miles x 4h) down from your normal target (80%?), then for that first night you just lower the target charge a bit so that you know it will complete in the 4h (or 7h in your case) and the following day you set it back to 80% as normal.
Yes, I agree 100%. I think this "bug" has more to it than just the M3. So far I have reliable 32A charging from my Rolec set to "dumb".
Just worked out some charging prices (I'm going to upload a spreadsheet into a new thread in a sec), comparing Octopus Go and Bulb E7. I compared 4h, 7h, and 10h of charge time, starting from the beginning of the cheap time, so in the case of Go, 7h and 10h overflow into the expensive rate, and in the case of E7, 10h overflows into the expensive rate.
Octopus Go (4h, 7h, 10h): £1.536, £4.925, £8.314
Bulb E7 (4h, 7h, 10h): £2.290, £4.008, £7.530
Those 7h figures are interesting, eh? And there's not much difference at the 10h mark either (less than £1 difference for effectively going from almost 0% to almost 100% state of charge -- i.e. something that will happen extremely rarely for the majority of people). E7 has a longer cheap period, but those cheap 7 hours aren't as cheap as Go's 4 hours.
Octopus Go (4h, 7h, 10h): £1.536, £4.925, £8.314
Bulb E7 (4h, 7h, 10h): £2.290, £4.008, £7.530
Those 7h figures are interesting, eh? And there's not much difference at the 10h mark either (less than £1 difference for effectively going from almost 0% to almost 100% state of charge -- i.e. something that will happen extremely rarely for the majority of people). E7 has a longer cheap period, but those cheap 7 hours aren't as cheap as Go's 4 hours.
As mentioned loads of times before here, for some, the short off peak period for Go is just unacceptable, for reasons not associated with charging the car. In cold weather we need as long a period of charge to the floor as we can get, and we need that charge as close to the beginning of the day as possible. Having our heating and hot water charging switch off at ~04:00 is not going to work for us.
When choosing a tariff I found that knowing the daily usage pattern, to within about 30 minutes per day, every day, was the only way to be able to compare which was better value. There are some activities you can shift around to suit the cheap rate period, like car charging, but some, like heating and hot water provision, that you really can't shift about a lot; hot water and heating has to be available at the time we get up and shower.
When choosing a tariff I found that knowing the daily usage pattern, to within about 30 minutes per day, every day, was the only way to be able to compare which was better value. There are some activities you can shift around to suit the cheap rate period, like car charging, but some, like heating and hot water provision, that you really can't shift about a lot; hot water and heating has to be available at the time we get up and shower.
Surely doing the bulk of the work from 00:30 to 04:30 and then topping up until 07:00 would be *extremely* similar to just having it finish at 07:00? You posted your latest electricity bill and it was *ridiculously* low (sub 500kWh for the whole month). I think you could be on a completely standard non-E7 plan and it would cost you almost the same.
Have a play with my spreadsheet (new post). I'd be interested to see what you discover.
I've been keeping a running spreadsheet for a few years now, recording house consumption every 6 minutes (10 samples per hour) and then comparing that usage profile with various tariffs. I can't shift the heating or hot water requirement much, that needs to be heating right up until the time we get up, really, although in less cold weather the heating either doesn't need to come on at all (not been on for the past three or four days, for example) or only needs to come on later in the night, closer to the 07:00 end of the E7 period. That delayed start is inherent in the control system, so if we switched to Go there would be lots of occasions when the heating never ran during the cheap rate period, as it would start too late.
Yes, our consumption is low, but it's a passive house, with 300mm of insulation under the floor and in the walls, 400mm of insulation in the roof, a high level of airtightness, with heat recovery ventilation, triple glazing, plus 6.25 kWp of PV generation build in to the roof. In summer the standing charge tends to dominate our bill...
Similar threads
- Article
