Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Octopus Go

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
My Brother is just switching, but the issue for him is he was with British Gas and they came to install a smart meter but when the engineer turned up he said ... oh you're on a dual tarrif (eg economy 7) British gas can't support that on a smart meter ...... and left ..... amazing! so now he has to get Octopus to send the engineer back round again.
Regarding Intelligent vs go. I'm on go as it's 4p/kwh cheaper during the day and I generally don't need more than 4 hours charge a day. The only issue I have is that with my basic charger you can't set a time limit to stop it charging after 4:30am and (unless I'm doing it wrong) the app only has a EITHER a start charge time OR and End charge time not both .... so you have to adjust the charge percentage to guess how full it could get in those 4 hours or manually start the charge at 00:30 ..... There's also some reports of people getting strange charge behaviour with their teslas where it does a strange start/stop charging which can mean it's not actually charging for a hour of your 4 hours and then overruns.
 
My Brother is just switching, but the issue for him is he was with British Gas and they came to install a smart meter but when the engineer turned up he said ... oh you're on a dual tarrif (eg economy 7) British gas can't support that on a smart meter ...... and left ..... amazing! so now he has to get Octopus to send the engineer back round again.
Regarding Intelligent vs go. I'm on go as it's 4p/kwh cheaper during the day and I generally don't need more than 4 hours charge a day. The only issue I have is that with my basic charger you can't set a time limit to stop it charging after 4:30am and (unless I'm doing it wrong) the app only has a EITHER a start charge time OR and End charge time not both .... so you have to adjust the charge percentage to guess how full it could get in those 4 hours or manually start the charge at 00:30 ..... There's also some reports of people getting strange charge behaviour with their teslas where it does a strange start/stop charging which can mean it's not actually charging for a hour of your 4 hours and then overruns.
it's not much of the guess, rather than quite simple maths, really.
Let's say Your charger is 7 kW. So you can get 7 kwh... per... hour.
Let's say your tesla is M3 LR ( which has 82 kWh battery, but ~80 kWh being available, let's say, for a simple maths).
If you divide it into %, means that 10% of battery makes 8 kWh.
So 1 hr on 7kW charger will top up by ~9% of the battery.

So you have 4 hrs of Octopus go. So 4 x 9 = 36

Basically your SOC + 36% will be how much you can do during 4 hrs with simple scheduling.


your numbers will vary depending if you can get 7.3 kw from your charger or your battery size is a bit smaller.

but all in all, for LR/P M3 it's current SOC + 36% per 4 hrs of super cheap charging.

p.s. I think most of people always charge up to 80% and rarely arrive home with less than 45%
 
  • Like
Reactions: cryo
just switched back to octopus for Go.

How do people work their charging?

I charge my Tesla to 85% and run it down to 20% which can take over a week.

Obviously with Go you get 4 hours cheaper rate but that isn't enough to go from 20 to 85%

... actually it nearly is, with 3 Phase Home Charging.

At 11kW... I get 44kWh in the 4 hours which is about 61% of the battery.

So from 20% to about 81% charge on 3 Phase at cheap rate. Usually more than enough for me.
 
No, but I don't see the point in charging every night as I don't do a lot of miles, I haven't charged since last Sunday and have 29% left
What happens if you have some kind of emergency and suddenly you need to do a lot more miles in a day than you anticipated? Personally I think its better to just keep it topped up each day - you're still using the same amount of energy and being charged the same amount regardless, so why not?
 
What happens if you have some kind of emergency and suddenly you need to do a lot more miles in a day than you anticipated? Personally I think its better to just keep it topped up each day - you're still using the same amount of energy and being charged the same amount regardless, so why not?

Aslo as Elon has stated a plugged in tesla is a happy tesla!
 
What happens if you have some kind of emergency and suddenly you need to do a lot more miles in a day than you anticipated? Personally I think its better to just keep it topped up each day - you're still using the same amount of energy and being charged the same amount regardless, so why not?

Exactly ... I don't see the point of having an EV with 200+ mile range if in practice it hardly ever has enough charge onboard to do anything like that distance!
 
I don't see the point of having an EV with 200+ mile range if in practice it hardly ever has enough charge onboard to do anything like that distance!

Well ... since I had enough PV to charge the EV I have been juggling "how low do you go" when today's forecast is for dreadful-sun and tomorrow's is wall-to-wall-sun. I need the Tesla conversion kit for V2H and then I could put my piddly little PowerWalls on eBay :)
 
that's strange, because they always have issues with my smart meter, which they installed.

The small remote display they provide with it shows nonsense.
Gas readining is non-existing on the smart screen
electricity - kind of ok.

but then they miss one or two meter readings over long period and cannot issue you with the bill and it is never ending...
We don't have gas, so I can't comment on that.

As for the meter readings, I had three days when a reading was missing, so contact Octopus and report it and they will send you a bill, but they don't bill you for the day of the missing reading. It's not a big issue.
 
What happens if you have some kind of emergency and suddenly you need to do a lot more miles in a day than you anticipated? Personally I think its better to just keep it topped up each day - you're still using the same amount of energy and being charged the same amount regardless, so why not?
I guess so, the cost would just be more spread out rather than a lump on set days

But with 20/25% I am never going to be in a situation where I can't reach anywhere I need to in an emergency, everything is within a couple of miles

Just laziness of getting the cable out the front LOL
 
I've commuted 4 days this week, between 60-80 mile round trip depending on route choice (shorter route has a problematic village with multiple pinch points, gets snarled up, so I often avoid). Our set-up is E/W 9.9kWp so we get decent output on a sunny day from about 6am and it's still producing after 8pm. I've only had the Zappi topping up for about an hour on overnight this week... but dropped to around 15% last night. 3kW currently going into the car.

Probably spent something in the region of 35p on commuting this week then. As opposed to approaching £40 if I'd been in a petrol car or on the motorbike.
 
I guess so, the cost would just be more spread out rather than a lump on set days

But with 20/25% I am never going to be in a situation where I can't reach anywhere I need to in an emergency, everything is within a couple of miles

Just laziness of getting the cable out the front LOL
Charging once a week with half your charging on peak is going to cost you approximately £400 a year at current go rates vs twice a week all on night rate. If your time is worth more than that fair enough. Maybe invest in a second cable to leave plugged into the charge point if you have an untethered one so plugging it in is less onerous.
 
Charging once a week with half your charging on peak is going to cost you approximately £400 a year at current go rates vs twice a week all on night rate. If your time is worth more than that fair enough. Maybe invest in a second cable to leave plugged into the charge point if you have an untethered one so plugging it in is less onerous.
time is worth more? how much time it takes to plug car twice a week? 1 minute, including walking down the stairs?