Switched from EO charger to a Zappi - couple questions

[Billbrown1982]

My Pen detector killed itself last week but at the time we wasn't sure what the fault was and if it was the charger itself. When I contacted EO to ask for some tech support and they took the details and told me someone would have an tech support advisor contact me in around 4 working days, I made the decision that no matter what, it was getting replaced.

Had an electrician friend do a straight swap out for a Zappi, which has been great but I'm having a little tweaking issues with Intelligent Octopus.

If I let octopus control via the car, it gives me a window, but the charger doesn't seem to start. I think its going into that "up to 10 minute delay" mode that they have to have now, but that means i'm losing up to 1/3 of a half hour slot and it seems to be upsetting Octopus.

So i switched to letting them control via the zappi, which seems to work better although I wish it could tell how much charge the car has. I set it for "give me 90%" even though the car is on 70%, and it gave me a 9 hour charge window.....which is great if I want to save money but not exactly what your supposed to do so is there a better way around this? Other than manually checking the car's charge level and adding on from there.

Finally, I've got 2 sets of graphs from Tessie. I've never paid that much attention but I noticed in the car the other day that the charge voltage seemed to fluctuate just a little and to the best of my recollection it never did before. By the looks of the graphs, i'm right. Is this just the way the zappi's work? Monitoring voltage and adjusting on the fly or have we got some kind of installation error here you reckon?

 

[cyclbatrob]

The voltage fluctuations are just what happens on the grid as the load changes throughout the day. Pretty sure zappi doesn’t do anything with the voltage.

If you connect intelligent octopus to the car then set the zappi in fast mode, but it’ll have a tendency to charge immediately when you plug in until octopus tells it to stop - my solution to this was to set a charging schedule of 23:30 in the car. If octopus wants to charge before then it will override it. This option means octopus knows the car charge level and can add what’s needed to get to the desired level.

If you control via the zappi then you set the car to charge any time (remove schedule and remove any schedule from zappi) and octopus drives the zappi. It doesn’t know the charge of the car though so you need to tell how much percentage to add - if you’re on 50% and want 80% tell it to give 30%.

Hope that helps

 

[Billbrown1982]

The voltage fluctuations are just what happens on the grid as the load changes throughout the day. Pretty sure zappi doesn’t do anything with the voltage.

If you connect intelligent octopus to the car then set the zappi in fast mode, but it’ll have a tendency to charge immediately when you plug in until octopus tells it to stop - my solution to this was to set a charging schedule of 23:30 in the car. If octopus wants to charge before then it will override it. This option means octopus knows the car charge level and can add what’s needed to get to the desired level.

If you control via the zappi then you set the car to charge any time (remove schedule and remove any schedule from zappi) and octopus drives the zappi. It doesn’t know the charge of the car though so you need to tell how much percentage to add - if you’re on 50% and want 80% tell it to give 30%.

Hope that helps

Hmmm weird that this charger is fluctuating that much but the old one wasn't. Very strange.

Going by what you've said I think i'll have to leave IO connected to the Zappi and do as you say. Shame really cause I did like how it worked with the EO but I suppose I was just used to it.

Cheers for the help!