IO and Ohme Pro disable price cap issue with solar battery

[Dad]

My solar batteries drained this morning by charging the EV, an unintended consequence of removing the Ohme Pro price cap. Anyone else has this?

So.. previous setup (which I’ll revert back to):-
IO smart charging via Ohme. Price cap set at 7.5p. IO send the smart charge schedule to charge the car between 23:30-05:30.

Fox batteries set to charge between 23:30 and 05:30 and NOT to discharge during this period.

This has worked well. It does mean if the car is completely empty it may not fully charge but that’s not an issue for us.

New setup. Ohme updated their app in past few weeks and the advice was to remove the price cap setting as this will extend your off peak 7.5p period if required to ensure the car is fully charged up.

What’s actually happened is that the car wasn’t fully charged up by 05:30 and the car has taken the remaining juice it needed from the battery! Arghh!

Obviously the battery setup is to charge the battery between 23:30 and 05:30 and NOT to discharge during this period. Works as intended. However it started discharging as soon as it got to 05:31 and finished off topping the car up due to this price cap setting in Ohme being removed.

I’ve now switched the Ohme price cap setting back on which should resolve the issue. I can’t think of another way around it?

[orrery]

One option would be to have the car charger split off the main fuse box.
I have a Henley block to split the meter tails to a small fuse box that does the car charger only.
If the battery clamp is on the feed to the main fuse box, the battery doesn't see the power going to the charger and doesn't attempt to supply it.
If you I want to charge from solar/battery, then I plug a 10 amp granny charger in.

[Dad]

Thanks. Yes I can see that would work.

I think I’ll just revert to the previous setting which is what I’ve been using successfully for the past year and suits us fine. Saves any more expense!

[Aragorn]

yeah one perk of IO is that the car will sometimes charge outside the 11:30-5:30 window. This is good for many folks, as it extends to the rest of the household, so you get some extra cheap electricity. It will also extend the charging session to ensure enough time to reach your desired charge level.

But with a battery, it can sometimes cause this to happen. The best solution is to move the battery current clamp so it cant "see" the car charger". I get this issue from time to time too. I havent bothered moving the clamp though, it happens infrequently and usually its only a short period. You can also adjust the "ready by" time in the app to 5:30 which will achieve the same thing, but it will start earlier if it needs more time (by which point the battery is typically empty anyway).

[Dad]

Thanks. Glad it wasn’t just me!

[RichR]

Yeah, it did annoy me for a bit - but given with IO we get cheap grid electricity whenever the car starts charging (often mid afternoon), it doesn't deplete the batteries that much if the sun is shining if I charge during the day. I have my batteries set to only charge during the normal Octopus off-peak period from the grid, but accept charge from solar at any time. So if the car charges during daylight, often the panels will replace some of what was used by the car. We've got 16kWh of batteries and a 5.5kW inverter now, which means it's rare for the car to deplete them so much that the house has to use grid during peak rates. Though I expect that might not be the case if we have a cold winter, with the heat pump using about 2kW when it's running, but we should be able to get through most of the day without using much grid.

[Dad]

We are similar to you Rich.. 17Kwh of battery, topped up to 100% every night before 05:30 and they are usually still around 95% full when we get up around 7am. However the other day they were down to 50% when we woke up and it took a minute to work out what had happened. Not a huge issue in the summer but Sunday was actually quite cloudy here sods law.

In the winter we will definitely use our battery because we’ve converted our gas Aga to electric which should save us a small fortune but is likely to use about 8Kwh during the daytime on a mix of eco all day and cooking at dinner.

[RichR]

Yeah - we ditched our coal/wood boiler and changed to a heat pump last year. There's no mains gas in this area anyway Last winter we only had a 3.6kw inverter, so it would struggle to run the heating and high loads (such as a kettle) without needing the grid. But even so, we spent a fraction on heating the house compared to burning coal, and without the mess and inconvenience of having to fill it and empty ash twice a day. Also probably for the first time since this farmhouse was built in the 1920s, every room was above 19C in winter.

Electric heating of the house, electric car, even changed my chainsaw and brush cutter to Makita battery ones. Just got the ride on mower to change and we're pretty much off fossil fuels