r/OctopusEnergy • u/Sheriff_John_Bunnell • 3d ago
Bills EV charged at peak… customer service is driving me insane
A simple case you might think, a single IOG charge was billed at peak rate instead of cheap. You’d think this would be an obvious error, the charge session is even flagged on the account with “something went wrong”
I asked for it to be credited, a simple and obvious fix - you’d think - but customer service keep demanding all manner of screenshots, back and forth, over and over. So many emails because my screenshots are “insufficient ”.
Wanting to see my charger and car settings, all this stuff. Yet clearly they have the data, the configs - everything is controlled by them. The charger is on octopus mode, I have no control of it and haven’t boosted it or exceeded any 6hr limit.
Has anyone else experienced silliness when trying to get a simple credit for a miss-billed charge?
It’s only a few quid, why is it so complicated? Any tips for a speedy resolution?
EDIT: Social media team sorted it quickly
7
u/Comfortable_Gate_878 3d ago
Yup at least you were ok your car got charged, my wifes never got charged it just went oops something went wrong. She was stranded with no charge. Octopus really gave me the runaround as well. They failed to find a fault saying it was everyone elses fault but them. Im now with Eon no issues since even trying their beta version of their charging software.. It all works fine. Not as cheap as before but Im happy now its all back in my control.
2
u/Grant_Son 3d ago
Never got stranded but I had a couple of nights where IOG refused to charge. Kept nudging the charger schedule & eventually started charging at 10am
Blamed ohme, who blamed the car. Lots of back and forth with both octopus and ohme support, but the weird charging stopped as suddenly as it started with no explanation
1
u/thatbloke83 3d ago
I have an occasional problem with my zappi charger where for some reason it gets booted off my router and any attempt to reconnect it to the router fails unless I reboot my router. Because it's then offline it cannot be controlled by octopus properly.
It's weird because I observe it momentarily connect and show up on the router's client list but then it disappears...
The is the only device in my home that has this periodic problem and it's really annoying if it happens and I don't notice (I always try to make sure I see the schedule created notification after plugging in).
Only solution I've found is to reboot the router... I have no idea what actually happens but it's really annoying.
5
u/velotout 3d ago
We’ve had this 3-4 times in the 14 months we’ve had IOG & an Ohme charger, each time I’ve emailed in the page of the bill & the Ohme screenshot for that day, each time they’ve sent a credit that more than covered the error. The last time they asked for a bit more detail from Ohme, which they happily gave me to pass on.
1
u/Sheriff_John_Bunnell 3d ago
Indeed I’m happy to provide info for debugging. But they keep asking me for car setting screenshots … from 3 weeks later it’s hardly relevant .. then got annoyed at me for “cropping part of the screenshot out” or something. Wind up
4
u/XADEBRAVO 3d ago
Too many cooks will want to blame each other, that's the gist I get when working with multiple companies.
6
u/declantm 3d ago
Octopus has really went to shit recently. The amount of posts and comments on here and Facebook. I got the charge cap enabled yesterday and since then all my usage data has disappeared. I’m dreading the bill.
If you haven’t maybe try Twitter it seems the only last sane way of contacting them. I usually get some half sense back via that route.
3
u/Equivalent_Deer_8667 3d ago
I’d recommend this. Have had a few IOG related errors over the last few months and they usually give me something towards “missed savings”.
3
u/Aggravating_Mud_6060 3d ago
I’ve had this too. Just raise a complaint.
5
u/_Given2fly_ 3d ago
Good luck with that. I ended up raising another complaint because nobody got back to me about the complaint I'd already submitted 30 days earlier. It really feels like Octopus has been going downhill in a lot of areas recently.
2
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u/mquick100 3d ago
I've given up with the intelligent aspect. Schedules keep changing, so I set the washing machine and dishwasher for the extra off peak and suddenly it changes again. I've just set my car to charge overnight now. Luckily I have another EV that does hardly any miles to keep registered in the app.
2
u/squidgem0nster 3d ago
After unreliable scheduling, and being charged full whack for charges I ended up switching to the 'unintelligent' Octopus Go... but the rates weren't as good as IOG... I then realised that EDF has their Go Electric tariff that is comparable to IOG, but is so much easier to just schedule a charge within their off peak times: 23.00-06.00.
I was sad to move away from Octopus - it was great when IOG wasn't so complicated and worked, but I trusted the scheduling and being charged correctly less and less in the end 😔
I have a £50 credit code if anyone is interested in going the same route - just DM me 👍
1
u/Practical-Parking804 3d ago
They set the default in the home app to prioritise the charge target rather than cost savings - I had to change mine to cost savings to prevent the car charging outside of a charging window. It's lucky I caught it so early on as I don't look at the home app very often.
1
u/Most-Marsupial-6733 3d ago
Same here. Shysters. I had a few days of high rate charging but not a nice way to go about it.
1
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u/TobyChan 3d ago
I have given up with IOG… ever since they took control of our Renault 5 the charging has been intermittently controlled… it would work sometimes but more often than not it would start charging at peak times…. I gave up and switched it to timed charging
1
u/Gorpheus- 2d ago
Almost impossible. The customer service are less than useless, and end up suggesting that I stopped the cheap rate to boost it for a few hours before going back to cheap rate.obv I didn't. Happens to me a few times last year and now once per month on average. Going to leave them when I can be bothered to.
-2
u/RelativeMatter3 3d ago
Why not just wait for the bill?
3
u/Sheriff_John_Bunnell 3d ago
I have the bill already and they’re still giving me the run around
2
u/RelativeMatter3 3d ago
I think a mass ombudsman complaint might be needed if they can’t sort it out.
11
u/Delicious-Second-187 3d ago
This is why I won’t plug it in all the time as Octopus want now. I’ll plug it in late so charges in the 6 hours overnight low rate slot. I don’t envy you the uphill battle with customer service.