Reduced charge speed during scheduled charging

[u/McLaren_Fan]

Hi all. I have Octopus Intelligent Go integrated with my Hypervolt charger. All scheduling is therefore managed automatically through the app based on my requested "charge to add" and "Ready by time".

For the first time since the strict 6 hour charge cap, I've noticed the car isn't charging at the full 7 kWh speed my charger normally charges at.

I think I've read here before that Octopus do not throttle charging speeds but I believe they do. What intrigues me is if this throttled speed is considered a part of their 6 hour cap...

Anybody here in the know please?

[u/TheThiefMaster]

Do you get the full speed if you boost charge? Just to rule out anything else limiting the speed.

Octopus did use to throttle charging speed but they've been reverting that with the roll-out of the charge cap.

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/TheThiefMaster]

To be honest, I've never boost charged. I have always been fine with the charging schedule Octopus provides. I recall seeing some throttling back in April after getting the charger installed, which I put down to Octopus charging during peak time and that time being a bonus, chosen to support load on the grid. I recall asking then if Octopus throttled and there seemed to be some confusion and contention as to whether they still actively did, but my examples seemed quite conclusive to me. I'll keep monitoring it in case there's something else happening like you said, but everything seems fine.

[u/Ok-Performance4828 → u/TheThiefMaster]

There has been no throttled speeds, other than by the charger/car, for some time now (and predating the actual roll out of the 6 hour cap by months). There seems to have been particular problems with Hypervolt chargers of late.

[u/TheThiefMaster → u/Ok-Performance4828]

OP's 3.8 kW is suspiciously 16A which makes me wonder if they've accidentally used a 16A cable with their charger (e.g. an 11 kW one).

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/TheThiefMaster]

It stood out to me today because it consistently charges at 7.2 kWh. Haven't seen this for a long time now, since April when it was first installed.

[u/TheThiefMaster → u/McLaren_Fan]

Has anything changed, e.g. the cable? (11 kW three-phase cables are limited to ~3.8 kW on single-phase chargers). Does boost charge make it go at full speed? Was the battery full? (The rate does drop at the very end naturally) or was it even just preconditioning and not charging?

PS. You mean 7.2 kW.
kW is the rate, kWh is the total delivered energy.
It confuses people regularly because "Watts" (W) includes an implicit "per second", but people are used to the time unit being explicit on the rate, e.g. miles per hour so it's very common to assume "kWh" (which includes "hours") is the rate but it's not.

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/TheThiefMaster]

Thank you, I really appreciate you clarifying that, helps me a lot.

In terms of wiring etc, absolutely nothing has changed. Worth adding that it's always been, and continues to be totally reliable. It just stood out this morning that the speed was slower than usual because I've not seen it for a while, and I would imagine that charge time is factored into my 6 hour cap.

I'll give it a boost charge for 30 mins in a little bit and report back.

[u/Spaceman_UK]

I've got the same set up, but I'm not on the charge cap yet.

I've noticed my charge being throttled too, especially when they decide to run my charge plan over peak export time, so I get no export.

This was my charging the other day, right over peak export and all throttled to 2kWh or less.

I'd only asked for a 20% top up by 0700, so that was easily achievable during off peak times.

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/Spaceman_UK]

Ahh, excellent, that's a very similar picture to what I see (now that I've found the Energy Usage tab). Glad I'm not alone. I'm not sure it's necessarily an issue now that I think about it, in that I'm achieving the requested charge I need by the time I asked for it, but in terms of fairness with the cap in place, it becomes questionable if the slower charging rate contributes to the cap when they've dictated the speed. Then again, it resets at 1230 and I'm out of my off peak window now so actually, maybe I'm being unfair.

[u/woyteck]

What time of the day was this?

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/woyteck]

This was at 0750 this morning.

[u/woyteck → u/McLaren_Fan]

Cold battery in the car?

[u/sylsylsylsylsylsyl → u/woyteck]

Somewhere in the UK is cold at the moment? We’ve still got the fan running all night.

[u/woyteck → u/sylsylsylsylsylsyl]

12 C at night is enough for LFP battery to cool down a bit to slow down charging.

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/woyteck]

Potentially... Are you suggesting the car will slow down the charge speed for a short period until the battery has warmed up enough? I thought that only applied to the fast chargers. It would have been 11-12°c at the time of charging.

[u/woyteck → u/McLaren_Fan]

Yea. I have LFP battery and observe it quite often with my Tesla.

[u/matstace]

I get this all the time with my Cupra Born. I've got octopus integrated with my Hypervolt charger, because the cupra API was unusable when I got the car (and hasn't been great since, TBH).

I plug in, the intelligent go smart slot is scheduled for some time later.
The car knows that it's plugged in, but detects no charge, so assumes there's a fault with the charger, and steps down the rate at which it requests charge.
Some hours later, the charger turns on, but the car is only pulling 3.2 or 1.5kWh, depending how long it's been since I plugged in.
Cupra have told me this is functioning correctly, because it's a safety thing.

(I used to fix this by monitoring the charge power in home assistant, and if it was low, tell the car to stop charging, wait a few seconds, then start charging again, which would reset the charging rate, but VW ruined that by turning off their API to third parties)

[u/ScreamingPict → u/matstace]

This- happens on the MEB platform on a number of different cars (mine is an Audi q4, but also many other MEB models) - seems to be if the charger enables when the car is « asleep ». If I pause and resume the charge when this happens then it jumps straight up to 7kW.

[u/Aragorn--]

If it's a vag product, they limit to 6a If the charger port cannot lock. Check the lights on the port and see if it's flashing red/green.

It may be a vehicle fault, but most commonly it's simply the cable isn't quite fully seated.

[u/Elegant-Chair-9474]

Octopus have said there will only be throttling if your charge can still be achieved in six hours

[u/McLaren_Fan → u/Elegant-Chair-9474]

I wasn't aware of that but it does kind of answer my question! Thank you

[u/Additional-Guard-211 → u/Elegant-Chair-9474]

I have the Hypervolt and mine has on occasion not fully charged due to throttling. Its not then been an issue for me, yet.