FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

I use IOG and have now got a very good set up with 46kw of batteries and solar producing up to 12kwh/day. I also have a plug in Hybrid. I am totally confused by the charge cap but as I read it the following appears to be the case

1) I will continue to have 6hours of cheap rate over night to fill my batteries
2) I will be allowed to charge my car for for up to 6 hours

However I am unclear if the 6 hours is when the house is on cheap rate or at anytime. In addition as I have experienced that Octopus only control their own installed chargers ( I have a pod point which they can’t control) and I have had numerous occasions where my car has started charging at peak rate, I don’t believe that Octopus has the tech to control either my charger or my Audi q5 hybrid and also the ability to manage the cap will simply be a retrospective ability to assemble the bill rather than the flow of electrons. Am I right to be concerned about this charge cap and the likely failure to control peak rate charging - I may need another automation in home assistant to support this

You will continue to get the 6 hours between 11:30-05:30 for your home use (and charging home batteries), but the EV 6 hours will be whenever they allocate slots for it (and any home use will be low tariff whilst it charges).

What that means is that it could happen during the normal 6 hour window, or outside of that, but if the EV is given it’s charge slots outside of the 6 hour window, you will not be able to set a manual charge during the 6 hour window or you will be charged at high tariff for anything used by the EV charger (if that is something that could happen to you i’d recommend having an HA automation).

The timing of the 6 hour charge window is taken from midday to midday.

I’ve no reason to distrust Octopus as they’ve usually handled the charging with my Zappi ok, albeit an occasional few minutes overshoot into a high tariff period.
In HA I have implemented a counter that increments every minute whilst the charger is active, and it resets each day at midday - for now I have added a charger stop command but left it disabled and i’ll wait and see how Octopus charge cap behaves.