I thought it might be useful to report my experience with car charging, it’s a bit of a saga but might give others some things to be aware of.
i bought an OHME charger through OVO and it was installed by plugin. The charger was installed in my garage to avoid some security issues and avoiding plug in in the rain.
cars charged O.K. But I noticed that the charger frequently went off line. This meant that about 25% of my charge sessions were not being reported to OVO which in turn meant I was losing about £20 a month in “rebate”.After months of challenging, and trying different things I found that if I left my garage door open, the charger stayed on line. Plug in then came to site and moved the charger to the outside wall.
success, no more loss of data.
i then realised that the charger never now went over 3.5 kW whereas previously it would go to 7.
started a new moan with OVO, OHME and plug in. Checked the cars etc and tried them on other chargers, no problem.
This was July.
on 2nd October, plug in arrived back and changed the charger, I did not ask them to do this but the engineer had been instructed to do so. He was not aware of the charge rate issue.
i asked him if I needed to do anything e.g. inform OVO of the change, he said no.
There was no improvement in charge rate.
more conversations.
eventually found a man in plug in who managed to get a setting changed remotely and instantly I had 7kW.
At the start of November I saw from my bill that I had only been credited with about £9 for the whole of October when it should have been about £100 and no credit was appearing for November.
the big issue was who was responsible, Plugin, OHME or OVO.
lots of calls and sitting listening to how important my call was again.
Spoke to plug in, who referred me to OHME, who referred me back to OVO.
imsuggested that there was a coincidence that this dated back to when the charger was changed which would mean a different charger ID. Did this means that the new charger was not linked to my account?
OVO then disconnected the link for my old charger ID and said the would send me instructions to link my new charger. So far they haven’t in spite of being told I would get instructions within a few minutes ( currently 5 hours ago)
I went ferreting through the OHME app and found a “ change charger” pressed that and it asked for my charger ID. Found the ID in the app and put that in. It failed. There was an option to scan the QR code on the charger. It is on the underside but I managed to use this and it then accepted. I checked and the charger ID reported by the app was different when I scanned to QR code, there was an extra “e” inthe original. I can only assume that the engineer mistyped the code.
i am now waiting to see if my data gets through to OVO.
I will update. But, please be careful to check all aspects if anyone has to do any work on your charger .
also I have found that the “take your ev for a spin” option has disappeared from the OVO app. This allows you to see what data OVO has received.
