OVO Charge - erroneous smart charge savings?

Charging software doesn’t know the difference between GMT and BST, and uses GMT all year round? What happens at 1630/1730?

I intend to find out what happens after 16.30. Think I know the answer….

Yes - the Charge app is stuck on GMT. Just confirmed that after charging between around 16.30 and 17.00 and getting a roughly 10p/kWh “smart charge saving”.

Looking at this in another way is interesting (to say the least):

If I charge my car with 7kWh total between 13.30 and 14.30 at the peak rate (in summer) this will add roughly 7*23p = £1.61 to my electricity bill. The OVO app/Kaluza software thinks I’m charging at the off peak rate (since it’s stuck at GMT) so it will calculate my smart charge savings at around 3p/kWh and I will get around 21p taken off my bill. My final charging bill will then be £1.61 minus 21p = £1.40 for 7kWh of charging i.e. 20p/kWh - that’s clearly not the same as the 14p/kWh standard Charge Anytime rate.

Things look much better if I charge between, say, 16.30 and 17.30 since that’s my summer off peak rate but the app is working with a peak rate.

Does everything even out over a 24 hour period? - well, that depends…. 

Without doing the sums, I’d guess that, on average, it’s not too bad for Economy 10 in summer.

If you just want a short charge then it’s best to carefully pick your timing in the summer months - probably few will bother with that though (including me)!

Actually, if you charge your car continuously over a 24 hour period then everything averages out perfectly in summer. It’s unlikely anyone will be doing that.

Your numbers are interesting but I’m finding a problem in decoding just how your tariff works! I am not on an “Economy x” tariff, so I pay a basic 21p (or so) at any time, but I then get up to 175kWh free per month. However, to get that, I have to just plug in and Ovo decide when the car will be charged. Usually that means overnight but occasionally there is a burst during the afternoon as well. I’ve only had my EV for a few months and quite a bit of that I have spent on holiday so not home-charging and so I’m still trying to figure out what the best tariff might be in the future. 

However, I have only seen CA options that say pay a fixed amount and get a corresponding “free” quota per month, or sign up to a flat rate of 14p/kWh although Ovo still decide when the car will charge. So how does that all work with an “Economy” tariff? It does sound complicated even without the Ovo charging clock being out of step with the rest of the country!

The Economy 10 tariff doesn’t matter - I can still “charge anytime”. I was only curious about how the “smart charge savings” were calculated when my rates changed.

We have two plug-in cars and I (easily) concluded that sticking with the 14p/kWh was right for us. We always charge at home. If we had pure electric cars and travelled “far” then maybe the fixed monthly tariffs would work given the cheaper public charging. Mind you, that’s “cheaper” public charging rather than “cheap”. My other concern was the “up to 175kWh” every month. More than likely it would be some number that wasn’t exactly 175kWh.

You can always “fool” the OVO app if you want to charge (nearly) immediately. For example, if it’s 1PM, you have a 7KWh charger and you want a charge of 28kWh, you just tell the app that you have a 28kWh battery in the car and you’d like it charged by 5pm. That should start the charge at 1pm. Works for me!