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October 1, 2026
Question

smart charging schedule ignoring ready by time

  • October 1, 2026
  • 0 replies
  • 1 view

My wife and I have a hybrid each both with circa 25kWh batteries. We both use nearly all of that on our weekday commutes. I have a 7.4kW charger. Each evening I get home from work at about 6pm and put my car on charge and then when I go to bed at about 11pm I switch the cable over and charge my wife's car ready for the morning. I use the ovo charge app to set a ready by time of 11pm. This means the smart charging function gets 5 hours to optimise the smart charge but around 3.5 hours of that it will need to be running in order to meet my 'ready by' time. The problem is it always pauses the charge for too long and so can never hit its target. This evening i looked at my phone at 10.30pm and the charging was paused with 50% charge leaving it more than 12 kW to fill in 30 minutes. Or in other words the supposedly smart app had planned a schedule that requires a remaining charge speed four times the capacity of the charging setup I have just to do what I set it to do.

 

A backup solution i shouldn't have to rely on is the urgent charge feature which I could deploy (and accept paying more than I should for charging but guarantee I would have the full battery I need at my ready by time). But the urgent charge function annoyingly dissappears as soon as the charge starts so I have to rely on waiting for the charge to pause before deploying it which would mean focusing on my phone rather than family for the evening. 

I struggle to believe that the app/smart charging would not be able to fulfill what are pretty basic charging needs so what can I do differently or can the app be improved?