Pre-conditioning ev with Givenergy charger

With these colder temps recently, I'd like to sometimes pre-condition my ev battery before I leave in the morning. However, it appears that my bmw i3 is unable to request a charge from the charger itself. I currently have a preset schedule from 23:30 - 05:30 which works fine and it drops the current as it approaches 100% charge but it seems like once it's reached 100% charge, it just stops charging. The behaviour I'd like to see is a timed charge up to my departure time that allows it warm the battery as well to optimize the range. Has anyone found a solution like this?

So, unless you've got something actively monitoring your car's battery level, and capable of starting your EV charger remotely, you may be out of luck. I've not found anything first party that'll help with that.

I use Home Assistant to both monitor my car's battery level, and have an automation to start / stop the EV charger as well. This ties in with PredBat (see other threads about that) that determines when this start / stop command is fired, but I see no reason why it couldn't be decoupled from Predbat if you wish to not use that.

With how variable my departure times are, it's easier for me to just let the Home Assistant pi5 monitor the car and hit charge whenever it drops 1-2% below target. Once that start command is fired, the car seems to pull just enough power to run the heatpump rather than charge the cells. (Your car's behaviour may be different)

I am just using the scheduled charge as I have found Predbat to be problematic when it comes to reliably charging the car every time. I do see three states for the ev charger through Givtcp: start, stop and ready so maybe I have to muck around a bit to see if I can force it into Ready state and then maybe it will work. Setting Ready currently just sets the charger back to Stop pretty much right away.

Is your departure time within the cheap rate period?

If so, roughly calculate how many charging hours are required to reach around 90-95% at your departure time, and set the charge start time accordingly. The process of charging is warming the EV battery to some extent.

I then use the car app to manually start the cabin pre-condition around 15 minutes before departure, so the cabin is warm and the windows de-iced.