newbie help with Octopus/Ev Charger/Battery

Sorry if this has been covered in other posts. I have 8.2 Battery with inverter and EV on the way. Trying to speak to Octopus about possible change to Octopus Go - but nervous about whether there will be enough time to charge car and battery. I guess this depends on how much charge you want to put in the car but I'm thinking if I want the batteries charged to 100% each night there will not be much time left to charge the car. (Variable is how much the battery has run down). Suddenly I'm looking at Octopus Intelligent which offers 6 hours but at the moment my car and prospective charger (the new GivEnergy one) is not on the Octopus Intelligent list so that might not be an option. I'm interested in people that have a EV and battery and are on Octopus Go. Does it work for you? Can you charge your car and have battery capacity, over time*? * I'm assuming 'in the real world' one doesn't charge the EV and battery from 0% to 100% every day.

I have an EV and a battery and it works perfectly well for me. Currently I have a dumb charger, (waiting for the GE charger) so when the EV charges, if I I didn't have a setting to intervene, the car would drain the battery to the minimum and leave me no reserve for the morning cuppa before the sun kicks in. To get around that, I set the timed charge setting to the value I need and to charge during the 00:30-04:30 Octopus GO duration. That way, if the home battery is above the limit set, nothing happens, if it's below, it charges to the set value and keeps it there until the end of the charge time after which it will drain slowly to the house.

Bring the EV into the equation. That is also set to charge at the same time, to get the cheap rate. If the home battery is above the rate set then the car will take that, (it's mostly stored sunshine so not big deal), then when it hits the level set, the home battery stops supplying and the power for the car comes from the grid. The home battery is kept at the level set. Both EV and home battery are set to stop charging at the same time so there's no drain from the home battery to the car.

As for charging to 100% each night, until last week we had the 28kWh IONIQ, (excellent car BTW), that could charge from almost 0-100% in the four hours which was perfect. Now we have the 58kWh Cupra Born so there's no chance that's happening. I generally will charge to 80% so the 4 hour window will give me what I need but if I needed 100% and the car was quite low, I'd just plug it in over a couple of nights.

I have the octopus go faster tariff....5 hours of off peak electricity and this is enough to charge the EV from 40 to 80% and fully charge the GE battery. Both car and house battery can charge at the same time so you shouldn't have any charging issues. The GE battery will charge at 3.6kw with the hybrid inverter and therefore you 9.5kwh battery should be able to charge from 0 to 100% in 9.5/3.6= 2.64 hrs!

Wow - thank you. That is very comforting. Could I ask what setting you have set your battery/inverter to. Currently mine is the Dynamic default setting.

quarkrad batteries charged to 100% each night there will not be much time left to charge the car

You can charge the house battery at the same time as the EV. If you have a Gen 2 inverter, you can charge the battery at 3.6kW (Gen 1 will be 2.5kW) taking 3 hours 15 minutes at most. Your car with an EV charger would charge at 7kW and so in a 4 hour off-peak slot, you'd charge it by 28kWh. While this is not a full charge for most cars, if it's enough to get you round the next day, you can put another 28kWh in the next night and so on. Your time slot would only become an issue if you're doing more than 100 miles or so every day, in which case, you'd probably have to charge at the standard rate to fully charge each night.

As long as your car is compatible and you think that you need more than the standard 4 hour off-peak window that Octopus Go offers then you are better off with Intelligent Octopus. You get 6 hours off-peak at £0.075 per kWh compared to a 5 hour Go Faster window at £0.0825 per kWh. Plus you can sometimes get extra off-peak slots- for example on Friday I had an off-peak slot which ran from 21:30 right through to 05:30.