[lexathon]

How does it behave when you first plug in?

I use octopus with a zappi charger - it draws as soon as you plug in for a while and then when octopus gets the signal and sorts itself out, it pauses charging. This is somewhat frustrating as it starts to drain my house battery, so I tend to plug in just before bed at 11:30.

 

[lexathon]

I get round the problem with the charging starting immediately by setting a timer in the car as well as on Octopus. Charging then commences according to the Octopus schedule and I am not wasting up to half-an-hour of charging at peak rate. Obviously the charging percentage limit set in the car must be the same or higher than that set on Octopus.
Incidentally, the Octopus app used to show the amount of kWh put into the car over the preceding 12 hours, but mine has stopped doing this. Has anyone else noticed this?

I never looked at that, but makes sense. I'm not sure they can know exactly how much the car's taking - if they did they'd probably bill us just for the car.

Getting off topic - I have home assistant monitoring the peak/off peak state and my home battery is in a charge / discharge state whenever the off peak state is in place. I made about £600 this year on export - the battery charges to a sensible level (solar forecast considered) and then goes through a cycle of discharging and charging 10%. I'm buying power at 7.5p and selling it straight back (still during off peak) at 15p.

 

[lexathon]

I know nothing about Octopus, but how does it know the state of charge of Q4’s battery?

It does't unless the car is talking to them directly.

So there's actually 2 methods of linking it. 1 is car linked, the other is charger linked. So octopus can either control the car to start the charge or the charger to start the charge.

When this tariff first popped up, the only option was car linked, but then they added support for a bunch of chargers, including zappi. Now I have the zappi linked I can charge any car overnight on their schedule but I need to tell it roughly how much %age I want to add and by what time I want it ready.

If you're having trouble with the charger set up as the linked device, I guess you could always switch it to the car - just delete the device and add the Audi instead.