{"id":5053,"date":"2021-10-17T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=5053"},"modified":"2021-10-17T15:39:46","modified_gmt":"2021-10-17T14:39:46","slug":"smart-ish-electric-car-charging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=5053","title":{"rendered":"Smart(-ish) Electric Car Charging"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For a while now I&#8217;ve been frustrated that the highly capable &#8216;smart&#8217; electric car charging point installed as part of the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=4595\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"4595\" target=\"_blank\">Electric Nation<\/a> research project reverted to &#8216;dumb&#8217; mode at the end of the trial period. It&#8217;s not been too bad because the car has some of its own intelligent charging logic but since moving from the Octopus Agile tariff to Octopus Go (with a rate of 5p per kWh between 00:30 and 04:30 every night) it&#8217;s become more important to do all the charging between those times &#8211; and I&#8217;ve got enough of the API to the charge point working to exercise the control I need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s a separate <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?page_id=4767\" data-type=\"page\" data-id=\"4767\" target=\"_blank\">Technical Article <\/a>on the details of the Circontrol EVSE API but the following high-level logic is currently working well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The car is configured to charge immediately and at the maximum rate of 32A \/ 7kW<\/li><li>The charge point is normally configured as &#8216;Disabled&#8217;; this state is automatically set at 12:00 (noon) every day<ul><li>This means that the car can be plugged in at any time after that and it doesn&#8217;t start charging<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>At the start of the Octopus Go low-tariff period (00:30), there&#8217;s a script which runs to:<ul><li>Check there is a car connected to the charge point<\/li><li>Change the charge point to the &#8216;Enabled&#8217; state<\/li><li>Run the &#8216;Remote Start&#8217; transaction to prompt the car to start charging<\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The result is that &#8211; whenever the car needs charging overnight &#8211; it can be plugged in at any time of day and it will be fully charged by the morning, using cheap-rate electricity. The charge point is also available to power pre-conditioning of the car and the battery for a morning departure, if that has been configured in the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(If the car battery is <em>really<\/em> low (like less than 10 miles of range) it can take 4.5 hours to fully charge at 7kW, so it&#8217;s not quite fully charged by 04:30 when the cheap-rate period ends. The least-bad thing to do is to leave it charging until it finishes, which is probably no later than 05:00.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a while now I&#8217;ve been frustrated that the highly capable &#8216;smart&#8217; electric car charging point installed as part of the Electric Nation research project reverted to &#8216;dumb&#8217; mode at the end of the trial period. It&#8217;s not been too &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=5053\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electric-vehicle","category-living-in-the-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5054,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053\/revisions\/5054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}