My Intelligent Octopus Go charge has drained my home battery. What’s going on?
While our smart schedules can tell your car when to charge, they can’t tell it where to get its energy from! The default behaviour of a solar battery system to support your home is:
Power the home using solar
If the home is using more power than solar can provide, the battery steps in to help
If the battery and solar are not enough, energy is imported from the grid
The problem is that your battery can’t (usually — more on this later) see whether the power demand is coming from your car or your washing machine. It just interprets the car charging as power demand from the home, rule 2 kicks in and your battery is drained.
But we totally understand that you might want to keep the charge to power your home through the higher-rate period.
There is a fix!
If you’re confident with electronics or happy to hire an electrician for a quick job, this is fairly easy to sort out. In brief, you can move the battery's CT clamp downstream of your EV charger. This effectively “blinds” the home battery to the EV charger. The battery won't see the car asking for power, so it will sit fully charged and only discharge when your household appliances turn on. Our resident tech king Phil Steele has explained all about this here.
You could also use your home battery app to pause the battery at certain times of day. However, this isn’t ideal if you’re leaving your car plugged in all the time to take advantage of IOGo’s bonus cheap slots for your home because you won’t know when they are.
Are you on Charge Pack?
Because IO Go and Charge Pack share the same platform, we can intelligently schedule both devices. Different combinations of EVs, chargers, and batteries naturally introduce unique interactions when balancing power demands, but we're actively refining our smart software to make coordination seamless — aiming to resolve everything purely through software updates.