ev.energy: Smart EV Car Charge 4+

Great app, works flawlessly with my Rolec, except if it’s set to charge only on off peak, it’s not accurate with its timing so will overrun or start early on peak rate.. costs about 50-60p per day extra.. which is about 25% extra to my running costs.. so I set both the charger and my car to stop this happening. It’s also great to be able to export the data as a CSV. Except for some odd reason the cost column as a strange European character.. A with a triangle over it, which is pointless I have already notified customer services of these 2 bugs late last year.. nothing has happening

Thank you for your review, Steve! We apologise for any inconvenience you've experienced with the accuracy of the timing for off-peak charging and your CSV exports. We would like to get this resolved for you so we ask you to please get in touch with our team at support@ev.energy. Thank you for using our app and for your valuable feedback! Have a lovely day! - Jess

I had my smart charger installed July last year. It hasn’t worked properly since. I have tried time and time again to get help from the helpdesk and so far the only thing they can suggest is that I turn off the smart charging ability and use it as a standard charger. What is the point in paying all the extra money for a smart charger and then using it as a standard charger. Smart charging is enabled it just doesn’t happen so in the morning my car hasn’t been charged. Therefore my entire journey is spent using fuel which is not why I purchased a plug-in hybrid. As far as I’m concerned the app is only good for telling me that my car is plugged in wow I knew that I put the cable in myself.
My energy supplier is now offering off-peak electricity packages to allow for cheaper charging rates overnight but I can’t take them up on this as my charger doesn’t work and quite frankly as far as I’m concerned it never will do. There is no telephone number you can ring for support only email that take a few days to get a reply. They ask the same questions even though I provided a lot of information they still can’t fix it. Eventually I got a phone call to try and resolve my problem before Christmas here we are in February and I still haven’t had a resolution

Hi Steve! We are really sorry that you are having difficulties Smart Charging your vehicle. From what we understand, it seems that the issues you're having are caused by the connectivity of the charger. As ev.energy is the company that manages the app itself, we are, unfortunately, not able to resolve a hardware issue fully for you. If your unit has already been checked by an installer, please do get in touch with us at support@ev.energy so that we can better understand your specific situation and investigate this issue in more detail for you.

So with this app you tell it what electricity tariff you’re on and it can then work out when is the best time to charge and it has always worked fine, I’ve never had any particular issues with it however to take advantage of what this app aims to do for you then you really need a smart electric tariff like Octopus Agile.

I had been using it for a couple of years on a standard Economy 7 tariff and I found the way app lets you set maximum pricing and only setting to charge off peak as a clunky method of just setting a simple schedule as I knew when my tariff provided cheap power so I could quite easily have just said to the app just charge between 00:00 and 07:00 so going through extra steps felt unnecessary.

In December we moved to Octopus Agile where the price of the electricity changes every half an hour and this really unlocks the power of this app.
Now I can just set a maximum cost per kWh I’m willing to pay for the charge and the app works out the rest which is so much easier than if I were to be setting multiple schedules which is great. As there aren’t many tariffs like Octopus Agile in the UK I suspect many other people will not be using the power of this app but if you are on a smart tariff where the price changes regularly this app really does take away any of the hard work!

Keep up the good work guys.

Hi TomDut84, thank you for the glowing review! We're so glad to hear about your positive experience with the ev.energy app and its performance with the Agile tariff. Have a great day! -Sofia