Discovered quite a blaring fault

[slug56]

For the past few months, I've been very occasionally woken up by some selfish little toe-rag laying on their horn for literally minutes at a time in the early hours of the morning. Several times I've gone to the window to offer up my best death-stare, but I've never managed to track them down.

Until today. After being woken up yet again, I checked the CCTV and noted the horn started at just a few seconds past 01:00 for about 5 minutes. I got a sinking feeling that time might coincide with my Intelligent Octopus charging schedule, so off I went to double check (the red line is when the horn blasted):

Welp, 01:00 is exactly when charging should have stopped, but it looks like there were a couple of blips between 00:00 and 01:00 when it should have been charging consistently during that period.

I've just been out and pressed my id3's horn (carefully checking for the absence of any neighbours) and what do you know, it sounds identical in pitch and volume to the recording from 01:00 this morning. Looks my like id3 has been blasting the horn in the early hours of the morning for the past few months

[gailjon]

Now that is funny (not for your neighbours obviously).

[shire-dweller]

[...] Welp, 01:00 is exactly when charging should have stopped, but it looks like there were a couple of blips between 00:00 and 01:00 when it should have been charging consistently during that period.

To comment on this specific point, as far as I am aware my IO (Intelligent Octopus) setup works as intended and it does have periods of time during which charging stops even though it is within scheduled IO charging slots. I noticed on several occasions that IO scheduled a larger number of charging slots than necessary to reach the target battery charge level, but instead of the charging “finishing early” overall, IO periodically stops charging as if to ensure that the overall charging actually takes as much time as originally scheduled. For example, last night IO scheduled several charging slots for my ID.3 that added up to 4 hours while less than 3 hours would have been enough to reach the target level, but during the first half-hour charging slot IO stopped charging about halfway through (after 15 minutes or so), and then hours later during the last scheduled slot some charging was still taking place.

This could not be explained (solely) as an underestimation of the charger power (which was stated as 7kW during IO setup, but in reality it is closer to 7.5kW) because the power estimation difference is only about 7% while the charging schedule overshoots by as much as 33%. I would guess (just my guess) that IO actually uses this overestimation as extra flexibility to load balance the grid and perhaps save Octopus some money as a counterweight to other tariffs like Agile Octopus. A simpler theory would be that IO chooses to always overestimate the required charging time and then “measures” the actual charging rate during every charging session and dynamically inserts charging pauses to ensure it keeps its original promise of target charge level and schedule (how much and when).

Anyway, my point is that while the “blaring fault” sounds like a serious actual fault affecting your car, the “charging blips” as you called them are actually normal behaviour as far as I am aware because I also observe them but my target charge level is always achieved by the end of the last scheduled charging slot, which I think is the core measure of success — fortunately for me without the horn ever sounding during the process!

I hope you are getting it sorted somehow, maybe involving both Octopus and VW tech support? I can see them trying to blame each other and this ending up with some hardware part being replaced by a VW dealership after a slow and reluctant investigation...

[slug56]

Hi shire-dweller,

Thanks for the considered reply that's interesting to know about the IO charging behaviour and I wasn't aware of it.
When I correlated the IO schedule to the horn, I appreciate I was taking a bit of a leap. It could still be entirely coincidental and I've (thankfully?) not been able to replicate it since posting this.

The car is booked into the garage this week and whilst I'll mention the charging correlation, I intend to make clear I'm just connecting the dots and don't have any data around the other occurrences.

Thanks

[slug56]

I thought I'd share an update on this one: my local VW garage has had my id.3 for the past 4 weeks. They're in talks with VW Technical, but I understand it that no one really knows why this is happening, nor how to fix it. I received a call yesterday to ask whether I use a steering-wheel lock. I do not. I have no idea how long they'll continue to have the car for, but I'm getting pretty fed up about the situation.

[Bobp]

You are not alone in having your alarm sound in the early hours when charging. I was awoken a couple of weeks at 1 am when my Zappi charge schedule started. Has been OK since then. There are posts for similar occurances on the forum.