Hybrid Charging - Octopus Go API Data - What's causing this?

[.Griff.]

Hi All,

I was hoping someone could enlighten me on why my Cupra Leon Hybrid is consuming electricity at 7.30 AM each morning.

I'm on the Octopus Go tariff and I've set the car to charge between 12:30 AM and 4.30 AM to take advantage of the tariff. As you can see from the API data below this is reflected in the electricity consumed (i.e note the peak between 12.30 AM and 4 AM).

After 4.30 AM the electrical consumption drops right back down to where I would expect and stays that way until 7.30 AM when it rises again and then drops for the rest of the day. Clearly something, and I can only think it's the car, is consuming 0.9 kWh for roughly 30 minutes. We have gas central heating and hot water (not that it's set to come on at that time), there are no kids in the mix running around switch on every electrical device they can find, and to be honest, we're not even up at that time so I can only assume the car is doing something.

Note I've only included a sample from last Friday but this "pattern" is repeated every day/morning that the car is plugged in. I've also included data from the next day when the car wasn't plugged in for comparison (no "peak" at 7.30 AM)

Any ideas? Have I inadvertently selected something associated with the "departure time" and if so what should I be checking?

Car plugged in overnight

Car not plugged in overnight

"My Departure" settings

 

[Stebb]

Hi - I think I worked this out (same set up with Octopus GO).
The car charges as much as it can off-peak overnight as expected, but the departure time being set for 08:20 'prepares' the car for use i.e. warming stuff up etc., in the time period just before - hence the extra pull on the mains in the morning.
I switched to a third party app (ev.energy) which replaces the Connect settings to control just the charging within the cheap period (the app knows your tariff and hence when to charge). This means that some nights there has not been enough time (00:30 to 04:30) to fully charge the car and its NOT prepared for departure before 08:00, but you don't get the spike at full tariff in the mornings.
The other benefit of the app is that when I go to say, Tesco, and plug in there, I set boost in the app and it charges the car using my Octopus tariff as normal.

 

[.Griff.]

Hi Stebb,

Thanks for the reply. I've done more investigating, and testing, since my original post in February and I think it's less to do with the car not sufficiently charging between 00:30 and 04:30, and more to do with preconditioning the battery (maybe).

I changed the departure time back to 09:30, although we still leave at 08(ish) and the car is always fully charged but the "spike" and corresponding consumption of electricity has disappeared.

So the car is fully charged but whatever mechanism/feature caused the consumption of electricity at 07:30 AM has vanished.

 

[Stebb]

That's makes sense too - as you're unplugging the car before it tries to prepare for lift off. Might be more effective in the winter with regards to warming things through, even if pre-heating/defogging is not enabled. I've been getting 35 miles pure electric this last couple of months from a full charge, it was no where near that earlier in the year.