octopus

Route planning apps for electric cars

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A screenshot showing various route planning apps, including Google Maps, Apple Maps, ZapMap, Electroverse, PlugShare and ABRP

Since I first got my own car (10 years ago), we’ve used Google Maps for directions. I’ve never bothered with a stand-alone satnav, and our Nissan Leaf is the first car that we’ve owned to have one built-in.

With our electric Nissan Leaf, Google Maps is still our go-to app for route planning and directions, but there are some other apps that I’ve considered. Here’s an overview of them.

Google Maps

Starting with Google Maps. Its support for electric vehicles is okay; you can tell it that your car is an electric vehicle, and it’ll offer the most energy-efficient routes as well as the fastest. Remember, electric and hybrid cars have regenerative braking; in a petrol or diesel car, a shorter but slower route may only use a little less fuel, but a lot less energy in an electric car. On one recent journey, a slower but more direct route took five minutes longer, but used 29% less charge and meant that would get there and back without having to recharge en route.

You can also tell Google Maps what plugs your car supports. Our Nissan Leaf, for example, can charge from a 3-pin plug, a Type 2 AC charger and CHAdeMO DC chargers. Then, when you switch your car from being petrol/diesel to electric, it’ll no longer offer to show you directions to petrol stations, but to public electric car chargers instead.

Google Maps will show public chargers from the majority of major operators, and their occupancy. However, compared to some of the other apps mentioned here, it won’t show all chargers.

If you have a really new electric car with Google Maps built-in, then it’ll know your car’s current charge and be able to add charging stops for long journeys. Our Nissan Leaf doesn’t – we can just use Google Maps through CarPlay or Android Auto. As such, it won’t automatically suggest charging stops on longer journeys.

Apple Maps

Note: I’m writing this about Apple Maps in iOS 18, which was current at the time of writing

I’m sure that Apple Maps works great, if you live in California. I don’t, and since Apple launched it 13 years ago in iOS 6, it’s been a disappointment. If you do live in California, or a supported country, then there are EV features available to you. But it appears that the UK either isn’t a supported country, or it just doesn’t work with my Nissan Leaf. Either way, for me, there are no special features available in Apple Maps.

I can’t even tell Apple Maps that I drive an electric vehicle, and so it still bubbles up petrol stations which are of limited use to me now. You can search for ‘charging point’ and get directions to charging points, but it can’t easily incorporate these into a route. It also recommended a charging point to me which didn’t actually exist.

ZapMap

ZapMap has probably the best list of UK electric car chargers. As well as listing all of those on the main charging networks, including availability, users can also add chargers themselves. These are often ‘destination chargers’ at places where you can visit, which may be offered for free and are not part of a larger network.

The app is ad-supported, and won’t work with CarPlay or Android Auto unless you pay for ZapMap Premium. This currently costs £5 per month, or £35 for a full year if paid in advance (£30 if you sign up before the end of the month). As well as hiding the ads, you get a free ZapMap RFID charging card (normally £10) and a 5% discount if you pay for certain public chargers through the ZapMap app. As I only use public chargers occasionally, I may consider the £5 per month option when needed, and then cancel.

The free app lets you plan a limited number of routes, which can then be sent to either Apple or Google Maps for navigation.

Octopus Electroverse

Electroverse is the public charging app from Octopus Energy. It doesn’t list as many chargers as ZapMap, as it focusses just on those on the major networks. However, it offers things like route planning, CarPlay and an RFID card for free, unlike ZapMap, and there are no adverts. It also looks nicer.

It’s worth noting that, by default, it’ll only show public chargers that are compatible with the Electroverse app and RFID card. This means that public chargers from Pod Point initially don’t appear, for example. You can turn this off if you want to prioritise seeing a wider range of chargers.

The route planning is quite good. You can tell it what car you drive, your start and end points, and how much charge you expect to start with. It’ll then calculate a route that includes stops at compatible chargers, and it’ll tell you how much you need to charge at each stop and how long it’ll take. You can then send the route to Google or Apple Maps. Note that in CarPlay mode, handoff is only to Apple Maps and not Google Maps, so bare that in mind.

PlugShare

PlugShare is another site that allows user contributions of public charger places. Unlike ZapMap, which is UK focussed, PlugShare is global. Its list of chargers is extensive, and even includes chargers which are ‘under construction’. I checked a couple of these locally, and found that, whilst there was planning permission in place for these, construction work hadn’t started. I think this is where Apple Maps may be getting its data from, but without the knowledge that they’re under construction.

It supports route planning, but this seems to be limited to showing public chargers on a given route. Unlike Electroverse, it didn’t tell me how much to charge up by and how long to stop for, and wouldn’t send the details to a mapping app. It supports CarPlay though.

ABRP – A Better Route Planner

A Better Route Planner is worth considering. It’s a full replacement for Apple Maps or Google Maps, and is designed for electric cars. Like with Electroverse, you can select your car and the starting charge, and it’ll plan routes to include car chargers.

CarPlay is limited to ABRP Premium, which also allows you to factor in weather conditions when driving, and to prefer chargers where there are toilets or children’s play areas. And, like Google Maps, ABRP Premium incorporates traffic data. It can also connect to live battery data in more cars, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. For my Nissan Leaf, it needs an OBD2 adaptor and the Leaf Spy Pro app (£20) set up. ABRP Premium costs €5 per month, or €50 per year.

Combining the apps

At the moment, I’m using a combination of all three:

  • Google Maps for general navigation
  • Electroverse for calculating charge levels on a route, or incorporating charge points into a route plan
  • ZapMap for finding charger locations

It would be nice if Google Maps included charge levels in its route planner on cars that don’t have it built-in; that would minimise my need to use other apps. Still, by planning my routes in Electroverse and sending them to Google Maps, I can achieve most of the features of ABRP without their premium subscription. Once I’ve picked up an OBD2 adaptor that’s fully compatible with Leaf Spy, I may give ABRP another try though.

Our journey towards an electric car – part IV

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A photo of a Rolec EVO electric car charger mounted on a Yorkshire stone wall

Time for the fourth post about our journey towards an electric car. Part one, in May, introduced the series, and part two last month answered the questions ‘why’ and ‘why now’. Meanwhile, part three talked about choosing a home electric car charger. Today, I’m going to talk about the charger that we had fitted.

We decided to buy our car charger first, before buying an electric car, so that we would be able to charge it at home from day one. So, back in May, we had a new Rolec EVO charger installed on the outside of our house, by a local electrical firm.

It’s an untethered charger, as the charger is located in quite an exposed place. That means that we can put the cable away when not in use, and it’s at less risk of being stolen. It connects over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; we chose a Wi-Fi model as it’s (just) in signal range of our router.

Around the charger socket is a ring light, which changes colour based on its status. As there’s no car plugged in, but it’s ready to charge, it’s flashing blue. It’ll turn green once a car is plugged in and charging.

The Rolec EVO app and OCPP

A screenshot of the Rolec Evo charging app on iOS

By default, the Rolec EVO uses its own app, which is fine. Within the app, you can start and stop charging sessions, and select the level of current to charge slower or faster. There are also the ‘Eco’ charging modes, which I’ll explain further down.

You can manage the Wi-Fi network that the charger is connected to (whilst connected via Bluetooth of course) and perform firmware updates – since we had this installed in May, there’s been a couple of updates released.

The Rolec EVO also supports OCPP, and so I could switch it over to a different platform. For older Rolec devices, the default platform is Monta (there’s a guide here) but others are available.

I may well consider switching to Monta, as there’s a Monta integration in HACS for Home Assistant. As yet, the backend for the Rolec EVO app doesn’t appear to have a public API. That means it’s not currently possible to add it to Home Assistant, other smart home platforms, or other electric car charging apps, unless you change to Monta.

Eco modes and schedules

As well as the big chonky electric cable that runs from your charger to your consumer unit (what most people call a fusebox), there’s a smaller cable attached. This connects to a CT clamp, that monitors your household electricity usage. If you put the charger in ‘Eco’ mode, then it’ll adjust the charging rate depending on how much power is being used elsewhere in the home. For example, if your oven is on, it might lower the current.

Eco+ mode is there for solar panel users, and so ensures that charging takes place when the sun is shining. That should save you money over using grid energy.

You can also set a charging schedule. This is helpful if you have an EV electricity tariff, which offers lower energy prices at set times of the day. That way, you can plug your car in, and then it’ll wait until the cheaper times kick in before it starts charging. We’re with Octopus (here’s my referral link), and they have two dedicated EV tariffs. One, ‘Intelligent Octopus Go’ requires you to have a certain model of car and a certain charger. It supports a lot of chargers, including other, older Rolec chargers, but not the newer EVO model that we have. The other, Octopus Go, simply offers cheaper electricity in the early hours of the morning. We’ll need to look into these once our smart meter is working again – you’ll need a working smart meter for both tariffs.

Future-proofing

I’ve mentioned that the Rolec EVO charger supports OCPP, so I can change to a different back-end system or run my own OCPP server. But it looks like it uses an Espressif ESP chip for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, based on how it presents itself to my router. So it might be possible to put custom firmware on it in future. Having spent a four figure sum getting installed, I don’t think I’ll be looking at this anytime soon, but it should mean I’m in a good place if Rolec were ever to go out of business.

We just need a car now

So that’s the charger that we’ve had installed. Now we just need a car to plug into it. The good news is that we put a deposit down on a new electric car on Saturday, and will be picking it up at the end of the week. I’ll conclude the series once we’ve got it.

How to: read a not-so-smart export meter

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A photo of our electricity meter showing our export reading

Somewhat annoyingly, our smart electric meter stopped being smart on the 26th March. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but since then, we’ve not had any automatic electricity readings sent to our energy supplier.

After a week, I reported the issue to Octopus, who are our energy supplier. We exchanged some emails back and forth, and tried various things, but apparently to no avail. What was weirder was that the gas meter still submits regular readings.

This web site has loads of information about smart meters, including how they work and how they communicate with your energy supplier. As well as the gas and electric meters, all homes with a smart meter have a ‘communications hub’ that sits on top of the electric meter, and it’s this that sends the data. So even though it was sat on top of our electric meter, it was only sending data from the gas meter. Weirder still is our ‘in home display’ (IHD) – the small black screen that sits away from our meters in our dining room. That was still accurately displaying data from both gas and electric meters.

With Octopus unable to fix the problem remotely, we’ll need an engineer to come out. And right now, there’s a long wait for smart meter engineer visits, as energy companies are currently prioritising those with a ‘radio teleswitch’ (RTS) meter. These older meters were used for (for example) Economy 7 tariffs, and listen for a radio signal to switch to a cheaper tariff – they’ve been around since the 1980s. Alas, the radio signal is being switched off at the end of next month, and there’s an estimated 400,000 RTS meters still in use. That doesn’t leave very long to have these replaced with smart meters.

Going back to manual readings

So whilst our gas readings are being sent automatically on a regular basis, we’re back to doing manual readings for electricity. As we have solar panels, we have to do two separate readings – an import reading, for the energy we use from the grid, and an export reading, for the energy that we sell back to the grid.

For the import readings, we can just use the IHD – press a few buttons, and it’ll give us our usage. But the IHD doesn’t display export readings. For that, we have to take a reading from the screen on the meter itself.

Our electricity meter is in our cellar, under the steps down from the kitchen. After we had our kitchen renovated, we also improved the access to the cellar, but it’s still in an awkward place. I have to move our tumble dryer out of the way, and crouch in the small space under the steps to take the reading.

It’s also not the most straightforward process. The meter itself has a small screen and two buttons, and you need to know which combination of button presses are required. Thankfully, Octopus offers this excellent guide to how to read various types of meters, and so I was able to submit both import and export readings. The next day, we were credited £116 for all the electricity we’d exported since the 26th March.

Hopefully, it won’t be too long before an engineer visits and fixes the issue for us. In the meantime, I’m also waiting to see if we can get an Octopus Home Mini, which bridges across to your home Wi-Fi network and sends data in near real-time.

How to: Use automatic Octopus tariff data in the Solax app

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A screenshot of the page where users can generate an Octopus API key

If you have a Solax inverter attached to your solar panels, and get your energy from Octopus, then you can now calculate your earnings using live tariff data in the Solax app. I gather this feature has been there for a few months, but I’ve only recently found out about it. Here’s how to set it up.

Firstly, open the SolaxCloud app. On the home screen, tap the Earnings section. At the top right, you should see an icon that looks like a calculator with a lightning bolt on it, so tap that. You’ll now see two tabs – ‘To Grid’ and ‘From Grid’.

Get your Octopus API key

Before we continue, you’ll need to generate an API key. Log into your online Octopus Energy account (on the web, not on the app). At the top, it should say ‘Hi, [your name]’, display your account number, and then show a link called ‘Personal Details’. Click that link.

You should now see several boxes, one of which is called ‘Developer settings’. Click the ‘API access‘ button.

Scroll down a bit, and you’ll see a box labelled ‘Your API key:’. Copy this key, and preferably save it in a password manager. You can only have one API key, but you can use it for multiple things – I use my key for the Octopus Energy integration for Home Assistant, for example. You can regenerate your key, but it’ll invalidate your previous key, and you’ll only be shown it once on the Octopus web site. That’s why it’s best to treat it like your password.

Whilst you’re on Octopus’ web site, make a note of your account number too, as you’ll need this in a moment.

Enable automatic tariff setting

Back to the SolaxCloud app. Below the ‘To Grid’ and ‘From Grid’ tabs, you should have two further tabs: ‘Customized’ and ‘Automatic’. Tap ‘automatic’.

A new box called ‘Tariff provider’ appears, so tap this, and select ‘Octopus’. There’s another option called ‘Nord Pool’ which may work if you use a different energy supplier. I don’t, so I’ve only tested this with Octopus.

Now, you’ll have two options: ‘API Key’ and ‘Select a package’. ‘Select a package’ lets you manually choose your tariff and region, but it won’t update automatically if you change your tariff. So, we’ll select ‘API key’. Here, enter your account number, and then the API key, and tap ‘Save’. You should find that your current tariff and meter point access number now appear in the app. Scroll down, and you’ll be able to see the underlying tariff data, both as a graph and the raw data.

I’m on a fixed tariff with Octopus, so at present there’s no fluctuation with my import and export prices. However, if you’re on a tariff such as Octopus Agile, you’ll now see this data in the SolaxCloud app. What’s more, any future earnings will be calculated using this tariff data, and so it’ll more accurately reflect how much money your solar panels and/or battery are saving you.

Join Octopus

Octopus is now the UK’s largest electricity supplier, with a market share of 22%. And, with features like API access, the chances are that if you’re geeky enough to read this sort of blog post, then you’re already signed up. However, if not, here’s my referral link – you’ll get £50 off your first bill if you sign up. Financial incentives aside, of all the energy companies that I have used, Octopus have had the best customer service by far.

My chosen HACS integrations

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Last week, I wrote about HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, which allows many additional community-provided integrations to be installed into Home Assistant. This week, I’m going to list those that I use.

DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service

The DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service allows you to monitor the publicly-available data about any UK car. When you set up the integration, you input a registration number, and it’ll download the data from the DVLA’s database. This includes useful information like when the car’s MOT is due, or when the car tax expires – these can be automatically added to a calendar widget on your Home Assistant dashboard.

HASS Agent

The HASS Agent integration allows you to use HASS Agent, a Windows desktop utility for managing Home Assistant. Once set up, you can configure automations to shut down your Windows computer, receive notifications, or monitor its state.

Nest Protect

We have a Nest Protect smart smoke alarm, which isn’t supported by the built-in Nest integration in Home Assistant. Google hasn’t made a public API for it, and so to integrate it with Home Assistant, you need to use this HACS integration. This is a good example of why an integration is in HACS and not Home Assistant core; setting it up requires you to log in to your Nest account in a private window, and then use Google Chrome’s developer tools to essentially ‘steal’ the cookies so that Home Assistant can hijack the same browser session.

Google has talked about adding the Nest Protect to its Google Home app for years, meaning that the standalone Nest app can be retired. But it hasn’t happened yet. When it does, perhaps there will be a proper API, and this will be available in Home Assistant core.

Timer Bar Card

This is a new card for your dashboard, which creates a progress bar for sensors that have a countdown. I use this for our Bosch dishwasher, so that as well as showing how long it has left, it shows visually how complete the washing cycle is.

Meross LAN

We have a pair of Meross energy monitoring smart plugs, and although they support Matter, to be able to do more than just turn them on and off, I need to use the Meross LAN integration. It supports both HTTP and MQTT communication, and will work both using Meross’ cloud MQTT servers and your own local MQTT broker, if you have one. Once set up, you can use the energy monitoring sensors in Home Assistant.

Octopus Energy

We get our gas and electricity from Octopus Energy (referral link, you’ll get £50 off your first bill if you sign up), and they have an API that any customer can use. The Octopus Home Asssitant integration lets you bring your meter data into Home Assistant, and you can set up automations to opt you in automatically to any energy saving sessions. The data is updated daily, unless you have a Octopus Home Mini which can provide realtime data for electricity, and half-hourly data for gas.

As well as offering some of the best unit rates for energy export, the fact that Octopus offers an API means that just about every UK geek that I know uses them. They also seem a lot easier to deal with than other energy suppliers we’ve used in the past.