Mine too, as it happens. Different type of phone?
I have another question, mainly aimed at John but for anyone who knows about these things.
John warned about the Zappi draining the home battery under certain conditions, if it was wired up the way mine seems to be. I'm still trouble-shooting this with my installer. However the problem I am seeing doesn't seem to be what John warned about. The Zappi never ramps up its drain from the battery. But drain the battery it does.
The thing works like a charm during the day when there is sunshine. The Zappi uses the battery to tide it over short breaks in the solar, but cuts the power to the car if there is a serious drop in generation. Once the sun has come back out the car starts charging again with no problems. The battery is also recharged and I don't think I have ever seen it drop below 95% while all this is going on.
In fact the pass-the-parcel game between the Zappi, the Eddi, the solar, the grid and the house is really elegant and clever to watch, and as I say in the middle of the day I have not seen it put a foot wrong. Take yesterday for example.
I got in about 1.30 and saw that the home battery was at 100% and the hot water tank was up to temperature and export was going on. So I plugged the car in and let it get on with it. All was very well indeed, at least at first. The car immediately started charging, but on two occasions (one just before two and the other about 3.30) the sun went in and the Zappi cut the charge. Once export was re-established it started the charge again. Great. (In effect the car charging is the green bit.)
But then look at what happened at around 4.30. The solar suddenly dropped again, actually by more than it had done earlier in the day, but the Zappi compensated for that by drawing more from the home battery instead of cutting the charge. There was another spell of evening sunshine, but inevitably the solar generation faded. The Zappi went right on charging the car at around 2 kw, by drawing from the battery. I watched this until about 6.30 by which time the battery was under 80% and still heading south. I didn't see any sign it was going to stop even when it got dark.
So I thought I knew what would fix it, and went to make the tea. At first I thought it was going to go right on charging despite the extra load, but after a couple of minutes of the microwave and the kettle being on, the Zappi got the general idea and stopped charging. But if I'd just gone out and left it, where would I have been? Empty home battery, that's where.
Why on earth would the Zappi behave itself during the early and mid afternoon, but then under what seem to be the same circumstances occurring in late afternoon, decide to keep the charge going?
This is not a major issue, as I can see a simple solution. In the afternoon I had prioritised the Zappi over the Eddi as the car needed charging and I had all the hot water I wanted. So the Eddi never cut in. If the Eddi had had priority it would have cut in and performed the same function as the microwave. But it's a really weird anomaly and I have no clue why this is happening. (It happened once before too, about a month ago.)
More major is the issue with what happened when Octopus decided to give me that scheduled charge I didn't want. Here's the result.
I'm guessing the schedule was 01:00 to 01:30 and 02:30 to 03:00. When the charge started the Zappi drew only about 4 kw from the grid and the rest from the home battery. What on earth does it think it's playing at? Then it got worse. When the scheduled charge stopped, athough the grid import stopped, the Zappi went right on charging at around 2 kw, taken from the battery - much the same as its behaviour after the solar faded in the previous graph.
When the charge re-started at 02:30 the Zappi went back to taking 4 kw from the grid and 3 kw from the battery, and then again when Octopus cut the charge (presumably it thought I had the 10% I'd asked for) it reverted to continuing to charge from the battery right on until 04:15 when the battery hit 5% and said, no more. After that there was a small amount of grid import just to keep the house going, until the battery magically found another 10% of charge from God alone knows where (not the grid, and not solar at that time in the morning) and reported for duty on 15%. By that time the solar was beginning to take over the house load and the battery gradually started to recharge. It got brighter and by lunchtime it was charged and the Eddi had heated the water.
So this was not a disaster. The Zappi just gave the car the previous day's excess sunshine, and there was enough sun the next day (even though it was quite dull and rainy) to recharge the home battery by a reasonable time. But if it had been REALLY dull, I could have been short of non-peak-rate power.
This seems to me to be serious. I probably want to charge overnight next week some time, but it seems I can't do that without draining the home battery. At all. My installer is aware of this and he's going to get back to me, but I'd really like some input on what the freaking hell is going on.
I could imagine the first issue not being noticed by other clients, because even if they are charging from solar rather than exporting, starting the evening meal or just the Eddi coming on will stop the rot. I can't see anyone holding still for the latter problem though, and as far as I can see it's something that will inevitably affect me if I charge from the mains. (It also happened back in May when the Zappi itself had got accidentally programmed to start a charge at midnight, a charge I stopped manually about an hour later when I realised what was happening.)
I also think the two issues are connected, given the very similar behaviour of the Zappi after the Octopus charging windows had closed, and after the solar had faded.
It's still working like a dream in the middle of the day though. I'm baffled.
