Charge Anytime

Unfortunately, the app does not live up to the promise of charging anytime, as suggested by its name and marketing. OVO has made the app slow and clunky. Once you plug in your car, it often takes about an hour before the app recognizes that the car is connected. This means you miss out on an hour of charging at the discounted rate, or any rate at all, since the OVO app prevents your car from charging until it acknowledges the connection. I live in Cirencester and recently made a trip to East London and back. After some driving around, I returned home at 2 PM and needed to prepare for a trip to Birmingham, leaving at 5:30 PM. The OVO app has an override option that allows you to start charging immediately, but only once the app detects your car. This results in wasting over an hour of charging time. Alternatively, you can adjust the scheduling to charge at £0.07 per kWh, but I don’t understand why the emergency charge option doesn’t allow you to charge at this rate. It seems that OVO complicates things unnecessarily. They really should communicate with their EV customers instead of just listening to managers who don’t understand our needs.

Details omitted in my first review: Indra charger with Renault vehicle. Plugged in car at 21:30 to minimise the chance of the dreaded “planning your next charge”, said next charge at 22:00, then minutes later changed it to 22:30. Woke in the night (2:00) and checked to find the dreaded “planning….” after half an hour charge at 22:30. I went back to sleep with no hope. Woke two hours late to find the dreaded. I got up, unplugged the car, waited 5 minutes, plugged it in. Within a couple of minutes the car was charging and remained so until fully charged. So app good for insomniacs and night workers but everyone else???? Why the dreaded phrase when clearly it was a green time to charge? Come on Ovo, I think this app is great idea but at the moment it is a recruitment tool for other suppliers. Many more broken nights and I’ll be off elsewhere to get my electricity.

When it works, it does save money. But I get constant phone notifications overnight because it seems to start then stop charging every few mins. But sometimes it just doesn’t charge full stop and you only find out the next morning when you get in the car-the app itself doesn’t tell you that it has failed to deliver the charge despite being clearly programmed to deliver by the set time. Like others, I have then had to reinstall it after it hasn’t worked for a few days. But trying to reinstall takes a couple of days due to error messages on attempts at reinstalling. But I apparently have saved about twenty quid in just 2 weeks of faffing about with all this!!