EasyGo public chargers

CMOTDibbler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122367212#Comment_122367212

I like the way eCars top you up automatically when your balance drops below €5 during a charging session. EasyGo should implement this.

markpb

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122367212#Comment_122367212

I think the issue is caused either by the hardware in the charger or by the type of integration between the charge point and the back office. When the back office tells the charger to start, it tells it how much money to allow the customer to spend before stopping. There's no way to update that amount mid-charge if the customer tops-up. If it's hardware, that's non-trivial to fix especially with the manufacturer gone out of business.

EasyGo don't have technical ownership over their app, their back-office or their chargers so there's not much they do to customise it or make the experience better for the customer. This is where Tesla and others that are vertically integrated have a huge advantage.

Your second point is probably entirely commercial - easyGo and eCars want the money up front from prepaid customers - they don't want to have to chase unpaid invoices from customers, especially when it's trivial for the customer to leave the debt and open another account. Again, Tesla have a huge advantage here because it's trivial for them to block you from SuperCharging again until you've paid.

CivilEx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122367198#Comment_122367198

Fair enough and good points made.

I think ESB are the "go to" or the "benchmark" against which all others are tested against though, and that's where EasyGo might be perceived to be more expensive. I see that behaviour in Castlebar for example where there will often be a queue on a Friday evening at the 50kW ESB charger

https://www.plugshare.com/location/80724

but there won't be anyone at either of the two 50kW EasyGo chargers which are literally 2 mins away on the same side of town…

https://www.plugshare.com/location/452759

https://www.plugshare.com/location/512377

On the face of it, people are willing to queue for 30 - 40 mins to save themselves €5 (40kWh @ €0.7 - €0.57), which I find hard to understand.

Maybe our discussion here on value for money has nothing to do with the public using EasyGo chargers (or not). EasyGo's social media engagement and generally raising awareness of their charger locations is non existent as far as I can see….they must be completely focused on rolling our new 50kW Tritium chargers around the country!

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122367812#Comment_122367812

There are other reasons why ecars might be worth queuing for over easygo. Easygo tritum chargers tend to be less reliable, some people might not have easygo accounts, in many counties, in Waterford for example, a lot of their chargers are single units so single point of failure risks. It could simply be that people have the time on their hands to burn. If it was me I wouldn't be bothered queuing to save a fiver personally speaking, I'd certainly be frugal enough to top up enough to get me to the next ESB charger but not enough to spend 45 minutes+ waiting on one

zg3409

Esb only dropped prices in recent weeks, they were both similar. I think lots of EV owners have no idea easygo even exists.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122369020#Comment_122369020

The HPC rate for ESB was 68c before the recent price drop so almost on par with easygo's 70c, presumably ESB will be dropping prices again later this year and at some point it will make financial sense for easygo to do similar or risk losing a lot of customers.

Easygo price increases were less reported on in the media probably because 2 years ago they were a much smaller operator. I think they might have been around the 55c mark pre-2020

cc

I think their niche/cash cow will be more on the shops, hotels AC charging. For DC at their current level of operations i'd expect they will always price higher against others

Alun

So, as an EV newbie, I just tried charging on an EasyGo charger at our local Lidl, in advance of a long trip where I might need to use one and I'm a bit confused ..

I decided to go with PAYG instead of PrePay as I won't be using them that often, and everything went swimmingly until it asked for payment so tried the contactless option and nothing would work, phone, physical card, nothing.

Eventually I tried initiating charging via the app. It then asked for me to type in the card details, which then worked OK. But looking in the app it appears that my card details aren't stored anywhere, so does that mean I have to retype them every time, or what?

I'd considered caving in and going PrePay instead, but there's no option for changing the subscription type anywhere that I can see either.

Exiled Rebel

The level of iceing going on at their portlaoise train station hub is ridiculous. Currently 2 ice cars taking up EV spaces but quite often a lot more. Saw 6 ice cars on two occasions in the past fortnight while walking passed the hub. A particular lady driving a red focus seems to love repeatedly parking in the spaces adjacent to the fast charger.

parking wardens from the council obviously do not exist because if there was the iceing of EV spaces would quickly stop.

MojoMaker

The rest of the country could adopt the Navan town model of warden-enforced parking oversight.

MBSnr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122729123#Comment_122729123

"Please call us on 01 254 4456 if you would like to switch contracts."

zg3409

Besides the new site that looks like here

https://www.plugshare.com/location/704880

I see that the overstay fee now is applied for every hour you overstay. I know ESB ecars recently enough changed to per minute overstay fees, looks like easygo have similar issues of people staying hours longer than they should.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122801803#Comment_122801803

Looks like they increased their prices as well to 73c/kWh, sneaky

CivilEx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122803420#Comment_122803420

I had a look at a few random EasyGo locations and the general €0.70/kWh rate still seems to be intact, along with the €0.50/kWh at Lidl sites. That location on the N2 noted by @zg3409 above is also back to €0.70/kWh..…

zg3409

30% off at night

Holiday Night Savings Tariff Project

Offer will run from 02/12/2024 to 28/02/2025

Night Rate from 23:00 to 06:00 reduced to €0.49kW

Access Fee and Overstay fee remains the same

Applies to Pre Pay and PAYG contracts

Applied to all EasyGo owned DC charge points in RoI

Tariffs will use naming convention Holiday Night Savings (30% Off)

119 Locations to be updated in Ocean

https://easygo.ie/30-off-on-easygo-night-rate/

I suspect the last word should be "in total", note this may not apply to Lidl etc as they may not be "owned" by easygo.

redlead

How do you know if an easy go charger has overstay fees or not? I needed 4 hours at a crappy lidl 11kw charger today as was doing a drogheda to waterford return trip. The app doesn't say anything about an overstay fee but does say there is a 2 hour limit for lidl customers.

zg3409

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122915546#Comment_122915546

Looks like there may be no automatic overstay fee at Lidl any more but beware Lidl clamp at some stores. At other sites (non Lidl), with CCS chargers it states 60 minutes

Like

dodzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122803420#Comment_122803420

I calculated that my old 520d was consuming diesel at a rate equivalent to approx 71c/kWh. This country needs to stop gouging EV owners. That is a simply a criminal price to charge people. I'd never have considered switching if this level of cost was going to be on the cards.

Red Silurian

All easygo DC charge points now have a rate of 49c/kWh between 11pm and 6am until the end of February. The rate is being called Holiday Night Savings (30% Off) which is a strange name because most people go on holidays in July/August.

I can see this being especially useful for overnights at a few hotels that have those 24kW DC charging

https://easygo.ie/30-off-on-easygo-night-rate/

MrMusician18

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122920063#Comment_122920063

I can imagine the discussion over the name of the tariff. My guess is someone wanted to call it winter night saving but someone more important felt that made it sound too permanent. They then thought Christmas, but as not everyone celebrates that now they went with Holiday.

I've been party to far too much of this nonsense over the years.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122920164#Comment_122920164

Oh yeah that does make sense. I forgot Americans call it "the holidays," except for Green Day who famously used the term correctly in one of their songs

redlead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122919950#Comment_122919950

The thing is 90% of your charging is at home for 7c a kwh. 90% of people will use public charging way less than they think and even when they do use it, they might only need 20 or 30 kw. In the last 5k km I have only used public charging 4 times for instance and genelerally only for 10 min top ups apart from once at a slow easy go charger.

Public charging prices should come down but I don't mind paying high ionity prices if it means they build more of them. Proper banks of 6 chargers etc not these single charger locations you see ESB or AP build.

Exiled Rebel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122919950#Comment_122919950

You never filled up the 520d from home though.

mr chips

As a newbie, I had my first experience of charging with Easygo earlier today (car is a Kia eNiro 64kWh). Although I had created an account beforehand, the app wouldn't load properly on my phone at first, then it wouldn't accept the card details I was putting in. With the charger having started a countdown before the session would be aborted, I just tapped to pay with a different card altogether, i.e. PAYG, and the session started. Hurray!

Left the car for about 40 minutes and returned to see a message that charging had completed - however, it didn't display an exact number of kWh delivered so I can't say exactly how much it delivered, but it had only added about 35% to the battery, with the range having gone from about 38 miles (charger display said 13% when the session started) to 130 miles. That was enough to be going on with, but I thought it was pretty low for the length of time the car was plugged in.

Tried going into the app once I got home to see what it would show me, but it kept telling me the password was wrong (it wasn't). Tried twice in succession to click on the forgot password bit, but never got the password reset email. And just now, 4 hours later, I opened the app again and was able to log in straight away, but there's no detail on the charging session from earlier today. When I go into "My Subscription", it shows "Pay as you go 21/03/2025", but no other information.

All in all, not exactly very satisfactory or informative. Is this typical of the app or is there something else I need to do??

mackerski

Your charging session wasn’t started from the app, so the app won’t be in a position to show it to you.

mr chips

Ah, OK. Hopefully it'll load properly next time ...

veryangryman

Yeah that's crapp that the app can't show you. I use rfid card from esb and yet the app can show me fine.

Hardgo they should be

prawnsambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123285882#Comment_123285882

How would the app know? The charge was started with a debit card and not the app.

mr chips

That might be fair enough in terms of the info not being available in the app, but it would still have been handy if even the charger screen had been able to show me the total amount of power delivered and the price I paid, as well as the actual duration of the charge - unless there's a way I don't know about to bring this back up after charging has stopped? Like I say, I was there for 40 minutes and charging had stopped when the battery wasn't quite 50% full. I thought I would have got more in that amount of time from a charger supposedly capable of delivering 70kW when I was starting the charge from 13%, i.e. not such a high state of charge that the rate of power delivery would have been limited. Hopefully the app will work properly next time, anyway.

prawnsambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123286074#Comment_123286074

Sometimes the charge stops for no reason, maybe plug not fully in or somebody comes along and stops it or just gremlins. Happened me once, no idea why.

Maybe worth your while getting the fob if you're likely to use those chargers a fair bit. Never have any issues starting a charge with it. You're not reliant on a good signal.