After a couple of days on my new tariff and charging schedule, the smart meter was reporting quite high daily costs. It looked like I was being charged the standard daily rate for my imports so a check was in order to see if anything untoward was happening! Fortunately my OpenEnergy Monitor was showing just what I expected, with imports occurring during the 04:00-07:00 and 13:00-16:00 cheap windows and virtually nothing in the 16:00-19:00 peak price window.
The smart meter also appeared incapable of factoring in any export that was going on, so it would be interesting to see what the bill looked like at the end of the month.
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Octopus managed to set up both the fixed export and Cosy tariffs just before my 2 year fixed tariff ran out. The challenge now was to organise my batteries to make the most of things. I had previously researched how to set up the Time of Use (TOU) settings on the Fusion Solar portal. It involved selecting Device Management and then the Battery and then parameters. however on looking at it now something had changed and I had to contact my installer for help. They got back to me promptly and it appeared that the setting I required was now under the dongle settings instead of the battery! I set my battery to charge in the two off peak periods, but initially didnt realise I had to set then to discharge at the other times. I thought that this meant a forced discharge to take advantage of selling electricity, but actually it just meant the batteries were able to power any load.
Once this was done things seemed to work as expected, but it did mean I was charging my batteries up to maximum and having to pay for it (albeit at a reduced rate). However since I was getting 15p/kWh on my export it actually meant it was only costing me 18.13-15=3.13p a kWh more than I would normally have paid. If I had to fully charge the battery twice a day (unlikely) that meant it cost me a maximum of 3.13 x 5 x 2=31.3p a day. One thing I hadn't fully appreciated was that while set to 'charge', the battery wouldnt power anything. However anything that needed power would at least be using cheap rate electricity. After giving up trying to contact OVO, I finally opened a complaint with OFFGEM. Within a couple of days OVO had transferred my account to Octopus as instructed!
After looking at the various tariff options available to me, I decided to go for Octopus's Outgoing Export (which gives 15 pence per kWh for exported energy) coupled with Cosy (which gives a cheap rate import window twice a day). My rationale for doing this was that on sunny winter days I would still have some export, and that having only a small 5kWh battery, I may well need to charge it twice a day if there wasnt much sun to power the Air Source Heat Pump. I also planned to heat my hot water cylinder via the immersion during the cheap night rate. The soak away is now finished during the Indian Summer! The next step will be to insert a rainwater collection tank between the gutter pipe and the soak away.
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AuthorEx Radiographer, Information Analyst, Teacher and Self-builder. Now retired Archives
December 2023
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