Dishwasher always went on overnight anyway. Now it just happens to also coincide with a cheap period.
Washing machine, we think about a little bit, but that can also still easily go on during the day in a cheaper period.
Cooking is the only other energy suck for us and that just happens as normal without thinking about the rate even if it’s slightly more expensive at peak time.
All in all, we’re saving about £12/13 per month on Agile vs the price cap.
If you take the standing charge off our electricity, we’re at about the £30 mark.
We’ve already got a bit of credit built up for the winter and our heating is hardly needed anyway, so I’ve taken our direct debit right down to align with our usage.
As you can imagine I’m on the side of binning standing charges and loading the costs onto the kWh rate. Our lower usage and efficient home means we’d come out as winners.
During the sunny spell earlier in the month we were able to be pretty much self sufficient.
Now that we’ve had a few very cloudy days we’re topping up the battery more often at 7.5p (off peak go rate). Also charging the car around once a week now whereas we had been able to just top up the charge from excess solar previously.
Our gas usage is still low. Aiming to get through October without using the gas central heating this year, using a few small electric heaters to prolong the need for the central heating.
Yeah, its working out really well because our typical daily usage is less than the capacity of the battery so our average cost/kWh is kept at around the off peak rate (~10p/kWh).
The math works out quite nicely at the moment. It costs us about £1/day for our typical usage (~7kWh at 7.5p plus 47p/day standing), versus about £3.29/day (~7kWh at 40p plus 47p/day). So a realistic saving on electricity of between £1 to £2 per day.
That saving is good, but the payback time at that rate is over 10 years… which is less good.
That’s why I’m so keen on offsetting as much of our gas usage as possible this winter with small electric heaters.
I also haven’t started exploring whether other tariffs would yield better returns, need to figure out my new usage pattern first.
The payback period reduces the more you can make use of the battery, so higher energy users can generally save a bit more. But our electricity usage was pretty low to begin with which doesn’t leave a lot of room for savings.
Our gas bill per year is sitting at around £1k (50kWh per day in winter). So our plan is to reduce our annual gas usage by ~20% using some small electric space heaters powered from excess solar and off-peak leccy. If we can do that the payback period should reduce by a year or two.
You would also see quicker payback periods on cheaper battery products. I went with the myenergi libbi which cost about 20% more than the givenergy all-in-one system.
I do wonder what Octopus are doing announcing new heat pumps when they can’t install the current ones due to lack of staff.
I signed up for one and was told immediately that the earliest availability for install was next April… and that was their existing released one not the new one… Also, they didn’t have anyone available to even do the assessment to see if I was able to have an install so they would ‘get back to me tomorrow with an appointment’. That was last week… not a whisper. They took the £500 deposit fast enough though…
If they haven’t even got enough staff to handle the demand for assessment of the jobs let alone installers, having a big media splash and trying to sign up even more customers seems badly timed.
So I’ve got to work out how long I give them to actually call with the appointment, or whether it’s just best to cancel given what happened to @Ordog
I think they’ve grown so fast they aren’t able to keep up and need to slow down a bit (I’ve not had any email responses for a month, phone hold times are nuts… still trying to chase my last FIT payment and my next one is due… they were slow before but the wheels have come off now).
It must depend on the subject matter. I’ve had three emails in two days about their intention to double my monthly payment, with a current credit of just over £250. I requested they didn’t and they agreed. R-
higher, which is why I’m always trying to save both energy and costs:
