New Customer How To use?

Hello all, my name is Ian, I had my battery installed on 1st November so all still new to me. Some initial questions please.

1. Is there somewhere I can go to learn how I set up & control things like how much to let my battery discharge to, when it should charge from grid, when the panels should export to the grid etc? In short is there a User Manual
2. I have noticed minor discrepancies (2-300w) in the amount of energy imported from grid versus how much I have been charged for by Octopus, is this normal?
3. I’m looking to move to an “agile” type tariff, do I need some form of home automation? We are usually home so large energy usage (w/m, T/d, D/w) can generally be when panels are generating.

Thanks in anticipation of any advice you can give.

Ian

idrobbo If you don't have an EV, time of use tariff or hot water diverter. Set the inverter to ECO mode and forget it for a while.

Whatever your smart meter is registering is correct. The Givenergy measurements are good indicators but you don't pay them for your energy usage, so their values are for information only.

See how you get on with the system for a little while before you commit to a time of use tariff. Everybody lives different lives and you need to build some experience of how your system works with your lifestyle before deciding what's best for you.

Tim thanks for taking the time to reply. Over the last day I’ve “discovered” the online portal which displays the information in a much more helpful manner, and I had sort of arrived at that same conclusion, sit back & see what happens. At the very worst I would be no worse off than before getting the system, and I have seen over the last 2 days my import drastically reduce, only down side is the battery is now very low.

We don’t currently have an EV, and we had already started to do energy hungry tasks during the day using solar when available, on an evening we sit here with the house ticking over at around .3kWh so nothing too drastic.

One thing I have realised from looking around the various communities is to arrange for my inverter warranty to be increased to 10 years, hadn’t been mentioned by my supplier.

Thanks again for the advice.

Hi idrobbo,
I believe Octopus have now pulled their Agile import tariff. It no longer appears on the web site. But if you are happy to load shift you could try their ECO7 tariff if you have a Gen 2 smart meter? When solar is low you could then do the energy hungry tasks overnight and top up the battery at a cheaper rate (around 15p) if you need to.

Karen Agile will be back, they are working out how to implement the energy price cap with Agile. Because looking at the data whoever managed to get onto the Variable Agile has been paying basically 0p per unit for the last couple of weeks. Lucky people!