Making the most of Octopus Agile

I've just switched from Flux to Agile for import (staying on Flux for any Export) but am not sure how best to make sure I'm set up to maximise the benefits during winter when solar is limited.
Currently my 8.2 GE battery is set to charge from 0200 (takes 3 hours) and come on from 1600 (high tariff/cost) and usually lasts 3-4 hours.
This means I draw from the grid all day until 1600.
Attached is a Flux-Agile comparison for my usage yesterday. Note the screen shot doesn't show past 0330, except the day total costs.
Thoughts welcome please? Thanks.

johnsherman are you sure you’re staying on flux for export? Thought you had to be on flux import to use the flux export tariff
https://octopus.energy/help-and-faqs/articles/which-export-tariff-can-i-combine-with-my-import-tariff/

Avenir
I did wonder about that but it's showing in my Octo account....

Nice, don’t change it in summer!

Flux will stay but you shouldn't be on it, ive heard on another forum some folks getting bills adjusted, I switched to agile outgoing just incase it did cause a problem for me, only time I export is during saving session and daylight goes way before 4pm hits.

Id love to get it sorted in Home Assistant to automate charge slots but I tried for days to get something working but im not sure if im just confusing myself on some stages or just doing something plain wrong I just gave up.

you should use octopus R&D to charge it at the best times.

I have a recurring schedule setup in R&D from 00:00 to 08:30 each day (it seems they are mostly the best times, the 22:30-00:00 window is also sometimes good but Octopus won't let you set up a schedule over 2 days so it can't be used as automatically as you want). I have 9.5 battery so I set it up to choose the 6 best half hour slots within that time window I just mentioned. So far, bar 1 slot on 1 day, it charges the battery at the best-priced time from 00:00-06:30.

Your usage is pretty high though generally so not sure how much of a dent it'll make. My flux average was £0.21/kWh, so far on Agile since 24/11/23 my average is £0.16/kWh - but I am only really charging the battery from grid, not all day usage like you. A decent ₂₀% saving for me though moving to agile for winter. Should have done it earlier...

Obviously though you're seeing a huge win generally... £14.93 in a day down to £6.11 is HUGE. You've selected a pretty good price day to compare here though, your lowest prices were about £0.05 which in my experience is rare. Sometimes the lowest price is £0.18. Check the week and month tabs to see if generally you are still saving.

Thanks all.
Rather than use R&D, or HA I'm giving https://myenergyoptimiser.co.uk/ a try. So far really good.
Saw it on Gary does Solar - https://youtu.be/Nmk7M156_PE?si=QyW3e7fnzMD-Q7Nw

johnsherman it will show up but they will mess up your billing and give you a bare minimum for export and at worst case can even charge your export as your import and bill you accordingly (happened to me so i know, had to get a refund of 9.** and get a -9.** added to my bill, huge hassle... avoid the confusion and email to seg@octopus.energy to get your tariff adjusted, don't leave it to them.

pacemaker Tried that on 2 occasions and it just doesn't work for me for some reason. It doesn't even attempt to change any settings or anything and there is nothing in History either. Set it up for charging at the 6 cheapest slots between 00:00 and 23:00 for a day and simply didn't do anything. Any hints and tips on how to make this work? All information (GiveE API and Octopus API) are already in the Octopus R&D website in my account. I will set it up again from 00:00 to 08:00 as attached to see what happens...does this look correct?

Avenir I am on IO for import and Agile for export. So I import at 7.5p 11:30 - 05:30 and export 16 - 25p 16:00 to 19:00.

Rogerbu Good for you 👍

dorosde

hmm that's odd, it looks like mine as far as I can tell, just not recurring. In Octopus R&D, go into the devices list, into your givenergy system, check the History option, it might give you a clue... Edit see you've already checked that.

Here's mine (that's been working for a couple of weeks)

dorosde one thing I will say... when I had an internet outage last week, my recurring stuff didn't fire the next morning, even though my Internet was up and running at the time. I mention this because even though it tried to do it (I think), the history showed nothing, no errors, but also no attempts either.

Other thing you can check is that the device page is actually showing you information about your system - then you can be at least sure it's able to connect.

pacemaker yeah, i can see the system and the graphs and everything is connected... its just the schedule that doesn't kick in. I will give it another go as per the previous post and see how it goes. Do you have the givE portal charge timers on as well or you fully disabled that? which takes action first if there is conflict? If that doesn't work again I will generate a fresh API from GivE and give it another go...

pacemaker I think i found the problem: As i setup R&D before going to Agile it was still thinking that i was on fixed tarrif, so that's why it wasn't doing anything. I regenerated a new API from Octopus and now it updated correctly! The highlighted in yellow wasn't updated after moved to Agile!

dorosde ah that'll do it!

Hope it works for you, tonight is super cheap!

To answer your Q, my settings are ECO mode on, everything else is disabled.

pacemaker will do the same! Will just leave ECO on! Yeah it’s super cheap when it’s windy!

pacemaker And voila! Everything worked as expected! Set it to select the 6 cheapest slots from 00:00 to 23:00, it did exactly that. It had chosen 5 slots in the morning and there is another one for 22:30 at 2p/kwh, so I am expecting that to be the 6th slot for the day and will be repeating that for the next few days. As solar is getting a bit better over the next few months or so I will be reducing the no of charge slots to suit!

dorosde nice!! yeah the only downside of having a recurring "all day" window to choose from means you can't add any other events (like additional timed charge or discharge) over the top, which is kind of annoying. So I've opted to chop the window at 08:30 and I'll manually add any one-off good slots late at night

What kind of prices are you getting on agile? I'm on flux at the moment. Wondering if I should change for the next few months.

Russ https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard

pacemaker but i can still do that manually from GivE portal isn't if needed?

deepanshus
Can you elaborate? Did " Myenenergy optimiser" mess up your tariff data after you'd set everything up with your API etc?

dorosde yeah you can

Russ

I'm currently seeing ₂₂% saving on agile compared to Flux, based on how I import. On flux I was charging 2-5am on the cheapest rate, on agile I charge whenever its cheapest within the 00:00-08:30 window (my choice on that timing, it just seems to be when the cheapest agile rates are other than sometimes at 22:30-23:30). On both tariffs I am charging for 3 hours in the night and seeing significant savings. Last night the average price was 4.7p/kWh which is waaaay below flux prices (my average for 2023 on flux was 21p/kWh)

That said there are times agile is at or slightly over the flux prices, even at its cheapest. I've been on it since 24/11 and seeing 22% saving compared to Flux, my only regret is not moving to it a month or so earlier

you can compare your costs on the Octopus Compare app with agile and see how your usage might benefit.

Here'a snapshot of yesterday on agile vs flux... 63% cheaper! Granted it was a cheap day, but for import only (without EV/ASHP, but with battery) it's a no brainer. Last night (this morning actually), it was negative pricing, they're paying me to use their kWh!

Perhaps a fairer test is to look over a longer period, rather than cherry-picking.
https://energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-southern-england/
shows a lot of useful historical stats.

Note that different price caps have applied to different versions of the tariff. When the govt. were subsiding, I think it was 35p, hence the flat green line on the max/min chart. That will, in turn, have reduced the average unit price on the previous graph.

(IIRC, it wasn't strictly a cap - a few times, the true price went so high that the subsididy wasn't quite enough to bring it down to 35p.) Is the cap currently £1/kWh or something along those lines ?

Perhaps a useful chart they could add would be something like the average price of the cheapest 6/8/10 slots per day, for those charging EV / house battery.

• ah - the dashboards section lets you customise time periods, etc.

I wasn't trying to cherry pick, just showing a most recent example. Have been careful above many times to say that it's not always like this, and that Agile is sometimes more than flux.

As with everything, it depends. It depends on your usage, your solar capability, your import and exports times, seasonality etc. The best thing anyone wondering can do is use something like Octopus Compare app that actually shows you hard data based on your historic usage. Even that can trick you because with Agile you may change your charging behaviour to get the most benefit out of it (like I now charge best 6 or 8 slots within an 8.5 hour window, vs Flux I was 3 hours only in the super off peak 3 hr window only - so the comparison is based on that).

But based on my personal circumstance at this point in the year, I am averaging 20-25% less on cost if I look purely at my average cost per kWh on Flux (21p/kWh) Vs now on Agile (16p/kWh). That is comparing the two time periods I had the two tariffs, Jan-Nov (21p/kWh), and Nov-Now (16p/kWh). (that cost also includes standing charge)

pacemaker having looked at the numbers, Agile might work out cheaper than Go for me. Unfortunately, EV charging is currently dumb, and I can only change the charging timer from within the car, so the hassle of having to update the timers manually just isn't worth it..

I have just switched from Flux to Agile. Put in the request last night and went live at noon today. Looking at the details my info shows that I'm on the Agile tariff for import but still on Flux for Export.

Tenkaykev a few people have seen that - would recommend pinging them (I find their twitter DM replies are quick) to get them to sort it out. Some mentioned here that leaving it wrong like that has caused problems for others

pacemaker
I don't have a Twitter / Facebook account so I've dropped them an email.
Fingers crossed it's all sorted soon.

pacemaker The best thing anyone wondering can do is use something like Octopus Compare app

Does that app actually compare historic usage in 30 min increments vs the various OE tariffs? The Agile Octopus portal appears to make calculations based on average price x kWh per day which is utterly useless to anyone who can charge batteries at the cheapest times and so consumption shifts...

26Left I've just had a quick play...looks like it does use actual 30-min slot data. But yesterday, for example, cheapest agile was roughly 2:30am to 5:30am. I did everything during Go hours. It calculated everything correctly, but obviously I would have shifted my usage to the cheapest agile hours (and would have been able to condense it down to 3 hours rather than 4).
Of course it would have been asking a lot to expect it to retrospectively adjust usage. So it's illustrative, but slightly pessimistic for other tariffs.

DD I switched off Agile on to Go for the winter on October 25th

I've just done the spreadsheet work manually: I downloaded my import and export readings from Octopus in 30 mins increments and compared the prices for Agile Import / Export and Go Import / Export x my figures.

My results FWIW - I'll try and compare these later on their app - for Oct 25th to Dec 20th:

So I'm definitely better off on Go for the time being.

yeah I think Agile works in winter for people that are just Solar + battery only. I don't think it's good for regular high EV and/or ASHP needs. As @DD rightly states, the comparison app is comparing 30 min increments, but it's based on your historic charge behaviour, which you would absolutely change when using Agile.

For example, yesterday I racked up my usage from 00:00-08:30 as it was negative pricing, using 24 kWh. That would have been about £6 on Flux vs £0.10p on Agile, a huge difference. That said, if I was still on Flux I wouldn't have used all that electricity and just charged my battery in the super cheap window as normal 🙂

Tenkaykev
Update to add I'm now on Agile for both import and export.

My second night on Agile and there were several slots were the energy prices were zero or negative. I set the battery to charge over several slots and, having an Immersion heater backup in our hot water tank I thought I'd take advantage of the free electricity and heat the water using the immersion heater. I noticed that the battery would start discharging to the house to meet demand from the immersion heater. I suppose one option would be to set the wireless controlled immersion heater schedule to heat the water first and then have the battery charge in the later slots, unless I'm missing a more obvious solution?

Tenkaykev I think battery should only discharging during a charging timeslot if it starts with SoC higher than the charge target.
Simple fix is to ensure charging period encompasses the full time you want to run immersion.Though that doesn't quite work if you want to charge battery in non-contiguous cheapest slots.
Or use pause timer on the portal to pause discharge during cheap periods, if supported by your system. Or set discharge power to 0. (May still discharge a few hundred watts, for reasons.)

Tenkaykev I am doing literally the same thing. I have the immersion running at the same time the battery is charging. Then grid is powering both recharge and immersion and house. As @DD states, its not exact as when you use agile you are sometimes using odd slots, but its been fine for me last 3 nights. Alternatively run the immersion earlier, let the battery "power" it, then you'll recharge later anyway.

pacemaker
Thanks guys, I will set the immersion to charge in parallel but finish earlier than the last couple of slots. Of course if it's on earlier then the immersion may well have reached its target temperature anyway.

pacemaker yeah I think Agile works in winter for people that are just Solar + battery only. I don't think it's good for regular high EV and/or ASHP needs
I'm not so sure - I've just run the Octo Compare app for the last month which shows this:

which shows a healthy saving if we had been on Agile over the Flex tariff.
We have a 14kW Mitsi ASHP and EV, so quite high usage. We also have solar and 19.5kWh of batteries, but I haven't been charging them much as waiting to decide on the best tariff.
But now defn going to try MyEO and switch to Agile which looks beneficial if I can get the batts charging in cheap periods.

Russ Honestly I am loving Agile atm, Thursday cost me 3p, Friday I got paid 37p for leccie use and Saturday I got paid to use leccie as well and it looks to be the same for sunday, sure its not huge amounts but im topping up a 13kwh battery and this has been my agile for past couple days.

As mentioned above download the "Octopus Compare" app it will allow you to compare two tariffs but best thing is to check the energy-stats.uk website and select your dno region which you can double check you got the right one here

When sun starts coming out more I will probably change back to flux.

For some reason the app seems a little off when you are owed money but this has been the general savings so far for past week and month compared to tariff I was on when I was on V7 AIO battery firmware.

EDIT
Since I joined on Nov 14th

downfield that's really interesting - thanks for sharing! I presumed because ASHP is less flexible when you can use it (as you want the home heated when you want it) it might mean more high cost usage! Vs battery, and I suppose EV which you can time charge at the cheapest possible times.

But looking at that the average cost of agile is a good 20p less every day for the last (almost month)

Wonder what the cosy tariff looks like on your data

Jellybaby I'll definitely move off to flux or higher export when the time is right.

I'm tracking my data in excel (boring I know!), looking at the right times to switch. I wasn't doing this before and came onto Agile too late. I should have switched earlier in October (I joined late Nov).

My plan is to use the 14 day moving average cross over to determine when I should switch. Both mu usage and cost saving trends marry up at around mid Oct so looking for those crossovers again in 2024 to switch back to Flux.

The blue dot on this last chart is when I switched to Agile. You can see my savings trend is flattening rather than shooting down as it was on Flux.

Note: you can see I am abusing the import in the last 3-4 days, it's basically free electricity so ramped up my import. Its messing up my charts but will sort out once this extreme cheap period is over.

pacemaker

Its messing up my charts but will sort out once this extreme cheap period is over.

You bite your tongue, it should never end 😃

Jellybaby I thought last night was it but its rolling into tomorrow too!

3 days in a row (so far) of 4 hour Power-ups for us lucky ones.

One important thing to note is that Agile now requires a 12 month tie up. Agile export rates, as far as I can see means losing out on the 15p export rate so in the summer months you lose out with Solar export.

Tenkaykev I've not heard of that. When I signed up on 24th Nov they said I can change after 30 days. Is that a new change? Their's T&Cs don't mention 12m for export

https://octopus.energy/policies/smart-tariffs-terms-and-condition/#agileoctopus

1.3 You can always switch from a standard import tariff to a smart import tariff (provided you meet the eligibility criteria for that particular tariff), but if you switch away from a smart import tariff, you cannot switch back to a smart import tariff within 30 days.

2.3 These terms apply to the Agile Octopus tariff - Last updated on 22 March 2023 (Version C)

2.3.1 Prices for the Agile Octopus tariff are calculated based on a formula related to wholesale costs, and are usually published between 16:00-22:00 (normally, but not always, nearer 16:00), for the following day, with a different price for every 30 minutes of every day.

2.3.2 Agile Octopus is a Variable Rate Tariff, and your daily standing charge and the unit rate pricing formula is variable and subject to change. We will give you reasonable notice of any changes.

2.3.3 Prices can rise as well as fall, though the unit rate is capped at the amount specified at the time of switching. We will give you reasonable notice of any changes to the cap.

2.3.4 The variable nature of Agile Octopus means any prediction of future costs will be inaccurate and historical data will not predict future performance. Agile Octopus is a smart import tariff that allows you to unlock the cheaper and greener benefits of using energy according to wholesale costs. Sometimes peaks may be higher, sometimes lower. You will always be able to switch to one of our fairly priced standard tariffs at any time.

johnsherman
On Agile I've disconnected from the 3rd party now and just set the Inverted to Eco and forced charge from 0100-1600.
In my all-electric house this resulted in my paying 71p for 46kWh of electric on Christmas Eve. That's 1.5p/kWh. Might be a 'cherry pick' but I like it 😊

yeah Christmas Eve was same for me too, whole day including VAT and standing charge cost me £0.02 and I imported 40 kWh!! Shame its not like that every day in winter 🙂

Cooked xmas dinner for -2.8p.....

pacemaker yeah I think Agile works in winter for people that are just Solar + battery only. I don't think it's good for regular high EV and/or ASHP needs

I have an ASHP and am on agile.

We swapped from Flux to Agile import in mid October, around the same time we turned the ASHP on for heating as I knew I wouldn't be able to run the house and ASHP from the cheap Flux period electricity once the ASHP was on for heating.
Spent ages looking at the options, considering all the tariffs before eventually settling on agile. Although Cosy offered two cheap periods for charging the battery, the peak periods were more expensive.

So far very happy with the choice made. It was a bit eye watering in early December when the peak rates hit 60p in the evening peak, but overall I'm paying less on agile than I would have been with Flux.
In the Octopus Compare app, comparison of 1670kW consumed 26/11-25/12/23:

• Agile £307
• Tracker £312
• Cosy £452
• Flux £455
• Standard variable £479

There have been days when tracker has been cheaper and I did consider that, only really being put off by the lock-out that you can't rejoin for 9 months afterwards.

Am using Predbat in Home Assistant to automate my battery charging and discharging.

geoffreycoan if predbat is optimising for agile it’s not really a fair comparison though… it would do very different things if you were on cosy or almost nothing if you were tracker! You’d have some efficiency advantages if you were using directly from the grid on tracker rather than the battery on a time of use tariff…

Need to run predbat in a kind of monitor mode for all tariffs and let it tell you how cheap it could have made each one!

geoffreycoan cool. I moved to agile the other day and setup PredBat. Amazing program!

geoffreycoan yeah I guess it also depends on size of battery. I was assuming with ASHP you really want to use that when its cold (usually mornings and evenings), which doesn't give you choice (you can't load shift it like a battery as you want the heat when you want the heat). But I suppose, if you have a big charged battery that can handle the ASHP load you can run it off battery too... I hadn't thought of that

Also now thinking more... I don't actually know the heating pattern using ASHP, assuming its same as central heating but maybe its different (like on all day vs blasts in AM/PM), which might change the agile outlook

pacemaker Also now thinking more... I don't actually know the heating pattern using ASHP, assuming its same as central heating but maybe its different (like on all day vs blasts in AM/PM), which might change the agile outlook

A heat pump is most efficient when you run it low and long, i.e. with as low a flow temperature as you can manage to warm the house (and balance heat loss), and run it continually/near continually so that it is constantly replenishing lost heat on a gradual basis. I didn't believe this at first and ran the heat pump more like a conventional (oil) boiler we had before, which meant that the heat pump had to do a lot of work every day to warm the pipes and radiators up from cold, and it meant a higher flow temperature was required to get the house warm enough.

Here FYI is my daily heat pump consumption from mid October:

Typical consumption is 15-25kW a day, but as you can see on really cold periods it can be very large. Up to 96kW on 2nd December ! Ouch.

I knew I wouldn't ever have a big enough battery to run my heat pump every day in the winter, or if I tried I'd hit limits of overnight charging throughput rate and it would probably never payback for the battery installation cost either.

@naltsta At the moment I only have a single 5.2kW battery so the optimisation predbat is doing is actually quite limited. The general pattern is charge overnight, release in the morning when the rates go up, then charge around lunchtime and early afternoon, then release in the peak period. During the evenings and middle of the day I am pretty much always running off grid import.

Before I chose agile I did a lot of spreadsheet modelling of what my current consumption was, what the heat pump usage was likely to be (based on last year's winter figures), then modelled what the monthly costs could be, taking advantage of the load shifting and battery charging appropriate to each time of day tariff:

There are different figures for agile based on different battery strategies.

I believe with the Pro version of the Octopus Compare app you can model load shifting. Anyway I did it all manually in a very complex spreadsheet

geoffreycoan

96 kWh in a day! Ouch! I assume you mean kWh and not kW

How are you finding the cost of elec consumption vs oil? I am in the same boat wanting to switch from oil to ASHP, but financially I am just not sure the numbers are there yet when spending about £1200 a year on oil.

After reading of people moving to the Agile tariff and retaining the Flux export tariff I emailed customer support for clarification. As of December the Agile tariff is a 12 month contract and you are supposed to be on Agile export too.
This will obviously make a difference especially during the summer if you are exporting a lot of surplus.

Tenkaykev yeah I don't think that's right I'm afraid. I just spoke to them on twitter on it and this is what they say:

Thanks for getting back in touch.

Agile is still on a variable tariff with no end date, however Tracker has been updated to a fixed tariff for new sign ups however you can still choose to leave the tariff at any point during that 12 months.

pacemaker I signed up for Agile on 23/12 and have double checked the T&Cs they sent me by email and there was no mention of a fixed period of 12 months. So I have saved these in case of future dispute when I switch in the summer.

my agile outgoing is fixed but that just means that if there is a price change I won't get the changed price but I am still free to leave at any point.

Not sure how they can fix the tracker tariff as that changes day to day, maybe the outgoing is fixed?

I queried the fixed nature with Octo support and they said:
This means that the caps you have in placed are fixed for that duration.
So I guess it refers to the £1 cap being fixed.

I may well be misinterpreting the information that I've been given. When I enquired with Octopus customer services I received this reply earlier today:

Thank you for reaching out to us. I hope you're doing well.

_I can confirm that it is not possible to be on the Agile tariff for import and the Flux tariff for export. However, please see our webpage below which confirms the tariff compatibility for both import and export. I hope this helps.

https://octopus.energy/help-and-faqs/articles/which-export-tariff-can-i-combine-with-my-import-tariff/

_Please let me know what option you would like to go with and I will arrange that for you. I can also confirm that the Agile and Agile Outgoing are compatible with each other.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to get in touch._

Kind regards,_

When I look at the tariff page I see this:


Loking at the page linked in the reply from customer service I now see that Agile import is compatible with the outgoing fixed rate of 15p

yup, that is what im on atm

Tenkaykev That weblink is really useful - thanks for posting.
I am currently on Agile Import only, because my solar installer is waiting for MCIS certification so that he can issue my MCIS certificate(!).
I know that Octo is supposed not to need MCIS but when I applied for an export MPAN the support desk said it was a beta programme and most folks will still need the MCIS cert in order to get the export MPAN. Does anyone know different? perhaps I am out of date and I should ask again.

downfield They still want the MCS certificate as part of the signup for an export MPAN. Also the letter from the DNO confirming their consent.

I have just switched from Flux to Agile.
The 12 month bit is the maximum length of time the plan runs for. I can switch to another smart tariff (or flexible tariff) whenever. The only restriction is if switching back to a flexible tariff I have to stay on that for at least 30 days before switching to another tariff.
My import switched to Agile immediately but the export stayed at Flux. I raised a support ticket who said the export should switch automatically in a few days. If not, let them know.
It was the same when I switched to Flux. The Import was immediate but Export took a few days to register on my account.

pacemaker 96 kWh in a day! Ouch! I assume you mean kWh and not kW

How are you finding the cost of elec consumption vs oil? I am in the same boat wanting to switch from oil to ASHP, but financially I am just not sure the numbers are there yet when spending about £1200 a year on oil.

Yeah, I did mean kWh ...

It was an ouch that day and for a few surrounding, but it mirrors what happened last year that on really really cold days where the temperature stays below freezing, the heat pump can chew through £20 or £30 of electricity. I did have an installation engineer in last year (one of my pumps had jammed) and he confirmed that this was quite common with other customers. If its only a few days a year I can live with that as the rest of the time my daily bill is less than £10.

In terms of comparison to oil, here's the figures I put together at the end of year 1:

For me I was kind of forced into making a decision. The oil tank failed and I found out that the current regulations for oil tank siting meant a replacement couldn't be in the same position as it has to be 1.5m from buildings/outbuildings and 750mm from boundaries/hedges. Mine was in the back garden next to the boundary fence and beside a wooden shed.
Finding a place to site a new tank that complied with the regs was going to be difficult. At the time the RHI grants were available so I calculated that the heat pump cost after RHI grant would roughly be the same as it'd have cost me for the new oil tank.
Plus of course I've then invested in more solar and battery storage. Can't make my own heating oil!

alan_johnston

When I switched to Flux it was an immediate switch to import but a 14 day wait for export meaning I lost out on the first few grid export sessions.

geoffreycoan

Thanks a lot for this insight, it's really useful and sounds very similar to my usage (oil wise anyway). The cost isn't that much more which is surprising. Interesting about the tank positioning, mine is close to my garage and would have to move for a new one. Maybe when either that goes or the boiler does, it really does make sense to switch...

Last Q as I don't want to derail this thread - what COP are you getting out of your ASHP? Make / model etc?

Jaw drop moment this morning!

pacemaker Last Q as I don't want to derail this thread - what COP are you getting out of your ASHP? Make / model etc?

I honestly don't know what COP I am getting. I've got two LG Therma V 9kW monoblock ASHP's. The control panel was definitely designed by an engineer not a user and the instruction manual was probably written by an engineer who didn't have English as his first language!
I don't think the LG displays what the COP is, or even what the energy output is from which I could work out the COP. I get the consumption figures from the meters that are connected to the ASHP (and I've now got a Shelly EM CT clamp over the feed to the ASHP to read the consumption in Home Assistant). I think the only way I can get the heat output is to put an energy flow meter into the ASHP pipework and that's not something I am contemplating, even as an enthusiastic DIYer!

What I have done is to turn the flow temperature down as low as I can and turned weather compensation on so the flow temp is set based on the outside temperature. Most of our radiators were upgraded in size as part of the ASHP install, the living room one we didn't go with their recommended size and have had to get that changed to a bigger earlier this year.

Watcher yeah, agile is very good at the moment. Have to be prepared for the prices to rise when its very cold, we had 65p a kWh in early December, but overall its worth the risk I feel if you've got batteries. Don't even need lots of batteries, just enough to run you through the majority of the peak period. We're running at about £5-10 a day for 40-60kW consumption.
Christmas Day -£0.15 72kWh
26th £5.82 46kWh
27th £3.35 49kWh
28th £1.04 41kWh
29th £4.82 47kWh

But to show how the rates can vary:
1st Dec £21.80 81kWh
2nd £29.68 119kWh
3rd £12.91 58kWh
4th £9.97 46kWh
5th £9.29 43kWh
6th £18.26 58kWh

Swings and roundabouts

geoffreycoan
As you say, I have to watch it but with an absolute max of less than 20k per day and usual 12-15 with a useable 9k of battery (which covers the top rate period) it looks pretty good at the moment.

Hi all, first post but been reading for a while now. I swapped to agile just before Christmas and so far so good but I seem to be missing all comparison data from yesterday... is it just me??

Janed9388 I am missing 29th and 31st on the octopus compare app but all available via octopus website, first two days its had trouble with.

EDIT
Just checked and I got the 29th in portal but 31st is not in portal and checking Octopus site I get this

BUT it shows my export for yesterday.

EDIT
Yesterday now showing up for me lol.

Shown up here too, very late today. The Octopus team must have been all out partying last night!

December's great rates coming to an end tonight it looks like, but last 30 days been a stormer! So glad I switched late Nov to Agile...

Can you spot where I might have turned everything on? 😆

pacemaker
That's an excellent summary screen. Is it Octopus generated or an App that you are using ?

Tenkaykev

Octopus Compare app on iOS

pacemaker
Thank you. I have the App, I never thought to flip across from the previous display page 🤔

Tenkaykev if you don't use HA then its not efficient, if you do have HA then check the below https://github.com/BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy

deepanshus
Thanks for the link. I have been looking at HA, I subscribe to " Speak to the Geek " and it's certainly interesting. I had Raspberry Pi 4 that I passed on to my Grandson to see if it would kickstart an interest. I'm comfortable with Tech, having dabbled from the days of ZX81 via a couple of OU computing/ Technology units. I took a quick look at " Home Assistant Green " as a turnkey solution but in all honesty I'm not sure I have the patience anymore which is almost certainly an age thing.
Currently I am having a play with " Wonder Watt " and am very happy with the way it is developing, and the feedback from their developers and support is frankly outstanding.
As I understand it there's no native way to run HA on my M1 MacBook without running in a VM via Fusion or VirtualBox which at the moment I no longer have the appetite for.

Tenkaykev As I understand it there's no native way to run HA on my M1 MacBook without running in a VM via Fusion or VirtualBox which at the moment I no longer have the appetite for.

suffering the exact same thing. Have tried multiple ways to get it to work on my M1 iMac and gave up. Just too long, complicated and broken, and I have an engineering background! I attempt every 3 months with the same outcome.

Hi All,

I have just switched to Agile after having my array and battery commissioned, I have signed into Octopus via the GivEnergy App and it has downloaded the Agile rates.

I have set the automation to Standalone Battery Hold Charge (initially Eco mode), this is because I didn't want to hit peak rates between 4pm and 7pm.

However I am wondering if moving forward I should be using Solar + Battery? However it doesn't really explain when it will charge the battery, I am guessing between 2pm and 4pm?

Thanks,

Matt

matttheotter when I was on that automation it charged overnight on the cheapest rates and then tried to let solar top it up to 100%. Mine usually got to around 60-70%, even when there were grey skies forecast so it wouldn't last me. It would then charge up 2pm till 4pm on (higher than night rates) electricity to 100%.

I now use Predbat on Home Assistant and it does a much better job.

Cdent thanks for the advice, I am totally confused, it has just gone 4pm and the battery still hasn't started to discharge yet the unit rate has gone up to 27p which is double the rate earlier.

What does it class as peak time?

matttheotter should be 4pm to 7pm, did you check live (home) or away which is delayed up to 5 mins?

problem here is that it all depends on the cloud and if the signal can't reach your inverter nothing happens - another reason I went with Home Assistant for local control.

Did it end up discharging?

pacemaker Hi Tenkaykev / pacemaker, I run HA on an M1 Mac Mini and bought "Server for Home Assistant" through the App Store.
It was a while ago so not sure how much it cost but it certainly made the set-up of HA much easier than without it.
Good luck.

ThePalfs thank you of the hint/tip! Here's the link for anyone interested: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/server-for-home-assistant/id6447077874?mt=12

Cdent Set it to "Eco Mode" and it started to discharge, I am wondering if this because the automation scripts become effect from midnight, I had a look at remote control and if you initiate the change during the day then there is no automation push.

I have installed Solcast and Predbat on my HASS, I'll look into configuring it locally, I already have GivTCP and Octopus (plus Home Mini) so I should be good to go.

Surely that means you have to run your main PC/Mac 24/7.
My solution was to I buy a Dell Quad Core 8GB Ram, 120GB SSD, WIFI, Win 10, PSU, Stand display port adapter for £45. on EBay
Cheap to run and works really well and was easy to install HA on. About the size of a largish paperback.

Wavy Davy my Mac is always on anyway, so no issue for me.

pacemaker
M1 MacBook Air here. It's always powered on, I just close it when not using it. Would HA be happy with that or does it need a constant connection? Got an old ( 2012 ) Mac Mini at the back of a cupboard, I could dig that out but have no display.

Tenkaykev that old Intel Mac mini would be ideal as you can install HAOS on it directly instead of MacOS

matttheotter Cdent I configured Predbat, wow that is a lot of sensors!

My HASS may need to be upgrade to deal with all this moving forward as its getting laggy.

matttheotter mine's running on a HP T520 thin client, but that's only got HASS running on it, works fine but yeah it can take a bit of processing power

Cdent erm mines running in Proxmox.....just a few other servers running along side 😆

@Cdent - Predbat is still in monitor mode, I have noticed it doesn't always seem to select the cheapest charge rates on Agile, wondering what is misconfigured?

matttheotter it could be a combination of things - usually the losses and min improvements make the biggest difference to mine

matttheotter @Cdent - Predbat is still in monitor mode, I have noticed it doesn't always seem to select the cheapest charge rates on Agile, wondering what is misconfigured?

If you have Predbat in Monitor mode then it is monitoring the existing house load, solar generation and existing charge and discharge slots you have setup on the inverter - it is NOT planning anything.

Try setting mode to Charge and Discharge or Charge and turn read_only on which means Predbat will plan your battery activity but not make any changes.

I have updated the predbat docs to make this clearer

geoffreycoan thanks for the info, I have enabled read only and charge as I am not planning on exporting atm as my export mpan isn't setup yet after that I will be on the Fixed 15p/kWh.

It updated the plan which makes way more sense to me now, assuming it is not charging as the rates are low, solar prediction will keep the battery above 50% for the next day and the rates are cheap to run the house?

matttheotter It updated the plan which makes way more sense to me now, assuming it is not charging as the rates are low, solar prediction will keep the battery above 50% for the next day and the rates are cheap to run the house?

Great, glad to see it’s making sense now.

Yes that looks to be correct, you’ve got low house load and so its not choosing to do any charging at the moment and letting your battery fully charge and the house run off excess solar/battery in the evening. You can see this by the last two columns (cost) being flat, not increasing.
Then in the late evening from 9:30 it is planning to hold the battery charge and let the house run off grid when the rates are lowest. When the agile prices for tomorrow are released at 4pm the plan may change. You might want to set the norddata config up in apps.yaml to get the market rate predictions for tomorrow which will give a reasonable prediction of tomorrow’s prices and will get a more accurate longer term plan

geoffreycoan Aye I have a 9.5kW battery, maximised the system on the first install, the system has only been online 3 weeks and only switched to Agile last week so I am getting used to the process and want to ensure I have capacity on the battery for when I cook between 6 and 7pm.

Was a bit cautious about using the norddata given the warning attached to it in the apps.yaml.

I'd be grateful for advice on how best to manage my move to Agile (import). I need better scheduling and management - preferably automated. Without being unduly techie or complex!

Staying with Fixed 15p export
Was previously on Tracker import but feel the re-jigged Tracker pricing and the fact I have solar & batteries should mean Agile is better.

Background (not all important to the question!)
Listed Grade 2 building with large modern extension.
LG Therma V 16kw ASHP
Underfloor heating + Rads
8kw pv solar
3 x 8.2kw GivEnergy batteries
1 x GivEnergy Gen1 hybrid 5.0kw inverter (important to note max charge/discharge rate is 2.6kwh)
Manual changeover EPS - but with infrequent outages probably no need to maintain large reserve
EV - say 8000 miles pa. Night charging normally possible.

Solar produces around 6000kwh but of course majority is Mar - Oct
We use around 8000kwh - majority Nov - Mar

On the simple Givenergy app I am planning to:

• hold reserve at say 15% (increasing during bad weather events if outage risks increase)
• charge batteries say 23.30 to 07.00 daily
• dynamic usage of batteries

But wondering if I can do better. I feel Home Assistant maybe beyond me! Especially as the heat pump does not seem to have an easy integration.

The 3rd party Givenergy Monitor App probably will do the main scheduling I need better than the native app?

Any other comments or suggestions - that might suit someone who is not overly technical - but willing to try and learn!

Tim Adams WonderWatt might be able to this for you, and Octopus R&D. Both can be a "hands off" approach, just plug your details into their site and tell it what you want to do. Does need a constant internet connection.

Tim Adams As Cdent says, Octopus R&D, WonderWatt and also MyEnergy Optimiser are all cloud based solutions that can do at least the GivEnergy inverter charging & discharging.

Octopus R&D was most people’s solution originally but I think there’s been issues of late and seemed to be doubt that Octopus were actively fixing bugs in it or not.

There’s quite a few people on here using WonderWatt and it seems to work well for simple agile planning and battery management. I don’t know whether it handles EV charging or not.
My Energy Optimiser is being used by at least one YouTube user “Gary does solar” to manage agile. £5 monthly cost I believe.

For the most flexibility and local control, Predbat with Home Assistant. There is like everything a learning curve but there’s a number of people on this forum using it and have got to grips with it recently, so it can’t be too hard!
Predbat will manage your battery, inverter and car charging. It learns from historical load and predicts battery use and solar charging.

On your LG Therma V, as I think you know I have this heat pump as well. Integration to Home Assistant is possible but requires a physical modbus connection and modbus adapter. Not something I have done yet. I monitor consumption of my heat pump in Home Assistant via a Shelly EM energy clamp but manage it via the thermostat and LG’s awful control panel. With Predbat you can tell it to adjust the load predictions for today based on today’s load so far, so if its a cold day and the heat pump is consuming more than normal, Predbat will take account of this

Tim Adams
geoffreycoan I would back up everything that Geoffrey has written in his reply.
I tried Octopus R&D. It usually worked but did sometimes miss slots.

I watched the My Energy Optimiser video from "Gary does Solar".
There is a cost but it looks like it could be a ready made solution.
I then started to look at WonderWatt and PredBat.

After a couple of days installing Predbat, I went live with Predbat at the end of January on a Raspberry pi4).
Predbat works with many tariffs but is almost made for Agile and the GE system.
The documentation is extremely thorough and takes you through the whole installation process. Initially, I didn't understand many of the setting but I quickly learnt which settings to tweak (and why).

The thread 'First Night Live on Predbat' has almost become the Predbat help thread, with over 600 replies from recent Predbat 'devotees'. We have learnt a lot from each other (and from the documentation).

Rob

Many thanks all @Cdent @geoffreycoan @Rbor
input is very helpful. I think I'll make a start with WonderWatt as first step but will try and get to grips with Predbat over the summer.

You can install Predbat to see what it is capable of doing in 'Read mode'. It won’t do anything until you 'Go live' but you will be able to see its capabilities.

Oh, and watch the supporting videos to help with the install.

There is nothing lost by going with WonderWatt but looking at Predbat.
That is exactly what I did but I plumped for Predbat.

Rob

Wow a good charge window on Agile tonight between 12am - 3am, all minus

Daveb01 Yep, far more useful than the negative slot we got in the daytime the other day. It was so sunny there was no way I could consume all the solar generation let alone import a bit more.
Had to make do with exporting at 15p/kWh instead.

Its times like this that at the moment reinforces my view to remain on Agile +15p fixed export rather than Flux as the import is so much cheaper. Even ignoring the low rates when its been windy the OctoPrice app says that over the last week I’d have been £2 better off on Flux export, but even if I’d prioritised more export in the peak period I’d still not have balanced out that Agile import was £24 cheaper than Flux import.

I have never seen such a big minus import, during the day as well 👍🍺

Looks like 11 slots.

Looks like a double charge/export day even without PV input....

Its so super-sunny tomorrow it looks like I’ll be exporting for most of the negative period. I guess that’s part of why the rates are so low.

I’ve been looking at the Octopus Greenness forecast which suggests we are likely to get a similar pattern of low rates for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday

Energy-stats.uk have done some interesting correlation of the greenness score to agile prices, and I’ve seen a similar link to the Power up events (yesterday was a power up event from 3pm-6pm)
https://x.com/energystatsuk/status/1777622448516616342?s=46&t=pKwuqfyabC3I5aJJKpHExw

Prices are low all across Europe and gas prices are lower as well. I crumbled today and moved over from IOG.

Change was instant and predbat immediately started discharging.

Hook
Decisions, decisions. Sticking with IOG for a bit longer, I think.

But today I did get Octopus to agree to extend the end date of my outgoing Fixed from Dec this year to April next year. Hold on to that sweet 15p for a bit longer.

geoffreycoan Does make me think I should shift to agile import and fixed outgoing at 15p! This is what agile import and export look like with PredBat.

James L that’s interesting to see. I had heard that when import rates were negative the export rate bottomed out at zero pence.

Tomorrow is an exceptional day, but how high in practice do the agile export rates go - evening peak and say durinig the day?

Fixed 15p export is pretty much the same as Flux export rate, and so durng the day I’m making a pretty steady income. I get the feeling that it’d be much more hit and miss with Agile Export

geoffreycoan Agile Outgoing in the East Mids has only been above 15p two percent of the time so far this year. That works out at an average of less than 30 minutes per day.......

Edit - its an utterly pointless tariff and its only a matter of time until someone with half a brain at Octopus works it out. My prediction is that Agile imports will soon be tied to Agile exports much like Flux.

Although octoprice.co.uk seems to show that with my historic usage (the house is empty most of the time May-September while we are sailing), Agile import and Export is better. Unless I'm misinterpreting or missing something.

Of course, it depends on what Agile rates will be this coming summer - the graph below is, obviously, using historic rates.

Vestas Thanks. Just been looking at the energy stats graphs for my area (Eastern) and whilst there are. daily evening peaks of around 20p and there have been some better winter peaks of 30p (when you’re unlikely to have excess to export), the average is pretty much firmly around 8-10p.

https://energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-outgoing-export-eastern-england/

So for most people its not a good tariff to be on.

With Octopus there’s no single tariff that’s right for everyone. You’d logically think that the cheap 7.5p overnight import on IOG and export at 15p would be another candidate to get phased out. The artificial peak rate supplement of _7p/kWh is another thing and just move to pure market rates.

James L I get a similar result for myself

I think it is valuing all my export at the best agile export rate of the day, so in effect assuming I can store all the solar generation and then discharge it in the peak periods. Which of course is unlikely

geoffreycoan Dunno about last year but this year I could have unlimited excess to export and there's simply no way that Agile Outgoing would produce more income than Outgoing Fixed - not with a G98 installation anyway.

It may work for large G99 installs but not G98 as I could only export a max of 1.8kWh in the 30 minute slot where (on average) its above 15p/kWh.

Edit - also the energy stats figures for East Mids aren't accurate for me. Not sure how he does it but I've looked at some of the Agile Outgoing spikes on the graph and they don't correlate with actual pricing. I noticed this before on Agile imports - they seem to be higher on that graph than they really are.

As it is so rare that we get a day with so many negative price periods I decided to turn off my solar inverter at 10.30am and import as much as I can whilst it negative - batteries, water heating, dishwasher, washing machine, hob and oven. I can do this as I have separate inverters but I must remember to put it back on once the rates go positive.

Windy Miller

I thought the same, however using electric is between -1p & -8p.
Export for me on fixed is 15p so best to export excess solar?

I have planned a double export today:
Charged battery cheap rate over night 3p
Exported before 10:30 @ 15p
Charged battery via solar back up to 100%
Will export at 16:00 - 19:00 at 15p

Daveb01 Much the same plan as predbat produced for me, except its then charging and discharging through the evening as the rates are so low.
Its frustrating seeing the -8p import rate and not taking advantage of it, but when I’m generating 3-5kW an hour it makes more sense to export it at 15p instead.

Overall not as sunny as yesterday, we generated 49kWh yesterday.

It also seems counter-intuitive to do the washing etc overnight, as long as its less than 15p/kWh to import, I’ll be making more to consume grid overnight and export solar during the day.

Daveb01 Did a check back. I've used 18 KWHr between 10.30 and 4pm today at roughly -5p average per KWHr. So 90p. The solar would have created 15KWHr but all would have been consumed by the house on a wash day when charging the batteries and heating the water. So I'm 90p up. Normally, however, I would charge the batteries and heat the water when there wasn't much solar (usually overnight) and would have exported perhaps 10KWHr excess solar at 16.5p. So was it worth it? Probably not but at least I now know.

Windy Miller Are you up on the day in terms of money paid to supplier? If so it was definitely worth it, even if its 1p.

Another good day tomorrow 😎🍾

Daveb01 Max of 3.15p/kWh between midnight and 4pm.

My daughter cut her bills (gas & electric) by over 50% just by moving to Tracker from flexible on my recommendation. No inverter, no battery, no PV panels.

Makes you wonder really in terms of people paying 25p or whatever on a fixed-rate tariff.....

Edit - this may come after the "likes" but I'm also opposed to standing charges for the simple reason it has a massively adverse effect on households with lower incomes. "Vimes boots" for those of you who read the Discworld books...

geoffreycoan A thought. I assume these predictions don't take automation like PredBat into account.

I think your previous assessment (in a different thread), that Agile import and fixed export would be better with PredBat control, still holds.

James L I assume these predictions don't take automation like PredBat into account.

Most of these re-pricing prediction tools just take your current consumption pattern over the time period and price it up with a different tariff. So if you are filling a battery on Cosy/Go in an overnight cheap period or exporting in Flux peak, the pattern of behaviour won’t necessarily be right for a different tariff as the high/low price hours are different.
And of course for agile it can be different hours every day.

The pro (subscription) version of the Octo Compare app and the Octo Price have a load shift simulator that you can play around with. I did something simple with a spreadsheet in October last year to evaluate myself what tariff to go to for the Winter. Modelling what the demand was and how I could take advantage of cheaper periods ot charge the battery and as I knew the ASHP demand would exceed the battery, what this meant for more expensive import periods

For the past 7 days ive not paid including standing charge over £1 on each day for electricity, standing charge is a large chunk of it and I run off grid when its basically free rather than use battery which is essentially 15ppkwh.

Vestas It worked out I was actually owed £1.20 for the 10.30am to 4pm period. The whole day comes out at -68p so even with the standing charge the supplier owes me. For £1.20 I could have exported 8 units and may have done 10 so it's pretty close. With Eon SEG I don't get to see the export money to the end of the 12 month period (May) when they are supposed to send me a cheque.

Windy Miller

Oh no not a “cheques in the post” pun 👍😀

How come it's so cheap at the moment? I've seen a few days of negative pricing in the past with storms, but nothing like this.

danerf windy sunny warm

After tomorrow (Monday) I think we’ll see a return to much more normal pricing. The Octopus Greenness index falls through the floor for the week:

Looks like another double export tomorrow 👍

Back to normal from tomorrow 🙁

Daveb01 pretty rubbish today/tonight, as you say, back to more normal.

Still, I’m £4.42 in profit today after exporting 33kWh, so its not all bad.

Looks like (from the Octopus Greenness score) that it’ll be much the same Wednesday, Thursday, then cheaper on Friday

geoffreycoan

I am up so far this month as well.

Export = £40
Import = £13

The free leccie is over 🙁

This is my position currently this month.

Seeing the old cost vs new cost is quite the eye opener.

Act Cost = Actual cost from Octopus Compare app which includes standing charges.

Jellybaby Do you manually read the import and export meter for the above spreadsheet?

MickWheater You should be able to use the inverter meter readings from the portal (or Home Assistant). Mine are very close to my Octopus meter readings so I use them to track my consumption & export.
But I personally only update my tracking spreadsheet monthly

geoffreycoan I have found the meter data in the inverter screen on the GE portal but it shows entries for every 5 minutes, it is not easy to obtain the information from without scrolling through many entries.
I think the best way I have found so far is to connect my tariff to the GE portal and use the 'Smart Tariff' tile on the dashboard. I don't see meter readings but I can see my import and export KWh figures.

MickWheater yup, in home display makes it easy

New Octopoints coffee offers 😀. Still no sausage rolls though.

Just noticed a new Octo offer today

I am liking Octopus Agile with fixed export and it is doing better than Flux, so sticking with it during the summer.

April
Import - £39.62 (410 kWh)
Export - £106.69 (514 kWh)

Octopus Gas Tracker
Import - £17.79 (414 kWh)

Daveb01
Over 20p/kWh Fixed export? Nice. How did you manage that - I'm on 15p?

Your Agile price of 9.6p (that excludes standing charge, right?) is less attractive than my IOG though. Last month I paid a headline cost of 7.5p, which reduced to about 5p for a full battery after doing a nightly Predbat charge/discharge/charge cycle.

Hi all, I have a question please. I am new to automation & keeping it very simple to start.

I have an AIO & 6 kw Solar

Background
I have been on Flux since Aug 2023 and it’s worked well, however my mind set has been on import at cheep rate and export during peak rate.

Thought’s
Moved to Agile as import was much cheaper on average, however export is rubbish.
I am now on Agile import & fixed 15p export.
Now export is fixed, I can export anytime.

Question
What’s the best strategy now please (add any thoughts on what you guys do please)

1. Set import to cheapest times night and day (as long as under 15p).
   Export for 2 hrs in morning
   Top up with solar (if any) or slots below 15p
   Export again for a couple of hours during day
   Save a bit of battery % when import periods are above 15p (especially between 4-7)
   Export again if battery above 40% for say an hour
   But no need to export between 4-7 any more?

Worries
Battery SOC may well be screwed
Battery drops
A bit of planning needed if no sun the next day
Will have to change this from say October.

Daveb01 Hi Dave

I’m on agile import and fixed 15p export. I use predbat to automate my battery management, but basically the strategy is to import when its less than about 13p not 15p as you have to allow for conversion losses.

Only perform forced export/discharges when the rate is due to drop substantially and you want to gain more SoC space for a cheap rate fill up. Just let the inverter export excess solar otherwise when the battery is full.

Never import in the peak 4-7pm period. No benefit to force export during that period either, I only export then if the battery is full and its just excess solar.

If its been a particularly grey day and depending on your battery capacity, consider an afternoon chargeup/hold charge to ensure you have sufficient battery soc to see you through the evening peak. Sometimes agile can be 20p well into the evening if its cold/not windy. Still cheaper than std variable but not as good as agile can be.

Run any high load appliances such as washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer overnight. Usually cheaper agile rates than you’ll get by importing rather than during the day when using up generated solar.

geoffreycoan

I think you put the mockers on it as there are no slots below 13p tomorrow 🙁

Had my bill come through for April which coincided with me moving from iog to agile.

IOG average was 7.62p v Agile average of 6.03p both controlled by predbat.

Although there were some negative slots when I first moved. Not been great for the last couple of weeks though. At least it’s sunny now.

I’ll probably move back to iog when I can. I think I prefer the predictability of it.

If you can access IOG I think it makes sense rather than Agile.

I am experimenting with Agile and I had just the standard go which doesn't allow the 15p export. But IOG does and you don't have to keep a constant look out for cheap slots.

I don't have a car or EV Charger that can use IOG so Agile or Flux gives me the 15p export rate.

Jury out on Agile for me so far...

M_J just in case you weren't aware, eon next drive is slightly better than IOG - 6.9p overnight for 7 hours, and 16.5p export. (Or something along those lines.)

Just got my April Agile bill.

£51 import, £144 export but then £19 of credit from the Power Up (zero rate electricity events), making a total credit of £112 for the month

My average import price (excluding the effects of the power up events) was 7.64p/kWh. March was 11.49p and I paid a tiny bit for the electricity consumption.

I don’t have an EV so quite happy with that.

Just doing some quick comparisons to Flux for the summer …

My man maths goes like this:

Day time export (15.51p) is almost the same as my fixed 15p export. Peak rate export (25.85p) is 10p better, and overnight import (15.15p) is (compared to April average) about 8p more expensive.
So roughly I need to export as much in the peak rate as I import overnight to counterbalance the rate differences. At the moment we are importing between 2 and 10kWh a day on agile, but that’s only because of the agile rates being lower than the export rate.
Apart from Friday when it was overcast and raining all day we are exporting more than we are importing every day so that suggests I could run on solar only on Flux with minimal import. Since any overnight import needs an equivalent amount of peak rate export to balance the rates, there’s no real benefit to force discharge in the peak and I’m better to retain the battery through the night to avoid evening and overnight import.

Upside is any excess solar exported in the peak is earning 10p/kWh more. Looking over the last week, I’m exporting 6-7kWh in that period. Slight additional upside of daytime export being 1/2p/kWh better.

Downside is any import at all is going to be more expensive than Agile.

The standing charge is 7p/day more expensive on Flux as well.

On balance I think I will stay on Agile. Whilst the export might be up to £20 a month more profitable on Flux, that gets eaten away as soon as I have to import, e.g. running the hot tub. And staying on Agile means I’m ready for the winter.

geoffreycoan Great in depth analysis Geoffrey! Agile obviously works a bit better for you particularly since you are still importing. Personally Flux is still working for me as I'm a low user and haven't imported now for a couple of weeks, making over £40 net, after gas, imported electric and standing charges in the last month.

Not very good tomorrow, not seen it like this before.

Daveb01 This weekend was surprisingly expensive as well, given weekend demand is usually lower, it was quite sunny (I generated 56kWh on Saturday and 49kWh so far on Sunday), the rates were in a similar range to what they are tomorrow.

Predbat is letting the battery run the house for most of the night with a few bits of freezing the soc and running off grid import where its not worth charging the battery up

Have to take some of the rough with the smooth with Agile.

TimHutchings if I had moved back to Flux then I’d probably not be importing much either. I’m only importing at the moment when Agile rates are lower than my export rate (or its a free electricity power up event when we charge the batteries, do the washing, etc). Last July I imported only 26kWh for the whole month.
It was just for me there wasn’t enough upside with Flux to make it worth the risk of paying for expensive import. Last year I was quite happy on Flux and was delighted by the export rate, but since then I’ve got better battery automation so can make the most of Agile. Things like Wonderwatt weren’t around either

Daveb01 Well I did have to ask for it three times but I eventually received £250 from Eon for the first years export at 16.5p per unit. I hope to improve on this next year now I'm on the Agile tariff so can also export from overnight cheap charging as well as excess solar.

As Wonder Watt lets you change the amount of slots it picks when the Agile slots are released at 16:00, I have changed mine now the sun is out more during the day as an experiment. (I am sorry if this jinks the weather and it now rains for a week)

I was charging at night on slots below 15p, exporting any Solar during the day at 15p. Exporting the battery between 19:00 - 21:00.

I am now trying not to import anything, if there is sun. so have charged the battery up to 100% via Solar during the day, export a little between 19:00 - 21:00, leaving enough t to last the night, ready to charge the battery up the next day.

Wonder Watt allows me to auto select slots during the day at very cheap rate to charge the battery if not enough sun, and auto cancels the charging slots if battery is full.

Going back a bit, these are the "allowed" tariff permutations apprently

iain

[https://octopus.energy/help-and-faqs/articles/which-export-tariff-can-i-combine-with-my-import-tariff/]

Good day tomorrow 👍

I am discharging 6-8am & 7-10pm

Trying an experiment tomorrow to see how much I can export (at 16.5p) and also how much I can import when negative. Starting with a discharged battery I can charge in these slots and discharge in the gaps. Then use the 12 to 15:30pm period to heat the water, run the washing machine and dishwasher and possibly do some cooking too to maximise the payback. (I did just watch GaryDoesSolar on YouTube when he said hammer the battery :-O )

It’s interesting seeing how predbat has planned for tomorrow’s agile rates for me.

Its force discharging the battery down to empty up to 1am, then filling it up again with grid import overnight so that by the time the solar starts the battery is full. There’s a couple of small discharges and recharging along the way when rates make it favourable, but through the afternoon when its negative prices, I will be exporting not importing.

This seems counter-intuitive, but I think the rationale is as follows:
The forecast is ~ 3.5kW of solar every 30 minute slot.
I have 2x Gen 1 hybrid inverters so they can only charge the battery a total of 2.6kW in the slot (1.3kW each inverter for 30 minutes).
I’m therefore generating more than I can charge into the battery and so I couldn’t import anyway.
Also it’s more beneficial to export that power at 15p/kWh than be paid the -6p/kWh for import.

geoffreycoan Yes that's where I may come a cropper. If the sun is good I'll simply use it all without exporting. I'm banking on an overcast early afternoon (currently forecast here). I might even turn my Solar inverter off for the negative hours.

I did not charge up over night, discharged the full battery at 6-8 this morning ready for them paying me to charge from 11am. Then as it’s sunny full solar export, so should make a few pennies today 😀👍

So today

I have cancelled the export tonight between 7-10pm, have done an adhok tomorrow morning from 4-7am. Then see what we get tomorrow, for the next export.

So at the moment:- Battery charged at minus, cooking and Washing at minus, plus exporting solar as sun has now come out, not a bad day really. And it took 30 seconds to change all this on Wonder Watt.

Windy Miller My results are in....

Hopefully there are 4 screenshots after this text.

The Givenergy charge/discharge profile (shown below with the WonderWatt Activity Log following) yielded 17 KWHr of export overnight and into the morning which at 16.5p/unit netted £2.80.
Solar export up to 12.30pm was 4 KWHr so another 66p.
But the cost of the overnight charges accumulated to £1.17 so the net gain of hammering the battery was £2.29.

During the plunge session I turned off the Solar inverter so that I could maximise the electricity import. I managed to import some 35 units - the 3rd screenshot shows roughly where it went (balance is what went into the battery). I did an oven cleaning cycle, heated the hot water tank from cold, 3 washing machine cycles and a dishwasher cycle as well as running all my aircon and dehumidifiers.

The 4th screenshot from the Octopus app shows I gained £1.80 in the 3 hour plunge session. But I forwent probably about 9 solar units which I could have exported - a loss of £1.49. So the net gain of all that effort was 31p!

So Geoffrey was right in his explanation of why PREDBAT didn't bother with charging during the daytime due to the expected solar units.

This is the 2nd time I've tried not running solar during plunge sessions and it has confirmed to me that it isn't worth doing in the summer.

It can become too complex trying to work out the optimum approach with Agile, especially in summer when there’s loads of solar predicted which may or may not happen.

I increased the Solcast 10% weighting in predbat from 30% to 40% in case it was going to be a duller day than predicted, but couldn’t see any obvious change to the planned battery activity.
As it was negative for the afternoon we had the washing on, tumble dryer, dishwasher and I turned the hot tub on to start heating it up for the first time this year. There were periods where we were net importing, and others where we were net exporting.
61kWh generated, 33 exported, 21 imported with a total house usage of 39kWh (half of which was the hot tub 😦). -£3.86 so far today.

Good to see that we’re back to a more ‘normal’ agile pattern with cheap overnight rates that predbat is filling the battery with, and then will be holding the charge tomorrow through the negative periods.

geoffreycoan Yes I quite agree. That's why I like to run experiments to understand how things might possibly work before I hand control over to one of the "intelligent" tariffs from Octopus or even to a control algorithm like PREDBAT.

I have learnt a lot in the last 2 months since I moved to the Agile tariff and in the last month of using WonderWatt. The latter I currently prefer as I retain control over exactly when to charge and discharge the batteries for maximum gain. Looking at my results over the last 2 months I have managed 85% days making a profit with my system with the maximum in one day of £5 (lots of solar, no import and 31 units exported) but a loss one day of £5 (little solar and needing to charge my son's car when he visited.)

Overall I'm making around £40 a month with the solar levels we are currently experiencing (possibly a little more as I sometimes heat the water from Electric rather than Gas). I hope this continues through to August but I expect things to be quite different once the solar levels drop in the Autumn. BUT this time last year, just before I had the panels fitted, I was paying £125 a month so the swing is £165 of which I am delighted.

geoffreycoan You can insulate the hot tub/install a heat pump for it and get some significant savings.

https://www.revk.uk/2024/05/hot-tubs-are-expensive-again.html

I found the "Pause Discharge" option on the "G1 fast response f/w" very helpful yesterday - also the Solar iBoost water heater earned some cash 🙂

17.6kWh imported between 1130-1530 despite the PV array being maxed out (3-3.4kW) for most of that period.

"Pause Discharge" is on today as well, no point in doing anything else when import is under a penny/negative....

Every 30 mins tomorrow is over 15p export rate, so ho[e there is a bit of sun down south tomorrow to keep me from importing 50/50.

Daveb01 Much the same in East Anglia. Predbat hasn’t scheduled any overnight charging for me, I’m running entirely on batteries overnight and they’re predicted to get down to 19% - phew, just enough!

Then lots of solar forecast so I’ll be at 100% by 10:30. And then I’ve got an Octopus Power Up event from 12-2pm, free electricity, but currently forecasting so much solar that able to take advantage of it. Such struggles!

Pft. You lot have your odd negative slot weekend every month which suckered me in once, but I’m far better off on iog!

Hook No EV for me so IOG not an option. The negative slots on Agile are quite rare actually and generally the Agile rates are above the 7.5p you get on IOG, so if I did have an EV it would be something I’d definitely look at.

I have succumbed to the better export rate of IOF though and applied to move to it last night. The enrolment failed so waiting to hear back from Octopus.

Be interesting to see how you get on.

geoffreycoan I have succumbed to the better export rate of IOF though and applied to move to it last night

We’ll miss you on the informal Predbat Users Society. (Assuming you can get registered 🤞)

PianSom Well I’ve still not heard back from Octopus so no change in my use of Predbat at the moment.

Assuming I can get enrolled I believe Octopus can only control 1 inverter on IOF and per the FAQ’s I will have to control the second myself - for which I will use predbat so that’ll be an interesting experiment. If I get a choice over it I’d prefer Octopus to control the inverter with the smaller 5.2 battery on it and I control the 9.5. Am hoping this’ll give me the best result from IOF, the superior export rates and a higher degree of control over what grid import occurs.

I ran the numbers several times and it was the circa £100 a month extra from export income that made me change in the end. It’ll only be a summer switch, I’ll be back to Agile and full use of predbat when I turn the heat pump back on.

geoffreycoan I ran the numbers several times and it was the circa £100 a month extra from export income that made me change

I'm not surprised - intuitively your large array of PVs should make the summer export rate of IOF very attractive.

Did you ever find out what happens with Power-ups + IOF - will you still be able to get them?

geoffreycoan Did you turn off 2FA on GivEnergy account on dashboard?

geoffreycoan

Good luck on the new Tariff Geoffrey.

I have had a think about it and I have only had my system since August 23, so 25 years to experiment 😀👍.

I have done Flux, now trying Agile, I will let you guys + Tim & Gary report if it is worth it.

If a new tariff comes out or no change next year I will prob do Agile till April/May, then IOF, then back to Agile in October.

As long as my bill for 12 months is close to zero as possible I will be happy. Any extra is a bonus but I am not worried. 👍🍺

PianSom My assumption is that I will still get the power up events, but will be something I’ll check when I get a response back from the Octopus smart tariffs team.

Leeshore I have never turned 2FA on on my GivEnergy account. But yes I did check this as I have heard it causes problems. The strange thing is that an authentication token was created for Octopus during the enrolment process, so not sure what the actual problem is. I suspect its my two inverters that are confusing Octopus 🤷‍♂️

Error message is a bit generic

geoffreycoan I had the same issue. Octopus told me to contact GivEnergy who tweaked my settings which sorted the issue. See https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/4267-intelligent-flux-sign-up-issues/7

geoffreycoan
IIRC they were originally scheduled to last a year - until August. So maybe there’ll be a change anyway then. No way of knowing.

So not to bad on the new thought process on Agile (see above).

Not bad yesterday sun wise, but we are very near the equinox. Long may it last.

My June month to date is £22.24 imported (of which some will have been power up events) and £100.12 exported, so doing all right still. Its funny how your solar expectations get changed though, in May my best solar day was just under 70kWh, in June I’ve had a couple around 73kWh, but the solar forecast has me wanting to see 100kWh in a day!

Still no update on IOF. GivEnergy reset my inverters as Leeshore suggested, and broke them for the weekend as a result, but I still can’t get through the enrolment process. Am waiting a reply back from 🐙

I’m 31% down on generation so far this June compared to last June. It’s been very dull in comparison.

Fortunately predbat is doing well with iog to maximise my returns.

Not even 2 month into my journey yet, but working hard to get everything I can from the solar, no clipping losses, high rate exports etc..
£200 of export over the last 5 weeks (36 days) from a 6kWp system and 9.5 battery.

I think this month is going to be a good one. Good sun makes a difference, but NOT charging at all from grid seems to be working. Battery just needs a top up in the morning then solar is exporting much earlier, til about 20:30.

Month-kWh-£-Import/Export (Octopus readings)
April-410-£39/514-£84
May-318-£41/604-££90
June(so far)-51-£3.56/572-£85.86

Final result

Daveb01 I’m waiting for today’s export data to appear in the Octopus app tomorrow, but looks like a bumper month for me as well

Daveb01

I'm on the same tariffs and my June is very similar. We have a 5.25 kWh array and AIO. I have been using WW to do a bit of manipulating with importing from the grid when prices are super low and then exporting back. Nothing as structured as HA/ Predbat ( which I follow assiduously, but still haven't pulled the trigger on Pi5 / HA Green ) ( not sure which is the best option).

I was thinking all the same things, however my other half has said you have only had it 11 months and you have a further 24 years to play with it. You have dont the manual thing in the app only, you are trying WW for 12 months, then you can decide if you want to go down the HA route in a year or so.

Daveb01
That sounds eminently sensible, I can see the logic in it and It's the road that I plan to go down. Give WW time to evolve and mature.... but then I won't have a new toy to play with as the nights draw in...

Wow a good day tomorrow

Daveb01 Its not really a good day tomorrow.

The overnight rates are good, Predbat is already starting to discharge my battery ready to fill it up later on tonight and in the early hours at cheap/negative rate.

But the rates during the day tomorrow are worthless if you have solar unless you can shift an awful lot of load into those time periods. My solar forecast from around 9:30 is 4kW of solar generation every half hour, so there’s no way I’ll be able to consume all that and import a bit to earn from the negative rates. Should be loads of export income though, circa £11 income tomorrow.

First world problems …

May was my best month so far since having the export tariff, £30 import, -£194 export

geoffreycoan My solar forecast from around 9:30 is 4kW of solar generation every half hour, so there’s no way I’ll be able to consume all that and import a bit to earn from the negative rates.

Turn off the PV inverters??

PianSom I tried that. Was a lot of effort and managed to increase export revenue by 31p! I need to see negative pricing of 50p per half hour.

PianSom Turn off the PV inverters??

The lowest price tomorrow is -2.38p/kWh at 13:30 when my forecast solar generation is 3.85kWh and house load of 1.05kWh.

So I’ll earn 3.85-1.05=2.80 * 15p /2 (half hour slot) = roughly 20p for the half hour
[Predbat thinks I will earn 39p for the slot so I’ve messed up something in this man maths, but carrying on anyway…]

So to earn 20p from the negative import rate, I’d need to import about 9kW. Do-able but challenging.

Even Predbat thinks it’s not worth discharging the battery during the day. I’ll keep an eye on it in case it changes its mind but so far, its just not worth it

geoffreycoan Even Predbat thinks it’s not worth discharging the battery during the day ... its just not worth it

Not with that attitude!

😉

Is predbat smart enough to schedule multiple consecutive charge/discharge cycles when the price is this low? Our solar doesn't really kick in until 11AM so there's almost 12 hours of when we could be doing this.

So I am discharging now till midnight @ 15p
Charging from 1am - 4am on negative
Discharging from 6am - 9am @ 15p
Charging from 09:30 - 16:00 + cooking + washing bedding on negative
Solar export at 15p once battery charged and house load met.

All the charging and discharging done via Wonder Watt. 😀👍

rjp yes Predbat works out the most cost effective charging and discharging based on historic house load and projected solar. My plan tonight is discharging tonight, then a bit of charging up, then discharging again before the negative slots, then charging in the negative, a bit of discharging and then recharging at the end, leaving the battery pretty full so it will start exporting as soon as possible in the morning

I see a people in this thread with absolute loads of export, I assume that's a lot of solar?

I have 10 x 390w solar panels and 14.75kWh battery (ish) so I assume that's why I'm not seeing over £100 export?

This is my current plan

Im not sure how to use my Agile tariff to link with my Zappi and get the best charging for the car (Phev so only small battery) as I need it ready by 7am and not back until 6pm to maximise, so currently only set charging on the zappi app to coincide with the cheapest period overnight.

shawry I see a people in this thread with absolute loads of export, I assume that's a lot of solar?

I have 10 x 390w solar panels and 14.75kWh battery (ish) so I assume that's why I'm not seeing over £100 export?

I have a lot of solar. 16x 250W panels in an older FIT array, then a further 28x 390W panels in two GivEnergy arrays, totalling 14kW.

This is my current plan

Looks like Predbat is doing a good job of maximising your income from charging on negative rates and then discharging.
The rates for tomorrow are just a projection of today’s rates. You can get a more accurate estimate by turning on the norddata feed in apps.yaml https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/#future-agile-energy-rates

Im not sure how to use my Agile tariff to link with my Zappi and get the best charging for the car (Phev so only small battery) as I need it ready by 7am and not back until 6pm to maximise, so currently only set charging on the zappi app to coincide with the cheapest period overnight.

Predbat can control your zappi to charge the battery on the cheapest rates and manage the home battery so it doesn’t discharge into the car. I have recently been rewriting the car charging instructions to pull all the information together, draft of it is here: https://github.com/gcoan/batpred/blob/main/docs/car-charging.md

geoffreycoan

Had a math chat with her in doors and she said:

Let assume the import rate is 2p all day 13 slots, the battery will be charged by Solar at 1030, why would you turn off the Solar and import during the 13 slots when you can export at 15p a kWh?

It turns out she was right and the battery was charged by 10:30, it had discharged as per my post above, so let everything as is and will see what Octopus say I made tomorrow.

I may now have to face the day with her walking around with a T-shirt saying “I Told You So”

Daveb01 I’d agree. I won’t even try to get my Mrs to do the man maths.

Only thing to suggest you might do differently is if your solar panels exceed your inverter size then as soon as the battery is full you are going to start clipping the solar generation.
Potentially different strategies to deal with this, either periodically discharge some of the battery to give some room for DC to flow direct into the battery, or reduce the battery charge rate so the solar takes longer to fill the battery up and you export more earlier in the day. I’ve been doing the latter when its really sunny as otherwise my battery fills up by 9am

geoffreycoan I suspect you've taken your 3.85 solar and 1.05 house load values from the predbat plan? in which case they are already half hour values so the divide by 2 you add in your cost (income) calculation is unnecessary and why you are getting half the predbat value.

Doesn't change anything obviously, but just in case it was bothering you.

Phil_H I suspect you've taken your 3.85 solar and 1.05 house load values from the predbat plan? in which case they are already half hour values

Thanks, it’s obvious really. It also helps explain why when Predbat says 3.85kWh then that’s a per-half hour energy estimate, so I could see a power output of 7.7kW across that hour, which is what I do often see. Stupid how I had never quite worked this out in my head!

Looks like everyone is watching the Olympics during the day as the rate on Agile is quite high 🙁

No sign of a negative import anytime soon, even with great Solar. I will stick to 15p export ££££

This months results on my no charge battery from grid plan.

No sun one day, plus upgraded AIO firmware, as you can see.

A good days tomorrow (it’s about time)

Wonder Watt auto picked my charge slots 👍😎

Nice sunny day tomorrow at the moment so full 15p export all day as well.

Daveb01 Wonderwatt is managing the charging of your battery, and its a super cheap rate overnight tonight, but out of interest, is it discharging your battery this evening so as to maximise the charging opportunity overnight?
(Predbat is doing this for me, but I've never used Wonderwatt so don't know as much about it).

I'd doubt that you'll be able to charge tomorrow during the day, most likely your solar panels will be busy exporting more than your house load.

My predbat plan:

geoffreycoan

Yup, I discharged from 22:00 - 23:59, charged up, then discharged between 6 - 8, it’s now charging on Solar and any minus slots till full, should be exporting at 15p by 10:30 ish.

Also WW has a handy switch that you can switch on to hold the battery if there are any slots between your charging schedule so as above I could hold the battery at slots 02:00, 03:00 & 04:00.

geoffreycoan WW doesn't choose discharge slots automatically, only charge slots. You use a timed scheduler for discharging. You can have up to 20 schedules so last night I set an evening one to dump the charge to the grid then 5 more to fill in the gaps in the charge slots with exports. The battery alternated between charge and discharge all night ending with full charge by 9.30am thus maximising solar export today. Only down side of this is I have to manually set the discharge times (and the hold charge) which can be quite error prone. I've just made a feature request to WW to do all the charge/discharge/hold on the one screen.

Windy Miller

Yup this is what I did as well.

Another good day, exporting now as it’s cloudy here till, 10:30, then charging.

geoffreycoan liking the design of your plan

Well this is a first, it is only the 10th and this is what octopus says in the app.
A minus for import. I know it will be different at the end of the month 👍😀 but it’s looking good so far.

Nice one Daveb01 I've never seen that myself

Well today is my 1st anniversary of having an export tariff, starting off with Octopus Flux on 10th August 2023, then adding Predbat for automation, then in October moving to Octopus Agile + 15p fixed outgoing which is where I've remained through all of 2024.

Scores on the doors, drumroll, annual consumption bill including VAT (but not standing charge as I feel I have to pay that regardless) is -£11. Smiley face!

10,734kWh generated, 6,861kWh exported, 12,395kWh consumed (of which the ASHP was 4,531kWh) and 8,690kWh imported.

And if I didn't have the solar panels and battery and was therefore on the standard variable rate then I estimate my annual consumption bill would have been £3,468.

geoffreycoan Up to the end of July from 1st Jan, I am £51 in clear profit so far, after taking out all import electric, all gas and all standing charges for gas and electric. It does however include £72 extra from saving sessions taken from Octopoints this year (but not an extra £150 I've had in three service gestures from Octopus for messing up my accounts). Export on std Flux is still just about worthwhile since March (Cosy from Jan to March) albeit the numbers are smaller, with price per Kws being lower and std charges being higher and the weather being particularly poor in spring.
Still hopeful that by 31st Dec I'll be financially energy neutral or slightly ahead. Time will tell!

geoffreycoan

I had my system commissioned on the 17th August 2023 so this will be my anniversary. I will have a look and post my results so we can see who wins the beer 😀. I started on Flux then moved to Agile. If Agile works out to be OK (for me) in the summer as well I will be sticking with it all year.

TimHutchings I've had in three service gestures from Octopus for messing up my accounts).

Is that all?

They've got 2 bills right in the last 13 months for us and have (once again) broken the smartmeter - this time by trying to backdate a security certificate on the electricity meter and bolloxing it up by putting the wrong dates in. No doubt they'll break the gas meter by doing the same in a month or two - security cert on that is 2 months out of date.

More stuff for the ombudsman.....

If only someone else had a similar tariff I'd be gone like a shot.

I wouldn't wish Octopus on my worst enemy.

Vestas Their accounting system clearly isn't up to scratch. Always very pleasant on the phone, but you would think that it wouldn't be too difficult for a big company like Octopus to produce one bill at the beginning of each month for the whole of the previous month, showing export electric, import electric, gas and standing charges. You would think that, but you would be wrong! You would also think it wouldn't be necessary to have at least two 8 page monthly bills showing plus and minus signs together against practically every figure on the 8 page sheet.
I'm sure they know what they're doing!! Not!!!

I forgot the figures above don’t include the £88 of DFS saving session credit. That would more than cover the service charge.

Personally I find Octopus not too bad. I had a service credit for delays on getting me onboarded to Flux, and there might have been another one from when I went off Flux to Agile but they forgot to cancel the Flux outgoing 😁. They are super-pleasant on the phone and via twitter and when I’ve needed things doing they have pretty much done it correctly first time.
Compared to Eon they are in my experience much better. I was forever getting adjusted bills with massive pluses and minuses that you couldn’t work out what the actual bill is. My monthly direct debit is now £1 a month and I’m £900+ in credit which’ll see me through the next winter

A surprise low costing tonight, so set discharge for 22:00 - 23:59, then a charge.

For anyone on WW I have just noticed some red arrows. This is indicating when I am discharging. Blue boxes charging from grid.

I will turn off the discharge starting at 22:00 tomorrow in the morning.

Daveb01 Those red arrows are so good for checking my scheduled discharges are aligned for my complex charging pattern to dump the charge first then end around 9.30am with a full battery.

Every discharge 30 minute slot earns me about 20p export (16.5p/KWh with Eon) so should get about £2.60 from tonights exports on top of the 17 exported solar units today (£2.70).

I set an export down to 10% scheduled to finish at 23:55 last night then WW charging slots overnight to top it back up. I notice that the percentage was down to 9% by the time the first slot kicked in, and the Inverter app reports 13.8kWh of charge to 100%.
I'm on version 9 of the battery software and think I will leave well alone as all seems to be working well 🤞
Looks like there are some interesting features planned for WW to bring scheduled discharge/ Agile automation into one page.

A good couple of days in a row on Agile, as it’s so windy. I still think Agile is better than IOF (for me anyway)

Yeah it’s different for everyone. I much prefer the certainty of iog.

I tried agile for a month and was more akin to feast and famine.

Hook You definitely need a decent battery automation system to make the most of Agile. Trying to manage it to best effect manually would be a nightmare.

If you’ve got an EV then Go or IOG is, at least for the summer, the best choice for most solar owners. Charge up overnight and sell pretty much all the solar generation during the day.

I don’t have an EV though, and given the relatively low mileage I do now and I’m not bothered about driving a newish car, I’ll be sticking with ICE for some time.

For me Agile is the best option. Particularly for winter where our ASHP consumes a lot, far more than our battery storage. Agile vs Flux in the summer but I ended up staying with Agile this year as the benefit of the better export over the more expensive import rates was marginal.

Even when Agile isn’t particularly cheap there’s usually some 12-13p slots overnight that I charge the battery in ahead of exporting the solar during the day. It’s not often that Predbat decides not to charge overnight at all. And I never pay the peak agile rates as the batteries take care of that load.
Last couple of days though, lots of negative rates overnight and during the day. Most of today was negative and it coincided with a grey low solar day which made a pleasant change that I could take advantage of it. We had an Octopus Power up event today and there’s another one tomorrow but no point in opting in for free electricity when the import rates are negative.

geoffreycoan If you’ve got an EV then Go or IOG is, at least for the summer, the best choice for most solar owners.

Go isn't great, since export rate is only 8p iirc. Might be better off with Eon NextDrive if you don't qualify for IOG (and perhaps even if you do).

It’s definitely horses for courses depending on your consumption. I basically live my life consuming electricity at 7p and living off my battery.

An ashp would definitely throw a spanner in the works. I’d like to get one, but it’s currently cheaper for me to stay with my 21 yr old inefficient non condensing gas boiler.

geoffreycoan

Looks like we are doing a similar thing at the moment. I just hope my current plan can last until the end of September. Just had a look at Octopus facts and it’s still in the minus for import. I have also screen shot the year estimate. Like you I have over £600 in credit for the winter just incase. My DD is £5 but may increase that to £10 as the increase coming is 10% and there maybe another one.

Month

Year

Another thing I am going to look at in September (ready for winter) is set the overnight charge to slots at 7p or below (this is to mimic the Go tariff as I don’t have an EV either. Then hope for some sun and may use a slot or two during the day if there are any.

If that does not work, I will go back to our post on doing slots below say 12p, and export a bit more at 15p.

Daveb01 @geoffreycoan Again, very similarly to you both. Been enjoying Agile controlled by PredBat since April, IOG before that which was OK for the winter. Replacement EV arriving October just as ASHP gets busy. Going to stay on Agile for this winter see how that goes. This will be my first winter with Under Floor Heating to the whole ground floor. Will be employing a low and slow heating strategy but try to avoid the high agile peaks when possible, I cannot automate my ASHP, too old - the heat pump not me, so will programme to set back further from 4 to 7pm. I work in wind power and this year has been, so far, the strongest for 10 years in terms of wind energy so for anyone following Elexon wind predictor and agile rates movements relationship will know it’s a good time to be on agile. As more and more wind power comes on stream month by month price plunges should be here to stay.

Daveb01 Another thing I am going to look at in September (ready for winter) is set the overnight charge to slots at 7p or below

Any import prices less than about 12 or 13p will cover the losses from battery charging and discharging and result in you making money by charging at those rates and exporting any solar. Roughly that’s what Predbat does so I’d suggest not limiting yourself to 7p charging and push it up a bit higher.

Nice set of graphs though, really showing the benefits of Agile pricing and solar panels. The weather has taken a change and we’re getting some quite varied agile prices now, fairly high last night, almost no solar today but cheapish import so my battery is hovering around 10% before its charged up later on. Quite scary to see it that low.
Today’s Predbat prediction is -72p for the day, whereas tomorrow is predicting -£6.

Our own figures for August month to date are £14 import, £125 export and year to date £705 import, £936 export and just £1 a month direct debit 😁

Jase1703 I cannot automate my ASHP, too old - the heat pump not me, so will programme to set back further from 4 to 7pm

I’d suggest you do some tests on the most efficient way of running your heat pump with UFH. In general the advice is to run the heat pump all the time so that it balances heat lost in the house with heat input from the heat pump and you avoid large temperature swings which cause the heat pump to have to push loads of energy into the house and consume more electricity at the time.
That’s the way we ran our heat pump last winter. That and other optimisations to the settings cut about 25% off the electricity consumption compared to the winter before, but just as beneficial was that the house was warm and comfortable all the time. The only setback we did was overnight.
And for most of the winter we only had a single 5.2kWh (4.2kWh usable) GivEnergy battery which was sufficient to last most of the peak period - for both the heating and the rest of the house, cooking, etc. The only time we did turn the heat pump down in peak was the super-peak of 60p for a few days in early December ‘23 and when the DFS sessions were on.

But we have radiators throughout. UFH has a much higher thermal mass so this may mean that turning the heat pump down has less immediate impact.

geoffreycoan

Just looked at tomorrow’s slots, not sure where the best places to export will be.

So the easy one export to empty before 23:30, then charge back up.

Do I turn off a few slots and export first thing in the morning and charge back up again, of just export at 15p, what does Bradpit (😀) say?

Jase1703
I'm very interested to hear that you think/thought Agile was better over the Summer than IOG. I don't follow it religiously, but almost every time I checked (perhaps apart from the last week or so) IOG looked far superior, assuming a reasonable size battery. So I have stuck with IOG so far.

I'm even more interested to hear that you think Agile will be better over the coming Winter. I'd be very interested to see any analysis that you've done to reach that decision.

PS I use the iOS OctopusCompare app to keep an eye on the differential in outcome between IOG and Agile given my (Prebat optimised for IOG) consumption. The last month shows Agile would have cost me £108, IOG £69.

This is what I am thinking

Daveb01 Here's my Predbat plan for tonight/tomorrow. The batteries are currently empty and I'm running off grid at the moment.
In essence it is charge up in the cheap and negative periods, interleaved with a few discharges when the rates are slightly positive, and end up with the batteries full by the morning.

All the negative periods from 8:30 onwards I'm just exporting whatever isn't used by the house load.

If you're not familiar with the predbat plan, the PV kWh column gives my predicted (solcast) generation for each 30 minute slot, and the load kWh is the predicted house load based on historical averages. The last column is total cost from now forwards (continuing through midnight), so right now I'm on -£1.85, by mid-day tomorrow, -£7.21 (i.e. about £5 by tomorrow lunchtime).

The reason for this plan? Once the sun gets up I am predicted to generate 3+ kWh per 30 minute slot; my inverters can only charge 2,6kWh per slot, so unless I can add a massive amount of load I am not going to be able to consume any import.
Two days ago it was a different picture, it was very grey and overcast, hardly generated anything so I did the washing, tumble dryer, turned the ASHP on and heated up the hot tub all on negative rate electricity. But when the solar is good I might as well export for 15p than try to chase -2p of import.

Daveb01 I've done something very similar. It's currently charging on all negative slots and discharging on all 0 and positive slots. I've emptied the battery before it started at 9.30pm and am aiming for empty at 7am before a 3 hour charge to full before the solar kicks in properly.

Windy Miller

geoffreycoan

Thank you 🍺

Windy Miller

Thank you 🍺

My issue is the GE AIO does not like 30 min slots that charge then discharge, I will get a big SOC drop, so will stick with my plan as above

PianSom short answer, I knew my EV lease would finish start of June and next EV arriving in October, octopus compare app also indicated, back in April that I would be better off on Agile so I switched to see how it would perform.. we are electric only large 70’s 4 bed house. Using AIO and PredBat to manage Agile. I agree that in low wind periods such as July rates can be boring, but August has been bonkers. I get the feeling winter and the U.K. energy mix could favour agile IF you can manage it well and IF you have a big battery. I’m happy to experiment on agile for this winter as others with ASHP have faired well in winter. Equally happy to admit it was a mistake and switch back to IOG with an EV.

Blast, I should have exported longer as my AIO only got down to 40% (needed another 30 mins)

As I have now had my system for a year this August I thought I would share my Solar production & prove North facing panels do work (down south at least)

I originally had 12 x 430w panels on south facing roof (200 deg) and 6 x 430w panels on North facing roof (020). However because I have a SolarEdge Inverter & Optimisers, these were split into 2 x strings 9 and 9. The north string was bringing down the few panels on the south side, so I had them swapped to just north and south. This increased the south facing string but the north facing string was having an issue, my installer contacted SolarEdge and they said there is a minimum panel string of 8, so this is why the 6 panels were not working as expected. My installed and I agree to add 3 more panels to the north facing string (total 9). So now have 21 panels (9 Kwh)

Total for year = 7.26 mwh
2023 = 1.78 mwh (Aug - Dec)
2024 = 5.48 mwh (Jan -Aug)

I will be sticking to Agile for the winter this year as well. I will make a decision on what to try next or stick with an Agile for another 12 months in May 2025.

Let’s all keep in touch and keep the stats going and thoughts about what’s good and what’s not.

Having had a 16kw ASHP from 2020 and 8kw solar + 3x 8.2kw Gen1 batteries from 2021 (Gen1 Hy5.0 inverter) we have gradually improved our efficiency and usage.

2020 & 2021 Octopus Fixed import and export
2022 & 2023 Octopus Tracker import & Fixed export
2024 (from Feb) Octopus Agile import & Fixed export

Everyone will have different usage but thought I would comment on my experience.
E/V added in Jun 2023

With a large 16kw ashp I stayed with Tracker initially as the batteries can only supply 2.6kwh via Gen1 inverter so I was concerned at amount of peak import I might have to make.
Installer setup ashp with fixed flow temps (55 deg I think). Moved to weather compensation and low temp 24x7 from Dec 2022 saving approx 25-30%
ASHP is LG with older controls and afaik not suited to integration with Home Automation etc.
Target temps are just 43deg for hot water and heating flow temps normally 30-45deg (typical flow in winter is say 37 - 42deg)

Batteries enabled excellent SavingSessions last 2 winters (2023/4 = about £180)
Usage (approx) - so many variables with forced import/export as well as solar, ashp, e/v etc making analysis tricky
2021 14k kwh pa
2022 13k kwh
2023 10k kwh
2024 expect circa 10k kwh but that includes near 2k kwh for e/v. ASHP is now circa 5.5k kwh per annum vs 8k+ in first year or 2

Solar prod is circa 6k kwh per annum (from 8k nominal pv, in SW Eng, not optimal pitch or orientation)
solar export is circa 2k kwh pa
Forced battery export varies sub 0.5k kwh pa

My average Agile import rate this year is sub 12p for say 2.5k kwh since change from Tracker. Key will be the ave I can maintain over winter - target is to be under Tracker rate of course.
Using WonderWatt to help manage imports. I manually tweak imports to maximise cheap imports. Probably could do a bit more forced exports but don't bother usually as inverter max 2.6kwh. Batteries can supply about 9 hours usage at max draw.
solar prod in winter is very low relative to usage. So filling batteries from grid at cheap rates is vital!

Key this winter will be to minimise peak imports and wonder if anyone has any comments/suggestions?
My thoughts:

1. Previously been running ashp with weather compensation and 1 degree setback at night 9pm to 4am (on Tracker)
2. Thinking that on Agile I should not use setback and indeed, when cold, might even try and heat +1 degree (especially overnight) to take advantage of cheaper rates
3. will have to see usage during peak periods and consider options e.g.
   a) setback 1 deg 4pm to say 7pm during peak rates
   b) increase heat setting +1 deg noon - 4pm to try and ensure less demand from peak time evening
   c) increase heat setting +1 deg midnight - 6am to try and ensure less demand from peak time morning

So I'd really appreciate some thoughts as to how I can evaluate agile v.s. flux. I'm currently on flux and using predbat to help manage on a 6KW array with 5KW inverter and 8.5 battery.

My own calculations say that (for example) on the 20th - I paid 17p per kwh for import v.s. 19p export - and predbat's been doing a good job - we were recently on holiday and it ensured we made a good £4-5 profit every day, importing avg 14p and exporting avg 18-19p.

If I try the calculators - those say to me "if you used the same energy in the same timeslots ..." and while I get that's all they can calculate on because that's the information they have - that's not what would happen - if I switch to agile, predbat will rethink it's plan and off it goes meaning different import in different slots.

I've had a go at eyeballing the lowest rates on a given day and comparing to my average. If I can charge at 5p and export at 15p - that's a bigger win than 14p import 18p export. The problem being that, sometimes, those low rates are at 11am when the array is already charging the battery at full capacity - and others they are at 3am when it's ideal.

So I'm a bit stuck - part of me thinks 'hey - you're doing ok on flux with predbat - don't break it' and part of me is wondering if there's a better option out there. I just don't know how to evaluate it.

(And appreciate there might be an answer somewhere up thread - so apologies if I've missed it)

MikeyHaz have you tried
https://www.octopriceuk.app/compare
It uses your own actual data

May help ... but as you indicate its hard to be absolute as it depends on soooo many factors

• extra time shifting usage?
• winter/summer import/export
  Etc

MikeyHaz Could you run a second instance of predbat in readonly mode, and ask it to assume the other tariff. And then just compare the two after a few weeks. Possibly not quite fair since the actual battery would finish each day at a level other than the readonly instance would have chosen.

Another good month on Agile

Electric import £0.27
Electric export £100.84
Gas £9.44

So electric & Gas plus Standing charge all £0 and extra in credit ready for winter 😎🍾

Daveb01
Happy to see ave import cost 8.08p in Aug for 331kwh
Ashp for hot water and EV

Export 438kwh @ 15p

Tim Adams
Interesting to see that imports so far in 2024 5326kwh @ ave 13.98p
Agile from about 20th Feb I think (tracker prior)

Exports 2432 @ 15p

Hopefully coming winter can keep under Tracker rates by good use of batteries as well as a bit of setback in peak periods

2023 imports were 8304kwh @ 22.2p on Tracker (not bad vs standard rates

Tim Adams I like your thoughts on strategy this winter. I’m also looking forward to sticking with Agile through this winter, I switched in April. I also have a large old ASHP, this will be first full winter with wet UFH so will be lowering flow temps and running 24/7 with set back 4pm to 7pm. I’ve got no smart functions on ASHP but will manually boost temps if I know/see price plunges. Contemplating upgrading room stats to smart wifi stats that I can control from HA.

Jase1703 i moved to using full "weather compensation" after about 2 years using original setup with fixed flow temps. My normal flow temps are lower with WC than I would've set and works great. But maybe your controls and HA can't mimic that?

If I was setting manually I think I would try as low as 40 deg for the heating and hot water just 43deg. Depending on your heat loss or other factors you might need to tweak higher or lower.

Nothing under 16p tomorrow 😞🙁☔️

What does Bradpit say Geoffrey?

Just done the 2 x free Octopus spins. Has anyone ever got more than 8 points per spin?

Daveb01 I win 8 points every time 🙂

Daveb01 Yes. I got 800 points on my very first spin back in November 🙂.

Daveb01
Ah, for the heady days of March ...

Wellllll, my strategy of not charging the battery until the end of September has failed on day 5. Battery is down to 47% and it’s only 10:43, so have had to do a top up during the day. I have now set a schedule to pick 4 slots during the day.

Welcome to the famine.

Although it should be sunnier tomorrow.

Daveb01
I auto select to charge at everything under 13.5p both day and night. With occasional manual changes if prices are super low. Slots higher than that I take a bit case by case depending on weather (solar) etc and likely needs. Tend to keep a decent reserve for eps - even though rarely needed.

13.5p limit used partly to aim for full battery and export as much as possible from solar

So far I very rarely charge at rates much over 16 or 17p. But with ashp its likely winter charging will need to do whatever necessary and likely will raise that to say 20p as a general limit.

Daveb01 Have a look at the smart charge schedule to decide how much to charge based on SOC, expected usage and expected solar the following day. I have 2 smart charge schedules for 2-5am* and 1-4pm* I am experimenting with which are only doing a charge if it calculates the battery may run out before the next solar period. It's easy to switch them off if Agile pricing is good or Solar is good.

*Those times tend to be the cheapest Agile 3 hour periods which would allow my system to go from 4% to 96% if necessary.

DD MikeyHaz Could you run a second instance of predbat in readonly mode, and ask it to assume the other tariff. And then just compare the two after a few weeks. Possibly not quite fair since the actual battery would finish each day at a level other than the readonly instance would have chosen.

Is there an easy way to set this up in Prebat? I would like to compare how Predbat would work on Agile compared to my current Flux tariff.

The Black Cat There isn’t really, other than as was suggested earlier to create a second home assistance instance and load predbat in that with a different tariff configuration and it set to read only.

What I did last year (and will refresh for this winter) is to create a spreadsheet where I compared the different tariff options. I knew my daily average consumption for the home and the ASHP and so I modelled different scenarios as to consumption and battery charging on different tariffs. For agile I took the average rates off energy-stats.uk, comparing agile all-day average, agile all bar peak average, etc. This gave me a range of possible agile options.

I created it for my own comparison but happy to share if it helps others out

The Black Cat

FWIW - I did make the switch based on some rough calculation and am regretting it right at this second. I was buying at an average of 15p and selling at 18p on Flux.

I switched late August and in September I've bought at an average of 15p and selling at 15p - that's with Predbat doing the management. September has cost me £17 so far (including standing charge). I think it would have been a few £ less with Flux - but that's a bit of guesswork.

I've had SOME days where I've bought at 3p and 5p - but others where it's been as high as 21p.

But I also appreciate that the agile pricing is running a little hot at the moment and we don't have a huge amount of wind which impacts the pricing more than solar.

So I'm going to give it a good run (6 months or more) before I jump back to Flux and I'm hoping I won't want to jump in a few months.

September results not to bad, still zero cost to me inc standing charge 👍😀🍺

The Octopus app doesn’t show the effect of refunds from Power Up or Free Electricity events, but still comfortably in profit for me as well

Big drop on the export income though, June £194.96, July £175.91, August £174.31. Winter is coming

My September import is 378 units £47.27, export is 179 units £29.53 so now paying £30.34 for my electric for the month including standing charge (has been negative since March). Agile is better than all the other Octopus (non intelligent) tariffs except Go which I can't get. (Go would have been £17.23, Cosy £32.92, Flux £42.29, Flexible £112.73).

The problem is my average unit charge for import for September on Agile is now 11.91p where I was paying 5.09p in June when Octopus had lots of spare electric.

Keeping an eye to see if better to switch over the winter.

Windy Miller The problem is my average unit charge for import for September on Agile is now 11.91p where I was paying 5.09p in June when Octopus had lots of spare electric.

Yeah that’s what happens.

My average monthly agile rates through the last winter were:
Oct 23 18.5p
Nov 23 19.87p
Dec 23 14.88p
Jan 24 16.95p
Feb 24 13.89p
Mar 24 11.17p
Apr 24 7.64p

And that was with high ASHP consumption and for most of the winter was only with a single 5.2kWh (4.2kWh usable) battery

I’ll re-run my maths soon but expect will stay on Agile. The average unit rate is still substantially below the standard variable rate

geoffreycoan With those rates Cosy might be better for October to February but all your import would need to be in the three lower priced windows (with enough battery to cover the in-between) otherwise it depends! ASHP will flatten batteries quickly unless you can also time their usage to the lower priced windows but that might mean the house goes cold in-between. Might be too much of a compromise.

I'm waiting to see what my usage yields for the winter having started on Agile in March this year.

Windy Miller With those rates Cosy might be better for October to February but all your import would need to be in the three lower priced windows (with enough battery to cover the in-between) otherwise it depends!

I've got a very similar decision to make - currently on IOG, and my 9.5kWh battery (plus a little daytime solar) is now only just enough to get through the day with my shiny new ASHP. (Sept. saw 430kWh import at 7p, and 475kWh export at 15p, so happy with that. I'm ignoring some daytime import when a visitor plugged in EV, but paid for it.)

EV mileage is very low, so not too worried about increase for that. But Tomato is so very tempting - 5p overnight plus a couple of discounted hours during the day, and no 4pm-7pm peak rate.

geoffreycoan I think my average monthly rates show the difference the ASHP causes:

Oct 23 12.48p
Nov 23 16.48p
Dec 23 8.8p
Jan 24 9.04p
Feb 24 10.36p
Mar 24 8.36p*

*to be taken with a large pinch of salt as Octopus were meddling with the account (to the extent its nonsensical) so a sort of bill turned up in mid-April.

Vestas That's better. I would stay on Agile with those monthly rates even though Nov might be a bit high.

Windy Miller The difference will be @geoffreycoan 's ASHP which "adds" an average of 3p/unit from Oct-Mar apart from Dec/Jan which presumably were a lot colder.

I'm obviously paying for gas to heat house/water.

Windy Miller With those rates Cosy might be better for October to February but all your import would need to be in the three lower priced windows (with enough battery to cover the in-between) otherwise it depends! ASHP will flatten batteries quickly unless you can also time their usage to the lower priced windows but that might mean the house goes cold in-between. Might be too much of a compromise.

My calculations last year were that with the kWh of battery storage I had (which then ended up unexpectedly lower) I was always going to have to do a substantial amount of peak rate import. The overnight discounts on the smart tariffs didn’t offset the peak rate premium, and so would overall cost more. So hence Agile or Tracker as being the best way to buy generally cheaper electricity.

Cosy now having 3 periods might now be worthwhile, got to run the numbers to find out.

The general advice for the ASHP is to run it low and slow all the time as that uses the least electricity to just replace the heat loss from the house. Relying on the thermal inertia in the house when it’s up to temperature and trying to avoid having to heat it up from cold too much. There’s a heat geek video on YouTube that explores different smart electricity and on/off strategies and he concludes that just keeping the heating on is the cheapest approach. Strategies such as boosting the heating in cheaper periods so the house then ‘coasts through’ the more expensive periods actually use more electricity as the boost consumes more than you save in the coasts.

Looking at my Home Assistant data for last winter the heat pump uses around 20kWh a day as an average figure, but there are some cold day peaks of just over 90kWh (in December and January) so there’s a huge variation in consumption depending on the outside temperature.

geoffreycoan

Plus if it gets windy Agile goes negative.

67p peak import tomorrow peeps....

Vestas
Yes, after last nights very low prices tonights are a bit of a shock. I have just put the gas CH on for the first time this season.

Tenkaykev Swings and roundabouts. I have to remind myself that getting irritated with import rates which (worst case average these days) are maybe 15p isn't that bad 🙂

Vestas 67p peak import tomorrow peeps....

67p at 5:30pm then 69p at 6:30pm for me (Eastern region)

Wow. It hit 50p the other week, but winter is definitely coming.

The batteries will see me through that so not especially worried, and as you say, average import price is considerably lower than this. So far this month I’ve exported more (202kWh) than I have imported (172kWh) and my total import is only £17 so I’m still in profit; plus a huge balance with Octopus from all the summer export

Vestas Cheaper than me on Dec 23 tariff still, I am Eastern England

Got a charge set up for the 3 slots at max 6kw charge rate.

I'm on Agile and love the 15p / kWh on export, especially when there's wind and I can import and export and make a bit of money as well as ensuring to turn on a few things also.

One thing I've noticed so far in October is that we've not had much wind and only had a couple of negative times, which when matched against lots of cloud my battery is not getting charged for free.

I always feel really comfortable charging if the price is below 15p import, but things are just so expensive at the moment, SW tonight at 72p / kWh at peak price😱, but at 81% battery I've enough juice for tonight to avoid the silly prices, but will just have to schedule a charge at around 23p overnight and just take some deep breaths 😁

I like it when the wind turbines kick in. Very good prices at the moment, I think we are beating the guys over on IOF, not sure about the average with IOG though.

Just done my October stats. High import month due to Son's EV 1.5x full charge (115 units) one weekend. Low export to be expected in October. Comparing Agile with the other tariffs for October and my usage pattern puts Cosy at the same price. Still no incentive to move away from Agile (as I can't get Octopus Go).

Nice stats.
If we gets edgy about current Agile prices, the winds will return:
Remember: 'When the winds blow, Agile rates are low.'

And even when there is no wind (and hardly any sun, just murk), Flexible rates are significantly higher (but keep away from 4pm-7pm).

October will be my first month since March where I won't have made a profit.
My Octopus October bill will be about £14 with standing charge (-£2 without).

I have no gas and I do have a heat pump (+ PV + batteries).
I also use Predbat which controls everything for me, hunting out the low slots to get the most efficient cost outcome.
It's brilliant but does take some time to set up with an associated learning curve.
R&D labs have worked well for many but it sounds like it is going through a flaky spell at the moment. Worth looking at – it is capable for hunting out low Agile rates.

Rob

Windy Miller Keep forgetting to add (so others can compare their systems)
17 SW facing panels, 6KW Solaredge inverter, AC 3.0 inverter, 2x 5.2KW batteries, gas used for heating, Agile slots managed by WonderWatt (£15.99 for 3 months)

Windy Miller Keep forgetting to add (so others can compare their systems)

Speaking of which - has probably been mentioned, but there is a 'givenergy' team on pvoutput.org
https://pvoutput.org/listteam.jsp?tid=1694

(Do givenergy provide a means to upload ? Something they could do from their side to save everyone having to manage their own scripts.)

DD I guess those are the panels fitted to the Givenergy offices? Been running since April '23

Windy Miller no - "A team for owners of GivEnergy inverters to share their solar PV generation."

The map shows coverage across the country:
https://pvoutput.org/map.jsp?tid=1694

DD Ha, fame and fortune is mine, I top the givenergy team with having the largest array!

So GivEnergy themselves don’t feed their data through to the givenergy team on pvoutput.

Some other inverters have the facility in their management systems to feed pvoutput directly. GivEnergy don’t appear to have this so I use an automation in Home Assistant to upload my generation data every 10 minutes

geoffreycoan I’m starting to consider IOG or Next Drive now that I have an EV.

Maximising off peak would be beneficial.

IOG if you can get it on a high usage EV makes more sense than Agile.

Agile can work if you can shift and delay energy usage to match the excess periods.

I can't currently get IOG and we have a single low usage EV so Agile has worked so far. Currently in doldrums so Agile is not good...

I think I've just had the worst Agile month so far in terms of average import cost/kWh. Looks like 17-18p which is ridiculously high compared to last year.

Maybe time to find another tariff/supplier as Agile has been pretty poor for a few months now. Edit - as has Tracker, so its probably Octopus I need to change.....

Vestas still cheaper than Intelligent Octopus Flux's off peak rate of circa 21p.

Obviously the benefit with that is selling electric when you have surplus, but as we head towards the winter, not so much!

Hopefully the wind will come back!

TX200 We don't export more than 25% of our annual generation (small array) so none of the Flux products would work.

There's a few tariffs ostensibly for EVs around 7-10p off-peak but they're fine with batteries.

I'll have to do the maths but one of the issues with Agile over the last few months is that the usual afternoon "dip" in pricing just isn't there anymore. That in turn means you might head into the (recently very expensive) peak 3 hour period with insufficient power.

Swings & roundabouts but Agile isn't what it was, even with wind. Nor is Tracker which makes me wonder if Octopus need those customers to suck up their excess power as much as they did.

Vestas I think I've just had the worst Agile month so far in terms of average import cost/kWh. Looks like 17-18p which is ridiculously high compared to last year.

Maybe time to find another tariff/supplier as Agile has been pretty poor for a few months now. Edit - as has Tracker, so its probably Octopus I need to change.....

I only moved to Agile on 26th October last year so don’t have all that much comparative data, but my average for 26th-31st October 2023 was 18.50p, and 19.87p for November 2023.
So for me it looks broadly similar rates to last year.

Tomato energy do an Agile rate as well but no information on their website as to what current or historical agile rates are (so can’t compare to Octopus), and no information on how you get the daily agile prices (app, email, API?) so a leap in the dark.

For me as a high consumption (ASHP) user with consumption bigger than my battery size I think Agile is still probably the best bet. I need to do the numbers of Octopus Cosy with their 3 charge up periods but until I do I will stay where I am. I console myself that whilst the agile prices are high they are at least cheaper than the standard variable rate that I’d have been on otherwise. October my net bill was -£3, without batteries and solar on SVT it’d have been £160.

geoffreycoan I'm not sure there's a lot in it one way or another for us as we both work from home (usually) but the Agile rates are definitely a lot "flatter" than last year. Any 30 minute dips are minimal. Tracker has been pretty poor as well, still cheaper than SVR but not by much. Saving grace for tracker is the gas price.

Edit - 12.48p/kWh for Oct 5 - Nov 4 2023.

Vestas my generation for the year was 1.4 x my consumption.

Hard to work out how much I exported as the system imports to export. But yeah, need to be exporting more than you import for IOF to be with it and I guess similar for flux.

I switched to Agile on 18th Jan 2024 with 15p fixed export.
My average import rate since January has been 9.15 p/kWh
My total electricity import cost has been £445 (without SC) and export savings of £972.06

My view is that Agile is a long term game. We are just stuck in the doldrums at the moments. A couple of weeks ago, I had a whole day with average of 0.72 p/kWh.
And the average current flexible rate is 24.5 p/kWh. Against which 18 p/kWh doesn't seem that bad.
I will be sticking with Agile but will monitor .......

Rob

With the low solar from the array (2-5 units where I need 15) I have been trying to find the right Agile slots to charge the battery between 7pm and 4pm the following day. Started with best 12 30 minute slots but found that many of them were overnight and I got to 4pm without enough to run through the evening. So I split the schedule into 7pm to 7am and 7am to 4pm with 6 slots in each. This worked better and with some tuning I have ended up with 8 overnight and 4 during the day as a good balance as recently the overnight slots have been cheaper than the day slots. Generally I have above 90% in the battery at 7am and 90% at 4pm which is typically good enough. There's also some room for any solar that does occur during the day. Earliest I run out now is about 10.30pm when the cheapest night rates are later in the night. This means a little bit of grid use occasionally (1-2 hours) without charging. But if I don't let the battery run out sometimes I get the SOC drift problem so it's not so bad.

I hear what you're all saying about Agile but something has changed between last year and this year in terms of Octopus supply/demand/profit margin which has increased average kWh pricing.

Rbor And the average current flexible rate is 24.5 p/kWh. Against which 18 p/kWh doesn't seem that bad.

Yes and last year flexible rate was 25p+ IIRC and I got 12.4p average out of Agile. With the exception of the last week of October which was still and grey, weather (wind/solar) conditions have been broadly similar to the same period in 2023. My consumption pattern is much the same and yet it looks like I'll be paying nearly 50% more.

I can't help wondering if its Octopus dumping excess energy into batteries they've installed/EVs on one of their "intelligent" tariffs? Especially in the 1430-1600 period.

Thankfully its not quite like last year where Octopus was the only game in town.

Windy Miller Pretty much the same situation as you and the difference over the last few months has been that there's very little drop in either mid-morning or afternoon prices. There used to be at least a couple of 30 minute slots with at least a couple of pence drop so where's the power going other than some form of ESS - or Octopus have a better deal for 2024 with another energy broker to take some of their excess energy.

Vestas I would need double the capacity of batteries to be able to use all the best slots in the 21 hours off peak period. The difference between the overnight and day cheap slots is maybe 3p. So it's costing me perhaps an extra 18p a day because my batteries run out. Even if you multiply that by 365 and 10 for a 10 year battery life can you find any battery system giving me another 10KWh cheaper than £657? (Really we are only in this situation between late October and late February). So maybe I already have the best balance with 8.4KWh usable battery and shouldn't worry too much about finding the absolute best slots.

I agree with you that Agile is now getting progressively less advantageous compared to the other tariffs especially with the extra effort of managing Agile (and also the extra subs. cost). I will go through the winter to see how it pans out but for me Agile was definitely a winner from March through to September and pretty much matched Cosy in October.

Windy Miller Last year I could pretty much set and forget charging on the following slots and come up with a close to optimal outcome on a G1 inverter (so 2.4kW charge) -

2230-2300
0200-0500
1030-1100
1430-1500

Total charge time 4.5 hours. Battery discharged at around 9pm.

2230 slot is still usually there but the others not so much.

Thinking on this a bit more. Octopus are probably just using Agile to balance out supply and demand between their tariffs. With the supply capacity available across all tariffs last year when perhaps not so many were using the 'Intelligent' tariffs they could price Agile to use up the energy they had left. Perhaps this winter a significant proportion of their 'Smart' customers are now using the 'Intelligent' tariffs allowing Octopus to balance things out a bit more. Net result is poorer Agile rates unless they really do have a surplus (windy days). So we need more Octopus supply or less 'Intelligent' demand to keep the slot prices down.

Perhaps my trick/treat should have been to run round the neighbourhood unplugging all the EV's charging on people's drives. 😮

Windy Miller Ultimately that's what all the "intelligent" tariffs are designed to lead to - a more balanced grid, which with an elegant inevitability leads to more balanced tariffs.

I mean there's times to get a reality check, and remembering that we are effectively day-traders on an electricity tariff which changes every 30 minutes is probably one of them 😃

Ten years ago pretty much everyone who participated in this thread would have though the idea ludicrous. I'm pretty sure 10 years from now (probably a lot less) the same viewpoint will be the norm again.

We live in interesting times. And digress. Again 🙂

Vestas I also think that as time goes on, the prices will flatten out more and more - overnight will become less cheap as more EV charging takes place thereby increasing the demand overnight. During the daytime I would think more grid-level solar will be deployed, this making daytime cheaper, which will encourage more daytime demand, which in turn will take some of the load away from overnight (think IOG). It will be very interesting to see how this pans out over the next 10 years or so

I’m not convinced that the flattening out of Agile rates is entirely Octopus’ doing.

It would be interesting to compare the UK power network battery storage, interconnect, solar and wind GWh capacity is last year and this. I get the impression (no facts behind this) that as a country we have far more in-built stability in our energy supply than we had a couple of years ago. Partly as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and our moving away from Russian energy dependence, and also partly just the general growth of these technologies at scale.

One additional data point: I use Predbat to manage my battery activity, as part of the logic it downloads UK next-day energy market prices at around 10am from Nord Data and uses that to predict tomorrow’s agile prices ahead of them being officially released by Octopus at 4pm. Its a prediction and there is of course some variation in prices per slot, but its pretty close and shows its the market rates that are driving a lot of the prices we experience.

geoffreycoan I’m not convinced that the flattening out of Agile rates is entirely Octopus’ doing.

They're not by any means. I just think Octopus at this point in time are probably ahead of the pack in terms of where we're going.

Intelligent octopus flux definitely got more clever as the months went on. It was fairly plain and simple when I first joined it, it pretty much always did the same thing, adjusted for the seasons, but generally the same each day in the season.

But now as I move away from it, it seems to be more aligned to their needs, the grid's needs (or perhaps the prices!). For someone with more solar than they need it's still a good tariff because of the high export rates, but you have to live with some of the minor annoyances like it occasionally charging and discharging in the same off peak period (lossy on the battery!).

I think one problem in the future will be too much solar generation and not enough consumption during the day. So will export rates drop? Will people be charged if they export rather than paid? Will we be encouraged to put on our heavy appliances during the day? Time will tell.

TX200 I think one problem in the future will be too much solar generation and not enough consumption during the day. So will export rates drop? Will people be charged if they export rather than paid? Will we be encouraged to put on our heavy appliances during the day? Time will tell.

That is what I think will happen. Gary Does Solar did a piece on this very topic

TX200 South Australia faced/faces the same issue regarding solar export. IIRC they have the ability to remotely limit export dynamically - well on or off is sort of dynamic 😉

Their local grid around Adelaide had pole transformers catching fire back in the 00s. A friend I payed an online game with (Eve) got disconnected and lost a very expensive internet spaceship when his local transformer went pop 😃

Its unlikely to be an issue in the UK due to latitude is the tl;dr really.

TX200 Will we be encouraged to put on our heavy appliances during the day?

Oh I hope so. I am reluctant to use heating appliances e.g. dishwashers, washing machine and the oven whilst we are in bed and not around in case something goes wrong (I don't mind putting them on if we're out). Nothing has ever happened to us directly but I do personally remember two incidents (fires) which happened to other people wrecking their kitchen. At least one was the tumble drier.

Well off topic now - sorry!

Windy Miller Thinking on this a bit more. Octopus are probably just using Agile to balance out supply and demand between their tariffs

Can they do that? I thought agile rates were fully documented in terms of wholesale rates - can they just adjust them on a whim?

geoffreycoan It would be interesting to compare the UK power network battery storage, interconnect, solar and wind GWh capacity is last year and this.

Yeah, I was wondering whether the interconnects were having an effect on flattening supply/demand.

DD I was wondering whether the interconnects were having an effect on flattening supply/demand.

I have a vague recollection of a 1.4GW link with Norway going down a few weeks ago.

The Norway link is back up, but apparently we are down a couple of Nuke plants due to maintenance and the weather is pants, well partially as at least it's not cold, the agile rates would be diabolical if it was cold as well...

The interconnects seem to be used more as time goes on. Remember it is a two way process with us both importing and exporting. With so many wind turbines going into the North Sea, all the surrounding countries are working collaboratively and this is part of Europe that we are working with.

I use an app called Gridwatch which gives live energy demand metrics for the UK and shows the sources of electricity that supply the grid, including each interconnect. You can see current and historical consumption levels.
This is a snapshot from the app as on 22:32 pm on 2nd Nov. On the app, there are several views that you can dip into.

Don't worry, Solar does feature (but not when it's dark!)
The 'Bio' input from burning wood chips at Drax is significant. We do count this as 'good' but perhaps contentious.

Rob

There are several Agile price predictors available, and they show the real difference that wind makes to the price charged. This week is fairly calm weather wise, and days are shortening, so prices will be higher than they have been for a while, but I view Agile as a long term tariff and will try it over the winter to see how things go overall.

As long as I can charge at below the 23p equivalent for a standard fixed tariff then I figure I'm winning... but I must admit it's been a bit of a mental journey: my system went live in May so I had a summer of exporting more than I used and the transition back to importing a bit has been something I've had to get used to again.

Pete.J You need to take into account losses which at full rate charge/discharge will be 15-20%. I use 20% as its easier to do the maths in my head.

That means that anything at or around 20p/kWh and its not worth charging the battery given the SVT on Octopus is 24.5p or so.

Pete.J Interesting looking at the forecast demand graph, can see the weekend demand is slightly lower than in the week = lower agile prices, which we generally do see.

The other thing that jumps out to me is just how limited the mid-afternoon dip in demand is, its only a GW or so; leading to us not seeing much opportunity for pre-peak battery charging

Vestas Even at 20p it is worth charging if you can't get through the evening peak. Rather than use 24.5p I use the following slot prices as an indicator to see if I need to tweak the number of charging slots that should occur before the peak. But I agree 20% losses is roughly what I use too.

Windy Miller If I have to pay 20p/unit to avoid peak rates then I've screwed up 🙂

There's various automations I run to avoid this - eg if we have less than 60% SoC on the 9.5kWh battery at 1300 during winter then one automation will pause discharge from the battery until 1555.

Rbor I am posting this (linked to myself!) to supplement my 'Gridwatch' app snapshot from last night.

This snapshot is for 11:42 on Sun 3 Nov.

• You can see just how pitiful the wind (2.8%) and solar generation (2.9%) is (and this is near to mid-day when we have potential max solar). The wind has dropped further from last night.
• There have been days of this so it isn't surprising that Agile rates have struggled.
• A couple of months back, I remember seeing 55% wind and 20% solar.
• French nukes are doing us proud. And our nuclear provides a near constant backhaul of energy for us.

I just need to ensure that I have enough in my batteries to get me through 4pm-7pm peak. Batteries currently on 6% with 222W solar. I may need to help out predbat this afternoon to force charge 2pm 17.75p slot (Predbat has already grabbed 2:30pm 16.80p slot).

Rob

Vestas Yes I would do the same if I could. WonderWatt can't do scheduled pauses (well it can do hold but that isn't very easy to control) and it isn't applying any intelligence other than to find the the cheapest periods so I haven't found a better solution than having to charge one or two slots between 12pm and 4pm even if above 20p.

Rbor French nukes are doing us proud.

Most of their nuclear power stations are in a worse state than ours in terms of reactor faults/cracking. Whenever they go offline (which is more and more often now) you can see the effect on European grid prices. Edit - I also have a vague recollection that some of the plants have to be shut down during summer in recent years as the water used for cooling is at too high a temperature for the design.

I don't think France has a plan A, never mind a plan B for what to do when they can't be operated (which is going to happen inside the next decade for a large portion of their nuclear plants, never mind what EdF claim).....

Edit2 - they do have massive PV generation compared to the UK, hardly surprising given the latitude in Southern France.

Windy Miller GivTCP/HA is easy enough to setup & you don't have to go down any complex paths like predbat or writing your own code.

There's a graphical automation editor which is easy enough to use & if you're not worried about fancy dashboards then all the info & controls are on the default Overview page.

Vestas Edit2 - they do have massive PV generation compared to the UK, hardly surprising given the latitude in Southern France.

Good point. The interconnect info in Gridwatch states the country linking to the UK, not the type of power generating the energy. I remember reading that the French nukes were having issues with some being offline and requiring work.

Rob

Rbor There was also something about algae or seaweed growth around the water vents shutting down reactors but that might have been in the UK rather than France.

I can't help wondering why the UK is building reactors in areas which are pretty much guaranteed to have issues with sea level rises (which are already baked in) during the next few decades. Ironically they're building one where there isn't currently enough water supply to run it and is also almost certainly going to be one of the first to flood.

I digress, again 🙂

Vestas Might do that eventually but it still wouldn't help tomorrow. Agile is so high at the moment it is only offering 19.82p at 5.30am then the next best is 19.6p at 9.30pm. My battery cannot carry the house through that so WonderWatt is planning 5 slots above 20p to carry me through. Hope it gets me through the highest at 64.2p!

Windy Miller Regional price variations, wow

Predbat is charging my battery up tonight from 1:30 at 17.xxp all the way through to stopping at 5:00. My 5:30am is 19.82p.
Another day of absolutely appalling solar forecasted but what little there is just about keeps pace with the house demand so I’m not predicted to run out of SoC tomorrow until 21:30.

I only generated 7kWh today and the solar forecast for the next few days is much the same.

geoffreycoan Bah - mine generated 2KWh. See why I'm so reliant on the grid over the winter. Without any day charge I would probably get to 3pm - just in time for those high rates. Or I could hold charge all day but I'm trying to let WonderWatt do it all rather than me keep fiddling.

PS We're both in Bedfordshire so should see the same prices.

geoffreycoan Windy Miller
Think both of you as being lucky in sunny Bedfordshire.

Here's my Yorkshire effort for today from my 9.75 kWp array.
Solcast PV forecast way out with Predbat struggling to correct matters during the day.

And tomorrow's Solcast PV forecast is 2.5 kWh lower at 5.9 kWh.
My only saving grace is that Yorkshire rates are lower (to balance the 67p daily SC).
My 1:30am rate is 16.64 p/kWh
My 5:30 am rate is 18.88 p/kWh
Like you, Predbat is charging from 1:30 am to 5:00 am.

What a truly dreadful run of weather!: endless days of grey murk with periods of fine drizzle with no wind.

Rob

1.0kWh generation on Sunday. Better than Wed-Fri though which was 0.7, 0.8 & 0.9kWh.

I guess I win the low generation prize.....

Rbor Remember this time last year in Yorkshire though when it was continuously raining and when taking my dog for a walk it was muddy everywhere. At least it’s dry…😎

Don't forget it's warm and dry which is a bonus as cold would send Agile prices into really silly territory...

My solar yesterday .07 & .45 on Saturday.

You think you have it ard... We lived in a hole and eating dirt if we were lucky...

On the other side of the fence, it looks like Predbat will be selling some of my energy to the grid this evening at 28-29p per kWh.

M_J We lived in a hole

Ground was frozen solid where we were, couldn't dig holes, had to lie in the open. Soft southerners..... 😉

Vestas
" Soft Southern Jessies " was the name I chose for our pub quiz team when visiting our daughter's local in inner city Leeds. It did raise a laugh.

Tenkaykev You're probably all "southerners" to me. I come from a part of the UK that's on the same latitude as Moscow 😉

Edit and just to prove this is all over the UK, my daughter went to a uni on the south coast and was told "you come from the north". She was born in Leicester. Not entirely sure chissits consider themselves "Northerners" 😃

Edit2 - sorry, going OT again but its better than looking at Agile rates....

86.19p at 4.30pm 🤯

Windy Miller 83.17p in East Mids.

Someone posted some tariff at 4.7p for 6 hours during the night and 23p the rest of the time. Looking tempting given that'd be like 15 hours (with battery) on 4.7p and 9 hours on 23p.....

Windy Miller 82.74p in Yorkshire at 4:30 pm

Rbor Ouch!

85.14 in the west midlands region.

I think I'll be exporting again, 38.2p per kWh on export for that slot.

Windy Miller 86.19p at 4.30pm 🤯

Crazy day tomorrow, probably the most expensive Agile price I’ve ever seen, but a few hours earlier from 11:30am-1:30pm we’ve got an Octopus Power up event, 2 hours of free electricity.

Have to admit I don’t follow the logic of some of these power up events, yes when its really windy or sunny it makes sense, but tomorrow, my Solcast forecast is 9.4kWh for the day at PV50, 1.9kWh at PV10, the base Agile price is around 22-23p in that period 🤷‍♂️

geoffreycoan a few hours earlier from 11:30am-1:30pm we’ve got an Octopus Power up event, 2 hours of free electricity.

Notable that - even though we are not so far apart - our Power-up experience seems to diverging. I had exactly one in October (3rd). I also had one on 1 Nov.

Back on topic- be interesting to hear the experience of anyone on IOF tomorrow.

Vestas Someone posted some tariff at 4.7p for 6 hours during the night and 23p the rest of the time. Looking tempting given that'd be like 15 hours (with battery) on 4.7p and 9 hours on 23p.....

Tomato Energy

Just doing the back of the envelope sums, comparing yesterday:

7KWh solar generated, 20.8kWh grid imported, 24.2kWh home consumed (of which 11.7kWh was the ASHP)
Funnily enough no grid export.

Octopus agile cost me £3.64 for the 20.8kWh imported.

Tomato overnight 4.7 x 13.5 (charge both batteries overnight) + 4.7 x 2.2 (overnight house load) = 74p
Tomato daytime 23 x (20.8 - (13.5 x 0.85 [adjusting for battery losses)) = £2.14

Total £2.88

A saving to be had therefore, but not massive

geoffreycoan A good bit more in terms of savings for me given I only have a 3kW array and no heat pump.

Edit - at 4.7p it'd make sense to heat the hot water tank via the electric element for the morning then gas for evening (usually two 30 min gas heating schedules).

Given what happened to similar ventures (Bulb etc) in the past I'll hold fire for now.

Hi all, very interesting topic tonight. To make any sense of things I have committed to 1 year on a specific tariff, last year it was Flux, this year it is Agile. I don’t have a heat pump or EV (yet). I have also thought about Swapping summer and winter tariffs.

Predbat has been doing a great job (for me on Agile), I am nearly at £800 in credit & my DD is £5. This should last me thought the winter.

The weather is a bit unpredictable and this period is a bit strange, I have not seen any sun for about a week and it’s not been windy either.

At the moment it’s cost me £10.85 and it’s only the 4th of November, so it will eat into my credit a bit.
Import £8.54
Export £0.13
Gas £2.44

In a nut shell I am happy with Octopus Agile at the moment and if it only costs me £5 a month (year on year) I am happy.

Good luck everyone 👍🍺🤞😎

91p / kWh tomorrow at 4:30 pm for Agile import in the South West 😱

Got about 900w from the sun today, but with a 9.5kw battery, I'm able to get to 1am ish every night, where I'm recharging for 4hrs to fill battery up at around 19p to 21p on average and able to make it till the next 1am, so missing the really expensive charging times.

Some wind and sun would be nice at some point though 😁

Daveb01 To make any sense of things I have committed to 1 year on a specific tariff, last year it was Flux, this year it is Agile. …

The weather is a bit unpredictable and this period is a bit strange, I have not seen any sun for about a week and it’s not been windy either.

At the moment it’s cost me £10.85 and it’s only the 4th of November, so it will eat into my credit a bit.
Import £8.54
Export £0.13
Gas £2.44

In a nut shell I am happy with Octopus Agile at the moment and if it only costs me £5 a month (year on year) I am happy.

Wise words Dave, you have to take the longer view with any of these tariffs, there will be good and less good periods. Christmas last year was super cheap for example, had all the heating and cooked Christmas dinner on free and negative electricity. Grey windless days are not good for Agile but we don’t get these all the time.

My costs so far for November:
Import £12.28
Export £0.16
no gas

So not dissimilar to your own.

I moved from Octopus Flux to Agile in late October 2023, so now have a full year of data, 1st November to 31st October. My total net electricity cost (excluding standing charge) was £10. I can live with that.

Comparative cost of the consumed electricity for “payback” purposes if I was on standard variable tariff was £3108, giving a solar and battery payback of just under 5 years. Also quite happy with that 😃

Not sure if it has already been mentioned in this long conversation but I use the OCTOPUS R&D APP to charge my 9.5kw battery using Agile tariff.

You can set the app to charge for a given number of 30min slots per day or set a rate where the battery will charge when Electricity is below a certain price.

For example, in this sun free environment we find ourselves this week, I have the app set to charge for 6 half hour periods which is enough to keep reasonably topped up with prices at about 16p per kW.

I very rarely use any electricity at peak times at my 3kw Inverter manages to supply the load during these periods.

I know there are other apps around that appear a little complex but this Freeby works fine for me.

The other app I have and find very useful is the OCTOPUS WATCH one which gives a very friendly display of prices for the following day.

Cheers

This morning, I looked in horror at the Nordpool predicted rates and I looked back at the title for this thread:
'Making the most of Octopus Agile'.

My conclusion was that I need a battery to get me through peak rates (or any rates in excess of the Flexible rate).
With little or no wind of solar, I need to load my battery whenever the rates drop.
Luckily, Predbat does that for me.

Having seen the Nordpool rates, I checked that my setup was working, only to find that my inverter had disconnected at 4:29 am and my batteries were heavy paperweights!

I tried the usual 'solutions':

• Restarting my inverter from the portal but my inverter refused to connect. I have an AC3.0 inverter.
• Checking inverter and batteries. The switch connecting my batteries to the inverter was still in the on position.
  But my dongle was flashing blue, so it is trying to connect (Solid blue shows connectivity).
• Switching off the main breaker in my consumer unit for my inverter and batteries but that didn't work.
  .... and switching off my heat pump to conserve energy.

My next course of action was to phone Givenergy. I then discovered the delights of the new GE chat support.
This was not a good morning ....

Having used the GE Chat weblink, I was greeted by 'Tom' after only 30 seconds.
Tom was knowledgable and suggested what I needed to do:

• Reset the dongle by holding down a near inaccessible reset button for 15 seconds. Then wait for 30 minutes.
• If the dongle's blue flashing light became solid, I was connected.
  30 minutes later and the blue light is still flashing.
• Then log into the dongle's local wifi and work through the steps in GE's 'How to fix wifi dongle connection'.
• I was working through the this document when there was a quiet click from the inverter and the blue light became solid.
• I was now connected to the inverter but meanwhile my router had changed the IP address of my inverter.

Anyway, I sorted the IP address and made it static (which I should have done before). I also needed to scan for the new IP address on the GE app.
I was back up after 2 hours and I switched my heat pump back on. I still have 70%SOC in batteries.

My good news was that the GE Chat support worked and was far better than the useless chat support that I had previously encountered on other sites. The Chat can work if the support staff are knowledgable.

Notwithstanding this, my view is that Chat support is a retrograde step for GE. It looks as if installers get voice support but us users get the Chat.

My conclusion after a strange morning is:
To make the most of Octopus Agile, you need a working inverter and batteries to get you through high rates and a way for topping up the battery during low(er) rates.

I console myself that my system was mended quickly and I was not to be waiting for an installer visit to repair things. I can also ride through 4pm-7pm tonight.
I have no idea what caused the inverter to stop working so that is still a niggle. Such a pity that the older inverter rely on wifi and not an ethernet cable for connectivity.

Rob

Rbor Good job you were on the ball and spotted the issue Rob.

Did you try manually totally shutting the inverter down and starting it back up again to force a reconnect?

Agile rates are not as bad tomorrow as they were today, but still pretty exciting. I can’t imagine being on Agile and not having a battery to take out the peaks.
In a bit of good news, I beat my Solcast PV50 forecast today. Admittedly the forecast was 5.1kWh and I only achieved 6kWh, but it’s still a win and I’ll take it!

Mega foggy here in Brittany France today, I had to drive to St Brieuc to buy a new staircase, at times crawling along at 30mph. When I got to St Brieuc it was brilliant sunshine. Weather, bhah

geoffreycoan Mega foggy here in Brittany

Dammitt! Off to Bergerac on Friday and I was assuming a bit of sun that I could bottle and bring back.

Woohoo, 67.8p here tomorrow. Same weather....

geoffreycoan Did you try manually totally shutting the inverter down and starting it back up again to force a reconnect?

Yes. I tried everything that I could think of.

My solar generation was up today, getting above 2 kWh to a heady 3.04 kWh from 5.3 predicted.
The sun hasn't appeared here since last Tuesday, a full 7 days.
I have checked back and there hasn't been such a sunless and windless period over the whole of the last year.
To make matters worse, most of our part of Europe and the North Sea has suffered the same fate, causing prices to rise.

Still, tomorrow, Solcast is predicting 10.3 kWh for me. Time to get the shades out.

Despite the Agile rates, the tariff is still more cost effective for me (with a battery) than other tariffs, provided that I keep off the grid 4pm-7pm.

My average Agile import rates for November so far have been:
1st: 15.48p/kWh
2nd: 16.35p/kWh
3rd: 17.74p/kWh
4th: 17.15p/kWh
All courtesy of the excellent Octopus Watch app, also mentioned by JOHN_ELEY

Just look at the Flexible rates, typically about 25p/kWh depending on region.
Well worth contemplating before abandoning Agile based on 4pm-7pm rates.

Rob

I managed 18.85p average yesterday. So far cheaper than my flux off peak rate.

Ended the day at +91p after export earnings deducted and SC

Rbor Not quite so good as yours
1st: 17.24p/kWh for 15.64kW
2nd: 17.91p/kWh for 18.21kW
3rd: 17.95p/kWh for 23.33kW
4th: 18.52p/kWh for 15.31kW
5th 18.57p/kWh for 13.81kW
(Data from Android Octopus Compare)

Highest slot I needed to charge in is currently 24.34p/kWh (the cheapest one between 7am and 8.30pm which is just too long for my battery to cover without help).

All these are below the standard flexible rate of 25.95p/kWh.

Windy Miller I have checked back at my costs between 4pm and 7 pm yesterday when Agile rates looked horrific.

In total, I used 0.06 kWh which cost me 3.53p.
Agile + Battery 👍

On forums, some are switching from Agile based on these 4-7pm rates.

But where is the sun? I last saw the sun last Tuesday, 8 days back.
My average solar generation after first 6 days of November is 2.2 kWh/day.
Today, I am above my Nov average with 2.65 kWh.
Solcast predicted 10.6 kWh and I am not even hitting the PV10% mark.
For Thursday and Fri, Solcast predicts 4.5 and 5 kWh for me.

Last year my Nov generation was 230 kWh, average of 7.7 kWh/day.

At least the temperature is stuck at 9-10C so heat pump doesn't need to work that hard.

Rob

While rates are terrible 4 to 7 pm predbat is still keeping my costs below 17p/kWh which is cheaper than standard. ATM there is a high pressure stuck over us. You can’t chop and change just for one weather system. Agile is a long term thing - Just need to wait for the wind.

PS. A lot of the time we are talking about saving less than a round of drinks at the pub…..

Leeshore LOL, yeah in 2004!

Leeshore Agile is a long term thing - Just need to wait for the wind.

Agreed

I’m paying around £4 a day for all my electricity and home heating (except 4th November which was £5.72), I’ve £1100 credit in my Octopus account from a summer of great export and last winter’s DFS, my monthly direct is just £1, so its not really much to get stressed about.

It was a bit of a shock last month when I changed from being a daily net exporter to being a net importer, but after a bit of red wine based therapy I’m over it now 🍷

For folk in credit with their energy supplier at the moment you should only be in credit for two months of direct debits. Much more than this you can ask for that money back. Martin Lewis explained it on his TV show you can watch on ITV x.

M_J

Don’t think Martin Lewis has Solar, Batteries, HP or EV. The way I think about it is my DD is £5. I am trying to get it to £1.

I build it up in the summer and spend some of it in the winter. The weather can change in the blink of an eye. So if it’s cold this winter then more of my credit will be used. When the bills come in at £200 or £300 for the month I don’t have to change my DD and I don’t have to worry.

Everyone is different but for me not having to worry or Octopus putting up my DD is a bonus 👍😎

Daveb01 I build it up in the summer and spend some of it in the winter.

Bear in mind that you could be earning (a little) interest if you have that money in a savings account.

You could even put it in an interest-bearing current account, dedicated to your energy account, and get Octopus to set up a variable direct debit - that way, they will take exactly what they owe, and you get to earn interest on the rest.

DD
I understand, however I have taken ML advice and have emergency cash in an account, plus savings = max interest £1000. Don’t want to pay the tax man any more 👍😀

Rbor
Last year

vs this year so far

My credit that builds up covers my winter usage, when my gas usage shoots up a lot!

I'm scheduled a heat pump install next week, so will be interesting to see the difference once gas free.

Hook My credit that builds up covers my winter usage, when my gas usage shoots up a lot!

I'm scheduled a heat pump install next week, so will be interesting to see the difference once gas free

Yeah that’s my view as well, my summer export will pay for the winter heating. Yes I know I could ask for the money back from Octopus but I quite like seeing it there and knowing that even with £200+ monthly bills in winter I won’t be paying anything. It makes me feel much less stressed about the cost of having the heating on.

After winter this year I will see how the sums balance out and will probably pull some of the credit out

I'm not an Agile user, but just came across this, which some may find interesting. Dated today.

https://octopus.energy/blog/agile-smart-home-diy/

PianSom Lot of good stuff in there about using the Agile API. Although Home Assistant gets a brief mention, there’s nothing about BottleCapDave’s Octopus Integration which is surprising, nor anything about battery management on the Agile tariff such as MyEO, WonderWatt or Predbat.

Agile price predictors (API and on Twitter) could have got a mention too.

But useful collection nevertheless, thanks

PianSom Dated today.

Hmm... I'm sure I've seen that before. Reference to Lockdown near the end makes me think it's recycled to some extent.

Super good weekend agile prices, more storms please!

Saturday 47kWh imported, it was comparatively cold so the heat pump guzzled 22kWh, total bill for the day £4.30
Sunday 57kWh imported (27 exported), heat pump only used 11kWh so total bill for the day -£3.64

And today at the moment I’m still with a negative net bill.

But back to more normal agile prices, 15-20p overnight tonight and the Agile predictor is showing a second peak of prices around 46-48p on Wednesday morning 8-9am which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before

Yeah today surprised me, currently 9p (including accounting for electricity SC) 😀

geoffreycoan Similar weekend for me:
Sat: 40 kWh imported. HP guzzled 28 kWh (colder up North!) Overall cost £3.71
Sun: 52 kWh imported (costing –0.09p!). HP guzzled 18 kWh Overall cost –£2.91

Looks like rates are now 'back to normal' but it was fun while it lasted.
Predbat has done a marvellous job, just being left to get on with things.
I was exhausted having tried to slurp up as many of the negative rates as possible.

Rob

Just done my November stats.

We have had such a poor set of circumstances with the weather causing Agile pricing to be quite a bit higher than expected and, sure enough, every other tariff other than flexible would have been cheaper in November with my usage pattern. I could have saved £25 moving to Cosy or £12 moving to Flux (or even £50 moving to Go if I could get it).

However I'm going to stick with Agile through the winter until March when I expect Agile will again be the cheapest tariff so that I get a full year of data. It's starting to look like I would save quite a bit if I switched to Cosy from November to February (even though I don't have a Heat Pump).

By next winter there may be other better tariffs from other suppliers that I might consider too.

17 SW facing panels, 6KW Solaredge inverter, AC 3.0 inverter, 2x 5.2KW batteries, gas used for heating, Agile slots managed by WonderWatt (£15.99 for 3 months)

Windy Miller I have an AC 3.0 inverter with two 8.2 kWh batteries. But I also have a heat pump, which really increases electricity usage. My mean for November is about 21 kWh pre day.
Over November, my mean agile import rate has been 14.9 p/kWh
I could go into Go or IGO but the battery is going to run out before the highly 5-6 hour charging slot.
Last November, I was on 2 slot Cosy but I couldn't get enough into my batteries to see me through the day. The extra late evening slot is attractive and I have done some sums. For me, there is little difference between Agile and Cosy.
My AC3.0 inverter can charge 2.8 kWh in an hour. I am envious of other inverters that can charge at about 5 or 6 kWh per hour. That makes it far easier to fill the batteries.

Since mid January when I transferred from Cosy, Agile has been good to me and I am still nearly £300 in credit (import + export + SC).

If I still had gas, GO or IGO charging would get me through the day.

So it very much depends on individual cases.

Rob

Rbor Cosy actually looks very attractive for those of us with small arrays and a single G1 inverter.

I could put 21.6kWh @ 11.86p/kWh into the battery over the 3 x three-hour slots which would easily cover our usage. Peak rate isn't exactly scary at 35p when compared to Agile pricing in the last 6 months.

Might have to take a hit every now and then to discharge/balance the battery cells but that's do-able.

I think I might switch (supplier).

Vestas Cosy is the tariff that I have been looking at as an alternative to Agile. The 3rd slot makes a lot of potential difference.
(BTW the 3rd Cosy slot of 2 hours so overall there are 8 charging hours).

My modelling showed little difference between Agile and Cosy, partly because when very low Agile rates appear (far too rarely with this weather), I will consume loads of electricity.
Although not ultra-low, Agile rates for tomorrow look healthier. But I am keeping an open mind.

As some people might say: YMMV !

Rob

Agile is certainly losing its shine. Tomorrow, when the grid is very green, all Agile can offer is the best slot at 11.06p and just 7 slots below 13p. (I was expecting another plunge day.) Octopus must be using all their excess to cover the free sessions and their other tariffs making us on Agile pay despite the extra effort of tracking it. I wonder if anyone has enough Agile data over the years to show whether the benefits of using Agile are diminishing with respect to the other Octopus tariffs? I'm pretty sure that is the case even having only been on Agile since March.

I only joined the Agile roller coaster this year but I have tracked how it compared to Go last year and even with the doldrums we recently had I am still better off than last year.

Running total This year 2024 vs Last year 2023

Jul to Aug = 287 kWh used at 9.85p vs the last year of 361 kWh used at 8.78p (Loss of £3.07 & Exported £16.59)

Aug to Sep = 532 kWh used at 4.72p vs the last year of 284 kWh used at 10.22p (Gain of £29.26 & Exported £33.14)

Sep to Oct = 337 kWh used at 7.20p vs the last year of 135 kWh used at 9.59 (Gain of £8.05 & Exported £14.98)

Oct to Nov = 472 kWh used at 8.62p vs the last year of 454 kWh used at 11.79 (Gain of £14.92 & Exported £6.20)

M_J This is my data for the last year. Ignore Dec, Jan and Feb as they pre-date me moving to Agile. How did you manage to get last month to be 8.62p average for 472 units? My 556 units cost an average of 16.79p + VAT.

June was my best month where Agile cost just 5.09p for 297 units (and I generated bucket-loads from my array to export too).

Windy Miller How did you manage to get last month to be 8.62p average for 472 units

We have one EV and a petrol. We can delay charging the EV until it is super cheap.

When I get an EV I will buy that stage get a charger that can use IOG and then we will drop off Agile.

Rbor My modelling showed little difference between Agile and Cosy, partly because when very low Agile rates appear (far too rarely with this weather), I will consume loads of electricity.

For me (and I have recently left Octopus) with a tariff like Cosy is you get the assurance that you know what your costs will be. With Agile it is variable, but obviously more risk = more potential reward.

From my perspective, the Agile rates are similar to the wholesale markets, whereas the other tariffs are likley based on that and will then have an uplift to also ensure a profit for the company

Rbor Over November, my mean agile import rate has been 14.9 p/kWh
I could go into Go or IGO but the battery is going to run out before the highly 5-6 hour charging slot.

I'm on IOG with HP. While battery does run out in the evening, my average unit rate for the month to 20th Nov. was still 8.8p + vat. So I think I''m still better off wrt cosy. But definitely need to keep a close eye on this... Probably depends strongly on how much solar I get - once that drops off, cosy will probably win.

CW more risk = more potential reward

The right hand side of that equation appears (IMHO) to have been modified this year, and not to the favour of subscribers....

M_J

I joined Agile in April from Flux. So far it has been better. I don’t see it in terms of kWh in or out, I see it as credit, bills and DD.

My direct debit is now £5 (it was £15 last year)
I am still over £700 in credit and it’s the 1st Dec tomorrow
I am hoping to get my DD down to £3 and hopefully £1 soon.
I have also got time back to do other things using HA & Predbat.

I am happy with Agile at the moment 👍😀🥂

Not as bad as I was expecting this month

November import 551.26 kWh for £93.27, export 7.92 kWh for £1.17
Average import rate 16.92 p/kWh so still doing better than Flux.
Might look at Cosy. Hadn't thought about that one. Didn't know you don't need a heat pump.

alan_johnston You need one now - or an "electric boiler". Can't join if you have gas.

Edit - which is a good plan for Octopus as they reduce the price differential between gas & electricity which when combined with heatpump COP comes close to eliminating the "spark gap". Also goes some way to explaining why Agile rates in the afternoon have been basically flat for most of the last year.

alan_johnston My November is:
November import 624.7 kWh for £93.44, export 41.8 kWh for £6.27
Average import rate 14.96 p/kWh.
Solar 191kWh down from 231 kWh in 2023. Down by 17%.

Cosy could well be better than Agile currently but if I were to switch, my SC increases daily by 15p from 53p to 68p!

Rob

My November 2024 Agile stats:

Import 1212kWh for £218.18 (after powerup event refunds), export 45kWh for £6.82
Net bill £211.36 (excluding standing charge)
Average import rate 18.54p
Solar generation 238kWh
ASHP consumption 753kWh

Comparing to November 2023, also on Agile:

Import 1263kWh for £240.61 (after powerup event refunds), export 120kWh for £19.36
Net bill £221.25
Average import rate 18.50p
Solar generation 316kWh
ASHP consumption 775kWh

It’s interesting how very similar the figures are for this November and last. Solar generation down considerably, not helped by the long overcast high pressure at the start of the month, and doubtless that’s by my export is down as well.

But actual bill and average agile rate paid, almost the same, which goes against the general view we have that Agile is not as good as it used to be.

I did a rough comparison of what it would have cost me on Cosy with assumptions about battery charging and how the batteries meet house and ASHP demand through the day, and I came up with a monthly import cost for November of £193. I probably have erred to optimistic on the use of the battery to cover non-Cosy period demand so actual cost could well be higher than that.
The standing charge would increase from 40.01p to 48.79p, so a further £2.63 a month.

So Cosy potentially gives marginal benefit for November, but last year whilst my consumption peaked even higher in December and January, the average import rates were all lower than November, so assuming a similar pattern this year, any benefits of Cosy are likely to reduce further.

Conclusion that I’ll stay on Agile.

Interesting.
My ASHP for Nov 2024 was 445 kWh, virtually identical to 2013.

3 slot Cosy looks very feasible but I am worried about whether I can fill my batteries in the 3 slots. With my AC3.0, I can get 8.54 kWh into batteries in 3 hours; 5.60 kWh in 2 hours.
Today is hardly a 'cold day', but my batteries (16.4 kWh) have half emptied between 4pm and 10pm. My ASHP at 10pm has used 13 kWh. Last week when it was colder, I was using twice that amount.
I think that Cosy would run Agile close but when/if Agile rates get back to normal, I think Agile will perform better and I am sticking.

Rob

Rbor 3 slot Cosy looks very feasible but I am worried about whether I can fill my batteries in the 3 slots. With my AC3.0, I can get 8.54 kWh into batteries in 3 hours; 5.60 kWh in 2 hours.

Since I have two inverters I can put about 7.2kWh in my 9.5 battery in 3 hours and completely fill my 5.2 (4.2 usable) in that time period, so 11.4 charged in 3 hours.

Today is hardly a 'cold day', but my batteries (16.4 kWh) have half emptied between 4pm and 10pm. My ASHP at 10pm has used 13 kWh. Last week when it was colder, I was using twice that amount.

My batteries generally last from 4pm through to about 8pm so my assumptions were that I could avoid the Cosy peak period but would incur some standard rate costs.
Although I can charge faster than you I’d only really be using the overnight and afternoon Cosy periods for charging, the 10pm to midnight I’d probably do a partial charge to see through to 4am as there’s no benefit to fully charging when there’s a cheap period 4 hours later.

Yesterday at 10pm my heat pump had consumed 20.3kWh and 25 by the end of the day. On cold days it can be double or triple that so some day-rate import would be inevitable for me.
More battery storage would reduce the use of Cosy day-rate, but for 12.3p/kWh saving in a few winter months, the maths wouldn’t add up.

Same conclusion for me on Agile vs Cosy.

geoffreycoan This is interesting. Cosy would be worse for you because you both have Heat Pumps - precisely what Cosy should be designed for. If there were more battery storage on the grid maybe the dynamics of a tariff like cosy might improve but you're right in the economics not standing up for increasing your own battery storage. Agile can be such a faff at times (like last night when I was charging in slots at almost 20p and holding charge today in slots at 25p).

I am waiting to be able to use an EV to power the house before I install heat pumps sticking with gas heating for the time being and I am also concerned at investing any more in the GE eco-system until they improve engineering and support. With my SolarEdge inverter connected to the panels I've not had a single issue in 18 months. No over-volt shutdowns, no unexplained limits to current and no need to restart it because it's stuck at idle or taken itself offline. I think it's pretty efficient too as it certainly runs cooler than the GE inverter even when converting 6Kw. Similarly I don't have continual battery worries with my Prius hybrid which is now 10 years old and still shows the usage and economy it did when new.

Windy Miller precisely what Cosy should be designed for

I made that point because of the comparison to Gas. Gas units cost me 6.2p with a system efficiency of around 80%. If you're mostly using Cosy day rate for your heating of just under 26p then you need the heat pump seasonal COP* to be better than 3.3 not to pay more for your heating. So either Cosy day rates need to come down (unlikely) or gas rates need to go up (very likely over the next decade).

*For hot water as well as space heating.

Windy Miller If you're mostly using Cosy day rate for your heating of just under 26p then you need the heat pump seasonal COP* to be better than 3.3 not to pay more for your heating.

Hmm - if you assume HP runs at constant power for 24 hours, then 8 of the 24 hours are at the off-peak rate. So average unit price (in my area) is 0.33 * 12.32p + 0.67 * 25.15p = 20.87p

Though you might set-back between 00:00 and 04:00, which will shift a little more usage to the off-peak either side.

I guess the early afternoon off-peak is a good time to heat water - less chance of defrost cycles if it's warmer outside when you're drawing more power, and solar gain will offset lull in room heating.

DD I run my ASHP heating from 10:00-23:30 every day with a setback overnight so it will come on if it gets too cold, but usually the house has retained enough heat that it doesn’t start until the scheduled 10am.

Last time (admittedly 2 years ago) that I tried running the heating 24x7 I found it was too hot overnight, plus too expensive!, but I’ve changed a lot including the flow temperatures since then so I was thinking about doing a test of running it overnight to see whether the overall consumption was better or worse. I’m expecting it will be quite similar as I’ll avoid the big power draw at 10am when starting up but have a gentler draw spread for longer.

If you don’t have batteries then I don’t understand how Cosy makes sense for most home owners.

I think Octopus assume you will boost your heat pump temperature during the Cosy periods, heating the house fabric up so you then can coast through the peak. In practice this is flawed logic as a heat pump is most efficient if you run it low and slow all the time; boosting the flow temperature to increase the house temperature uses quite a bit more electricity - there’s a HeatGeek video on this that works through the modelling and shows it doesn’t pay for itself.

Also I don’t think it’s practical to coast through the 4pm-7pm peak rate, it’s too long a period of time. Last year turning the heating off for an hour of the DFS sessions was OK but I wouldn’t want it off for 3 hours to avoid the 37.42p peak rate cost.

geoffreycoan Last time (admittedly 2 years ago) that I tried running the heating 24x7 I found it was too hot overnight, plus too expensive!, but I’ve changed a lot including the flow temperatures since then so I was thinking about doing a test of running it overnight to see whether the overall consumption was better or worse. I’m expecting it will be quite similar as I’ll avoid the big power draw at 10am when starting up but have a gentler draw spread for longer.

Because IOG is stupidly cheap overnight, I was definitely looking to optimise for cost rather than energy consumption. And my heat pump does seem to consume a lot of power trying to get back up to temperature after it's been off, and I was trying to avoid that. Esp. if that happens when running from battery rather than grid.

DD Hmm - if you assume HP runs at constant power for 24 hours, then 8 of the 24 hours are at the off-peak rate. So average unit price (in my area) is 0.33 * 12.32p + 0.67 * 25.15p = 20.87p

Sorry - forgot the expensive bit!

So it's (8 * 12.32 + 3 * 36.46 + 13 * 25.15) / 24 = 22.28

But hopefully with a battery you can mitigate the peak.

DD Plugging in your new number means the sCOP needs to be above 2.8. This is more likely as the MCS limit for an install (below which they won't certify it) is, I think 2.8.

Still makes getting a heat pump an expensive and disruptive exercise with so little economic gain.

Sorry we are off topic again.

Windy Miller I don’t think anyone would get a heat pump for economic gain, either get it because the old one is end of life or for environmental reasons.

I got mine because the oil tank failed and the regulations meant that I couldn’t site a replacement in the same place. Has to be 750mm from any boundary and 1.5m from any buildings including sheds. Would have ended up with an oil tank in the front garden!

Annual running costs are about the same/slightly less than the oil boiler except of course I can generate my own electricity and sell the excess. Something I can’t do with oil (or gas)!
Purchase cost was horrible but after the RHI grant repaid over 7 years, it’ll be about the same as the cost of a new boiler.

And yes off topic.

Windy Miller This SCOP 2.8 from MCS is well out of date for modern HPs.
I think that Heat Geek guarantees a minimum HP SCOP of 4.

Rob

Rbor Of course it depends on the flow temperature so if the installer doesn't fit large radiators you might still get a low sCOP if you want a nice warm house.

Windy Miller Very much so. Half of my rads were upgraded and I have some K3s.
The design flow temperature was 40C at –3C.
The highest flow temperature I have seen is just over 35C. I live in a 1920s detached, no underfloor heating and minimal cavities. Lots of insulation in loft. My installer was a Heat Geek Elite and he knew exactly what to do to squeeze the maximum out of my setup. My SCOP is just over 5.

To get the best out of a HP system, you need a good installer.
Of course it is costly but I am glad I had it done 16 months ago.
The house is so comfortable and it is good getting rid of gas. At least I save £100 on gas standing charge, a small contribution to the cost.

Rob

Rbor In comparison I don’t think I had an optimal install. At the time (2 years ago) Heat Geek wasn’t a thing and I struggled to even find anyone to give me a quote.
The company that did my install did a fair job, they did a proper heat loss survey and concluded I needed a 15kW system and so sold me 2x 9kWh ASHP’s working in parallel as there wasn’t an MCS certified 15kW ASHP available.

Most of the radiators were replaced with K2’s or larger units but the system still had a design flow temperature of 55 degrees and a SCOP of 2.85.

How I wish I had understood this more at the outset. I have optimised it quite a bit in the past 2 years, turned on weather compensation, changed the settings, etc and reduced the electricity consumption by about 30% from the initial setup. I still don’t think mine is plumbed in in an optimal way, but it is what it is now.

But yes, agree with Rob, get a decent installer.

geoffreycoan I needed a 15kW system and so sold me 2x 9kWh ASHP’s working in parallel

Does that mean you only need to run one in autumn/spring? That would probably work quite well. (Perhaps even better if they were asymmetrical, like 6 and 9.) Or do they run half the house each?

Rbor heat geek will even put insulation in at their expense if it doesn't hit 4.

DD Does that mean you only need to run one in autumn/spring? That would probably work quite well. (Perhaps even better if they were asymmetrical, like 6 and 9.) Or do they run half the house each?

The two heat pumps feed a buffer tank which then in turns feeds the house so basically they work together to run the house. Both heat pumps do the heating and one does hot water as well.
When it’s not too cold then I do see only one heat pump operating and the other goes into a standby mode, but most of the time they are both running. I did try one experiment of turning the second one off completely but electric consumption was very similar and the house wasn’t quite as warm.

geoffreycoan My old house has a more modern extension with good cavity insulation. The extension had K2s and they were fine 🙂

The 1920s part of the house had a mixture of K2s and K1s. These were mostly changed to K3s. I wanted a system that worked at as low a temperature as possible. My installer first worked on 45C, then 40C (and that was when more K3s appeared). In practice, my flow temp is mainly about 30C rising to 35C on really cold days.
I run entirely on weather compensation via a sensor on a NW wall. All the TRVs are full on.
I work on 20C 6am-9pm with 17C standby overnight. Most nights, the temp doesn't drop below 19C.
My installer knew so much and taught me loads (along with Heat Geek videos). Like @geoffreycoan, I wish I knew them what I know now. I have a 10 kWh HP.
The HP arrangement of geoffreycoan with two HPs is a 'Cascade' system (See Urban plumbers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYgMhJcNAqs&t=129s)
I also do not have a buffer.

The energy pull from HP is a bit of a shock but you have to remember that you have no gas heating or DHW costs.
With the ridiculous difference between unit rate costs, you need a COP of about 3.3 for parity (assuming that gas boiler is 90% efficient). In winter, I am looking at 10-25 kWh just for HP, typically 14-23 kWh. And you need your base input also.

Low temperature is key in getting an efficient SCOP.

Now to Agile, title of this thread.
This time last year I was on 2 slot Cosy. I couldn't charge my two 8.2 kWh batteries enough to get me through the day from 4pm to 4am. The 3 slot Cosy should help.
HPs work best if on all the time but Cosy seems have been designed to assume that you would heat the house more during the cheaper slots. With batteries, you can get a cheaper tariff when you charge batteries and use the battery's energy to run HP. (Any minimal solar will help but you can say goodbye to export!)
I shifted to Agile from 2 slot Cosy mid January 2024 and Agile was far more cost effective than Cosy. Agile rates were then 'sensible'. In current weather pattern, Cosy would probably win out but is does depend on whether you can get enough charge into the battery.

An EV tariff is also a possibility if you qualify. Attractive prices but your batteries will run out and you will finish up using SVRs for a good part of a winter's day.

So that is how I make the most of Agile with an ASHP.
But I am keeping an eye on Cosy, but not when temps rise and solar reappears.

Rob

Rbor Post-install I have replaced the lounge K2 radiator with an even bigger one (partly my own fault I didn’t believe the heat loss report of the radiator size, and we elected for a smaller one than recommended), and replaced the towel rail radiators in the utility room and kitchen with conventional radiators. Not convinced the heat loss report got the figures right for the towel rails and both rooms were never hot.
As you say, it’s all down to the size of your emitters. Fnar fnar

Back to agile, looks like the rates will be improving, strong winds forecast for the weekend and both the Agile price forecast and the Greenness index are going in the right direction.

geoffreycoan Back to agile, looks like the rates will be improving, strong winds forecast for the weekend and both the Agile price forecast and the Greenness index are going in the right direction.

About time. I use Octopus Compare on Android and set a threshold of 28p for Red bars. Today (6am to 7pm) was all red! First time I'd seen that.

geoffreycoan I forgot to say that all my radiator upgrades to K3 were able to use the same pipework. At least that saved some hassle and cost as just involved removing old rad and adding K3.

We really need that wind to blow. At least we have some of our nuclear capacity back with more scheduled to return during this month. Looks like our nuclear reactors hare having an extension of their life which is good news.

Rob

Let’s hope Mr Bat is on his toes for Wednesday as I have never seen a 30 min slot at 88p before?

I am going to keep an eye 0n it as don’t want to be at less than 30% from 16:00

Daveb01 Just told my wife not to use washing machine and tumble dryer tomorrow. That went down well........

Daveb01 this is horrific. HP may get tweaked down. We will know the worst come 4 pm

Rob

Rbor They're taking the proverbial.

Cheapest rate from 0730-1930 is 40p? Peak is 92p?

Where's the justification for that? They're overcommitted on supply (cosy/EV's/etc) and we're picking up the tab.

Time to move.

Vestas

I just mentioned it to the other half and she said the same thing, email them and say you need us when theres not enough electricity but punishing us when it suits you.

Yeah that’s pretty horrible Agile rates tomorrow, what are normally peak rates for pretty much all the day.

Very little solar forecasted so Predbat is planning to charge overnight on the 19p rates and then hold the charge during the day at the 50p+ rates until the true peak rates from 4pm. My peak is 94.77p at 4:30 with 88p rates either side.

The only slightly good news is that its forecast to be “only” 6 or 7 degrees C tomorrow so at least the heat pump won’t be working too much in overdrive.

Octopus tracker is 35.45p tomorrow, expensive but not stupidly so.

Leeshore My wife says the washing machine and tumble dryer are all setup ready, we’ve just been discussing whether to put them on tonight at the 19p rates. I might just do so, show willing and all that…

geoffreycoan

Mr Bat has just updated and I am OK with the results as high battery ready for the high prices.

Daveb01 Advantage you have of 2x AIO and no heat pump. Most of my half hour slots from 10:30am onwards are predicting 1.5kWh of house load so the batteries will only really cover me from 15:30-19:30.

geoffreycoan Likewise. Going to give it till the weekend's greener-looking days and then decide whether to jump ship or not.

geoffreycoan Provided that I get lower Agile rates in the night slots, my two 8.2 kWh batteries can just get me through the daytime Agile rates and I shouldn't be using any of the high rate slots. My solar generation is down to a few crumbs of 1–3 kWh per day.
Oh, for those halcyon days of May and June.
I am in trouble if the lower rate slots don't materialise overnight.

On weather front, it looks like we will have similar conditions until Fri/Sat followed by a succession of depressions with winds. We should also be getting a good proportion of our nuclear fleet back in action, having been refuelled. So fingers crossed.

Rob

Just thought I would have a look on Octopus, this is 2023 and 2024. Not to bad so far.

I have changed tariffs, and got Solar etc in aug 2023, so not comparing Apples to Apples

Josephiah You have to look at Agile over the longer term, and for me, other than Cosy where its about the same, I don’t think I could find a cheaper tariff for my high winter consumption.

My average import rate so far for December is 17.3p/kWh. November was 18.54p and last December was 14.88p but there was a load of really cheap electricity over Christmas so maybe the average will get pulled down again this year.

Yes it’s bad at the moment but it will come good again I’m sure. Last weekend we had negative and zero price electricity

geoffreycoan Yes, I had a look at modelling what we could manage with Cosy last night - I think I could beat Agile in Nov/Dec so far by a few p/kWh, but only at the expense of hammering the battery through three full cycles every day instead of one or two. Every other month this year Agile wins hands down.

Josephiah have you looked at IOG-like rates (also available from EON without the need of an EV). I'm all electric, and Octopus Compare is putting me well ahead of agile. (I do currently try to save some battery for early evening, but I am still using some import then, which would unfairly penalise agile in the comparison).

My average import rate for Nov was something like 10.8p I think, and includes a big chunk of daytime import when a visitor charged their EV all afternoon. If I adjust for that, it's more like 10.3p. And that's just one battery cycle per pay, so fairly gentle.

If you want, I could subtract off EV usage, but I think it's a relatively small element of it.

DD thank you, yes, I did, when I was looking at the economics of a second battery the other day: https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/5318/40
Because we're fairly heavy users (heat pump), I couldn't get IOG(-like) tariffs to come out favourably without a much larger battery, i.e. bidirectional charging EV- level, which just isn't there yet (and we don't have an EV at present anyway).

DD have you looked at IOG-like rates (also available from EON without the need of an EV). I'm all electric, and Octopus Compare is putting me well ahead of agile

As ever, no single answer for everyone. I just ran the numbers for Octopus Agile vs Eon Drive v5 for two typical consumption days for me this month, a ‘low’ consumption and a ‘high’ consumption:

1st December 33kWh
Agile £5.96
Eon Drive £5.93

7th December 62kWh
Agile £7.05
Eon Drive £13.29

So Eon Drive more expensive. I then looked for a couple of days when Agile has been expensive, and Eon Drive is cheaper:

3rd December 47kWh
Agile £12.24
Eon Drive £9.48

10th December 46kWh
Agile £20.71
Eon Drive £9.23

And if I look at my total import of 439kWh over the 10 days of December from 1st to 10th:
Agile £82.32
Eon Drive £86.97

And for all of November 1-30th 1208kWh:
Agile £216.63
Eon Drive £233.23

So no material savings. Eon Drive is cheaper when Agile prices are high, but when taken over any time period its generally slightly more expensive for me. Plus the standing charge is 10p a day more expensive on Eon Drive.

I have 13.1kWh usable battery capacity. If I had more battery capacity then the sums would tip more towards Eon Drive, but the economics of more battery storage doesn’t stack up.
(18.7p/kWh saving of low vs high rate thus £1.70 a day saving on a 9.5kWh battery, £3,500 install cost, somewhere around 10-12 year payback on just the winter import saving, a bit shorter if you continue charging overnight and export for 10p profit in the summer)

It was certainly worth looking at, thanks for the suggestion

geoffreycoan
What are Eons’s export prices like?

As you may recall, I do a charge/discharge/charge overnight on IOG/15p, which nets me over £1/day. This may swing it?

That said, for a marginal benefit I’d probs stay with Octopus - better the devil you know/solid API.

PianSom it's 16.5p export rate on Eon drive I believe so slightly better than Octopus Fixed export.

My Gen 1 inverters can only charge at 2.4kWh and discharge at 2.7 so I wouldn't be able to get a full charge discharge cycle in in the overnight cheap period. Would be able to do a partial one which would bring in a bit more income, yes.

The other thing with Octopus is the Free Electricity and Power Up events which help reduce the average import rate

99.99p tomorrow.

Its a complete piss-take. That's more than they charged in 2022 when gas prices went mental.

I have two 8.2 kWh batteries, so 16.4 kWh total, and a Gen 1 AC3 inverter. Luckily for me, the inverter is 2nd half of 2022, and I can charge at 2.8 kWh and export at 3.0 kWh. But nothing like AIO and hybrid inverters.

I have sometimes wished that I had purchased just one battery, but the two batteries have been a godsend in current conditions. Overnight, my batteries have been able to fully charge on about 18-20 kW import rate. And this can get me through the whole of the next day until the next 'low' nightly rates appear. I am relying on them.
I do have a heat pump as well and that is consuming 16-20 kWh daily at temperatures of about 4-5C.
Usually, my solar panels help out, even in December but with days like today with 0.9 kWh total, solar is a write-off.

On 'making the most of Octopus Agile', my advice is to have battery storage.
But with normal weather conditions, a single battery should suffice (batteries are expensive).
And use something like Predbat to grab the lowest night-time rates.

With a saving session 6pm-7pm this evening, I need to work out how much I can afford to export without running out before rates drop.

Having seen the official rates for the next day, I have set my hot water heating for tomorrow 2:30am-3:30am to grab the 'cheapest rates' while my batteries are charging.

Rob

Vestas 99.99p tomorrow.

It is an ouch, but I don't so much mind the 99.99p in the peak period because my batteries will take me through that, what I don't like is the 60-78p rates for all the day beforehand. The heating will be on and with the high peak period rates Predbat is Freeze Charging for the day so I'm going to be running the house and the ASHP on those high rates during the day.

Bhah

Rbor Having seen the official rates for the next day, I have set my hot water heating for tomorrow 2:30am-3:30am to grab the 'cheapest rates' while my batteries are charging.

I have been heating my water all year at around 3am. We only heat the water once a day and that's enough for a day of typical showers, baths, washing, etc. I heat it (with the ASHP) at 3am because that's usually a cheapish Agile rate. I know the COP/SCOP and efficiency will be lower overnight when the temperatures are low but I figured the import will be cheapest then

I have asked ChatGPT.

The high Agile Octopus price of 99p per kWh is due to a combination of factors related to wholesale market dynamics and the structure of the Agile tariff. Here’s a breakdown of the main reasons:
1. Wholesale Price Volatility: Agile Octopus links its electricity prices directly to wholesale market prices, which can change every 30 minutes. Recently, global energy markets have been volatile due to factors like increased winter demand, geopolitical events, and supply issues. This volatility has pushed wholesale electricity prices to extreme highs, which in turn drives Agile prices up .
2. Peak Pricing Uplift: To discourage energy use during peak demand periods (usually 4-7 pm), Octopus adds an artificial price increase of 10-12p/kWh during these hours. This not only reflects higher wholesale procurement costs but also aims to reduce grid strain by encouraging users to shift usage to cheaper times .
3. Price Cap and Limits: While Agile Octopus caps its maximum rate at 100p/kWh, it does not fall under the Ofgem price cap because it is a dynamic, time-of-use tariff. This means it isn’t bound by the same price limits as standard variable tariffs .
4. Winter Demand Spike: Energy demand typically increases during winter, driving up wholesale electricity prices. Since Agile prices follow wholesale trends, users are exposed to these increases. This differs from fixed or standard tariffs, which may offer more price stability .

If you’re on the Agile tariff, it may be beneficial to reduce energy usage during peak hours (4-7 pm) and shift consumption to cheaper periods. If price stability is important, you may want to consider switching to a fixed or standard variable tariff.

The high Agile Octopus electricity prices during the day (not just during peak hours) are primarily driven by the following factors:
1. Wholesale Market Prices: Agile prices are directly linked to the wholesale electricity market, which can experience sustained high prices throughout the day. Unlike traditional tariffs, which average out energy costs, Agile reflects real-time wholesale costs. Current global energy issues, such as high gas prices and supply constraints, have kept wholesale electricity prices elevated throughout the day, not just during peak times  .
2. Limited Price Protections: Agile Octopus is not bound by Ofgem’s price cap because it is a dynamic, time-of-use tariff. While there is a maximum cap of 100p/kWh on any half-hourly rate, this cap only limits the extreme highs. It doesn’t prevent rates from being consistently high throughout the day if wholesale prices remain elevated .
3. Increased Winter Demand: Electricity demand is naturally higher during winter, not only during peak hours but throughout the day, as people use more heating and lighting. Since Agile follows wholesale price trends, sustained higher demand during colder months results in persistently higher daytime rates .

These factors make Agile more suitable for users who can shift a significant portion of their electricity usage to off-peak, lower-cost hours, usually late at night or very early in the morning. If you’re unable to avoid using energy during the day, it might be worth considering a fixed or standard variable tariff for more price stability.

Daveb01 This suggests that perhaps high Agile prices may become a norm, albeit in the short term. Although I have benefited greatly from Agile for the past 18 months, I am not convinced that I can stick around with my fingers crossed when it is so easy to jump across to say Flux, which offers a degree of stability and a chance to make good use my limited battery capacity (under 5kwh).
I suspect I am not alone having these thoughts.

KevinH

This maybe the case, I have committed to Agile for a year April to April. I have also planned for increased payments and have £700 in credit in my account from a good summer. My DD is £5 a month.

So at the moment I see it as, it’s winter and my bill will go up, if I use all the £700 in credit, my net will be zero and I will have the summer to build up credit again.

I will make a decision in April if I think it’s worth sticking or moving.

Although we berate Octopus for these high prices, it looks as if its market rates that are doing this.
Here's the Octopus price predictor for the next week, it gets its prediction from weather forecast, market data and previous price history:

We all knew Agile could spike, its part of the risk of the tariff. As long as these are not too often (and who knows), I think I'll just have to continue living with it

It’s also the lack of Sun and Wind in the UK, so Geoffrey can you bring some sun back from France please. 😀😎

KevinH I am still on december agile 2023 so cheaper standing charge and im still able to fill up battery under standard rate tariff atm.

Daveb01 You don't have to wait til April to switch.

Jellybaby Yes, the standing charge is a tad cheaper on the older Agile tariffs, which is one blessing I guess.
Sorry to ask, but if you are on Agile how do you top up at the SVR?

By judicious use of the battery I have managed to get through today's peak slots above 40p (7.30am-7.30pm) with just 20% left. (2x 5.2KWh 80% DoD batteries). The dehumidifiers are off (gas heating) and no washing or dishwasher use but otherwise have managed OK. Will have to do the same tomorrow (only using one hob for cooking; not the oven).

Having enough batteries is what makes the Agile tariff bearable. I know we are having slots up to 99.99p but my average cost for today will actually be around 19p + VAT as I used 7 slots to charge last night. When you compare that to the flexible tariff or even the Flux day rate that is still a significant saving. I'm so pleased I chose 2 batteries when I placed my original order with Eon in April 22 before I understood all of the ramifications that I know now.

Windy Miller I'm so pleased I chose 2 batteries when I placed my original order with Eon in April 22

ooh nice export rate with them then 😃

CW On track to have exported 3000 units in the year earning me £500. Not exporting much this month (30 in Nov.). Managed to export 637 units in June - best month so far.

Edit - just checked the original estimates from Eon - was 900 export units at 5.5p = £50. So reality is far far better.

KevinH SVR? and what do you mean by "top up"?

Jellybaby SVR

I think it should be SVT for Standard Variable Tariff. i.e. the norm if you don't do anything.

RR

Rbor ah, in that case for the person that asked I don't top up at the SVR I top up at the cheapest agile rates which so far have still been below the standard rate.

Windy Miller I got Solar installed in mid April this year. The export that I actually generated and before I moved to EON was £540. Assuming I send nothing back to the grid until next April, I will end the year basically flat i.e. no charge at all for electric (including standing charge). So I have to say I am pretty happy with my set-up and am looking forward to getting a full year's worth of data (rather than projecting what the next few months will be like)

Took me a bit to find this, r/e the discussion about Agile prices and how high they are at the moment and whether this will last or not

https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/2772-which-octopus-tariff/15

Discussion from September 23 with helpful links by @Tim Adams to the Dutch Gas futures market data https://www.ice.com/products/27996665/Dutch-TTF-Gas-Futures/data?marketId=5600523&span=3

Worth re-reading the discussion we had a year ago when I was trying to decide on which tariff to go to, ultimately deciding on Agile, and looking at the futures market rate for Winter 23 vs Winter 24. The futures rates for this winter are actually slightly less than they were for last winter, suggesting to me that this period of intense Agile rates is temporary and won’t be sustained.

Also worth looking back at the history of Agile pricing over the last year https://dashboards.energy-stats.uk/d/5cZqqmf4z/user-dashboard?orgId=1&var-area_name=Eastern_England&from=1696114800000&to=1735257599000

We forget we had peaks of 60p in December last year. This year definitely higher at the peaks but the shape of having a few large peaks before Christmas is not dissimilar, and if anything I’d say the max Agile prices for this winter are slightly lower than last year’s max prices

So slightly lower max and average Agile prices in December but the peak prices are higher. More peaky if that is a thing

Helps explain current pricing. The wind will return... one day!

_Power from Britain’s gas-fired plants surged to a record-high after a slump in wind speeds hit generation from renewables.

Gas-fired generation covered 70pc of Britain’s power demand, according to data from the National Energy System Operator (Neso).

By contrast, wind is producing just 5pc of power as the so-called “dunkelflaute” weather phenomenon leaves wind farms idle across Europe.

Prices for power in the window of 5pm to 6pm on the country’s day ahead market leapt to more than €900 per megawatt hour on Wednesday, according to data published by Epex Spot. That was the highest level recorded in 18 years.

While wind output at this time of year is normally about 19 gigawatts, actual output on Wednesday was just three gigawatts, according to Montel Analytics._

Also nuclear plants have been shut for planned maintenance and slowly coming back online.

For myself I'm filling batteries overnight... warming house & hot water with ashp overnight... charging ev overnight
Using woodburner in the day...
Batteries pretty much carry us through the day as ashp demand reduced.

On good news front. 'Ofgem wants suppliers to have to offer ‘zero standing charge’ tariffs by next winter as part of plans to address ballooning household energy debt.'
I assume this will benefit solar/ battery system savings.

Henry3rd For those interested, this is the link to the Ofgem press release:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-release/ofgem-proposes-introducing-zero-standing-charge-tariffs

Rob

Henry3rd n good news front. 'Ofgem wants suppliers to have to offer ‘zero standing charge’ tariffs by next winter as part of plans to address ballooning household energy debt.'

OTOH unit rates will increase to compensate!

FYI, I saw the program with Guy Martin about energy. (Worth a watch)

He was (and I) discussed with the way we are forced to pay for energy. Without going into to much detail (it’s better to watch it), Solar, wind and nuclear are all very very cheap. Coal, gas and some import electric from other counties are expensive (e.g Europe). But we are charged the price for whatever is the highest, instead of the price it could be.

E.g Solar 5p, wind 6p, nuclear 7p, Coal 21p, gas 22p, everything is charged at 22p. So 10% at 5p, 30% at 6p, 30% at 7p then the 30% only at the higher rate. (Hope that makes sense).

I was also interested in what one of the nordics had done and all nuclear produced electric was free, because they made the money from all the other sources by selling it to the market at 21p, so no one paid for Electricity. (I hope I heard that right)

Well we got through the worst Agile rates seen so far, 99.99p yesterday 12th December for the entire peak period, and 50-70p during the day when Predbat was ‘freeze charging’, preserving the SoC for the peak period.

I did knock the central thermostat down a degree during the day, but looking at the heat pump power it doesn’t look like the heat pump was off for any meaningful period of time. But we got through and still had some SoC left with the batteries only running out at 8:30pm.

So I had a look at what it cost me this week on those super-high rates, and whilst the average import rates were the highest I’ve seen, the actual daily bill wasn’t the biggest, helped by the fact that it wasn’t all that cold:

Date: Thursday 12th
Total import: 42kWh for £16.68
Average import rate: 39.7p
ASHP consumption: 29.6kWh
Average outside air temperature: 7.4 degrees C

Date: Wednesday 11th
Total import: 42.2kWh for £14.00
Average import rate: 33.2p
ASHP consumption: 23kWh
Average temperature: 7

Date: Tuesday 10th
Total import: 45.8kWh for £10.86
Average import rate: 23.7p
ASHP consumption: 29kWh
Average temperature: 7.6

Date: Monday 9th
Total import: 46.2kWh for £9.32
Average import rate: 20.2p
ASHP consumption: 26.8kWh
Average temperature: 7.5

Date: Sunday 8th
Total import: 58.1kWh for £7.36
Average import rate: 12.7p
ASHP consumption: 32.2kWh
Average temperature: 8.1

For comparison, much higher import costs on the colder days in late November:

Date: 28th November
Total import: 74.4kWh for £17.59
Average import rate: 23.6p
ASHP consumption: 59.9kWh
Average temperature: 4.2

Date: 21st November
Total import: 78.2kWh for £17.86
Average import rate: 22.8p
ASHP consumption: 65.4kWh
Average temperature: 1.5

So, not great but the batteries prevented me from incurring the worst of the import costs, and as long as its not too often, think I can live with it (as long as its not bitterly cold at the same time 😉)

Nice to wake up to find I’ve got full batteries and am slightly in profit

Predbat imported at negative rates and exported when rates were low

The Agile price forecast is back to more normal this week

I heard mention that some people on Agile have been swapping between Agile and Cosy on a daily basis recently. Has anyone done the maths of how much this would have saved on the expensive rate days? It would have increased my standing charge as I’m still on the December 23 Agile rates before the SC went up.
Based on what I spent geoffreycoan it maybe saved a bit, but hardly worth it?

geoffreycoan

Mine is the same chart, but I can not get cosy so can not answer your question.

I have just watched Martin Lewis YouTube video on removing the standing charge. It is not exactly what he wanted, as if you choose a tariff without it, it maybe very high charges. He did say who would benefit with and without it. He did not mention anything about those on Solar and batteries etc.

I was thinking how this could affect us with Solar and Batteries etc. If the rate without a standing charge went up quite a bit, with the new Predbat changes would we see a big difference on charging and discharging? Would it be better to just charge the battery on cheap periods and only use it to power the house? Not sure where my brain is going with this at the moment. But worth a think?

Daveb01 My basic logic on this is as follows.

1. The standing charge will be applied on the KWh, either as a fixed amount or as a proportion of the tariff. This benefits us as we import less KWh due to our solar input. Definite win.
2. The additional tariff will create a higher delta between agile prices, which enables Predbat to go to town. Definite win.
3. There is some suggestion that the removal of the standing charge will be a customer by customer decision. Which means any net benefit may be slight. Posible slight win.

Daveb01 I was thinking how this could affect us with Solar and Batteries etc.

Its worth bearing in mind that the standing charge has had a fairly linear relationship with the export value of the average* PV array since FIT for new installs was ended.

By that I mean if you exported 100% of generation that would be a pretty close approximation to the annual standing charge. That assumes something standard like Octopus Outgoing Fixed (15p/kWh) which is available across pretty much all the import tariffs.

I'm not convinced its a coincidence 😉

I suspect that a zero standing charge tariff will impact export rates a lot more than import rates so things like Flux will be significantly less attractive during summer. Question is will the average punter who stays on the same tariff year round notice that much difference? Probably not.

*the size which is recommended in every EPC & that's 2.5kW, however average array size is actually reducing now (from low 3-4kW) due to housebuilders fitting minimum possible to comply with regs/SAP assessment.

Henry3rd There is some suggestion that the removal of the standing charge will be a customer by customer decision

My understanding from what I heard of the news is that Ofgem are consulting with industry on options, and the initial proposal was that suppliers would be obliged to offer tariffs with and without standing charges.

I would guess that Ofgem will set the price cap for the non-SC tariff based on it being equivalent for those who have typical home consumption. So low consumption users will find these tariffs beneficial and those of us with heat pumps and high consumption will not. I personally doubt that there would be a choice on every tariff as to whether to have standing charges or not, most likely it will be a limited range of tariffs such as SVR and Economy 7, but who knows what might get innovated?

Update: quick look on Ofgem website https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-release/ofgem-proposes-introducing-zero-standing-charge-tariffs

“Ofgem will publish a consultation on the standing charges proposals in the new year. This will include mandating a zero standing charge tariffs alongside existing tariffs, offering consumers the ability to choose what is right for them”

geoffreycoan

I had a look at my costs in the card you helped me with and it looks like a good day like you.

The $ sign is still in the left hand column, did Trevor fix this so we could choose or is it still had coded?

Daveb01 The $ sign is still in the left hand column, did Trevor fix this so we could choose or is it still had coded?

Trefor brought out a fix to this whilst I was away in France. I’ve not upgraded to that release or looked at what it does, so don’t know.
Looking at this is also on my to-do list !

geoffreycoan

Hhhmmmm will now have to see if I can change it as I have installed the upgrade. I thought it was going to be auto changed to £.

Anyone else managed to update the $ symbol.

I have this setting in apps.yaml

Henry3rd Agreed.

It has always peeved me that I could have days where my bill to Octopus is mostly SC.

Rob

I was wondering whether it would be beneficial to move over to Agile Outgoing in winter (there is so little solar) and then to export 4-7pm when Agile outgoing rates are higher. Predbat should pick this up.

I then checked out typical Agile outgoing rates and it isn't worth it. They are too low!

See https://energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-outgoing-export-yorkshire/
You can change the data to fit your region

Rob

Rbor I then checked out typical Agile outgoing rates and it isn't worth it. They are too low!

Apart from last week in the super-expensive period, Agile outgoing is almost always lower than Fixed outgoing apart from in the peak period when its usually slightly higher.

Paired with Agile import I don’t think Agile outgoing makes sense, no opportunity to charge and discharge when Agile rates are low. If you’re on another smart tariff such as Cosy or IOG and have the spare battery capacity then there could be benefits discharging in the peak winter period.

I think someone did the analysis and concluded that Agile outgoing was only better than Fixed outgoing in 8% of the slots across the year

Rbor since the 1st Nov, my average agile export price has been 14.18p

Close to 15p, but not quite!

Plus predbat might have decided to export more overnight if it was 15p export. Conversely it might have exported less during peak times.

So, are we more likely to see cheap overnight power vs. Expensive peak export opportunities.

I'd lean towards fixed 15p. Although it's no longer guaranteed to be 15p.

TX200 Although it's no longer guaranteed to be 15p.

My 15p fixed ran out at end of November so I renewed and have snapped up another year fixed at 15p 😃

Rob

I'm not sure if this is of interest?
Power and gas markets yesterday fell by a large amount, continuing the theme over the past few weeks of a sustained downwards trajectory. Today, we are seeing the curves stop and change direction, with a 0-2.5% percentage point increase being seen across all time frames to 2027; gas is rising quicker than power.
Renewable generation is moderate again today, supporting around 36% of UK domestic generation, whilst overall UK demand steadies in the low forties (40.7GW today). Gas and nuclear are adding to the support, providing 14.22GW and 4.53GW respectively, with some increase in transfers (now 5.1GW).
A large amount of price suppression could also be explained by 4 nuclear facility extensions in the UK, most notably Heysham 1 and Hartlepool being extended until 2027, with Heysham 2 and Torness extended all the way into March 2030, proving ample power supply for the UK.

Henry3rd Thanks of the update.
The nukes are recovering well during their current refuelling. About a month ago, they were down to approx 2.6GW so an increase of nearly 2 GW is very welcome. Hartlepool 1 and Heysham 2 are due to be back before Xmas which should see all the nukes back in action.

Rob

Can anyone beat this (not better but lower) 😀😛

⚡ You reduced power by 0.079 kWh compared to normal, earning you 40 octopoints. (That's £0.05)

Daveb01 sorry no I can’t, I was stupidly much higher than that

⚡ You reduced power by 3.704 kWh compared to normal, earning you 1784 octopoints. (That's £2.23)

Yes - but only narrowly:

⚡ You reduced power by 0.074 kWh compared to normal, earning you 40 octopoints. (That's £0.05)

Here's mine:
⚡ You reduced power by 1.98 kWh compared to normal, earning you 952 octopoints. (That's £1.19)

HP heating switched off during saving session.

Rob

You reduced power by 0.007 kWh in half of the session, but not overall compared to what you'd normally use. That means you earned 8 Octopoints (that's £0.01).🤣🤣
PS Didn’t get notified of the session which didn’t help…

Leeshore

Looks like you win 🏆

I wasn't notified of the savings session and this dropped into my inbox.

I was on last years sessions but got no email about this year's and on the day I clicked the sign up link again but got no confirmation that I was signed up for that session.

All a bit naff really.

Anyway hopefully will get notified about the next one when it happens...

This is when the Agile tariff really comes into its own...

Using Wonderwatt, which by the way I'm finding very versatile, the Blue boxes are the charges and the Red arrows are the exports. All done at 3Kw.

There are 21 charge slots and 22 export slots configured. The exports should get me around 28 KWHr at 16.5p = £4.60. I will import around 30 KWhr at an average of around 4p = £1.20. Net gain £3.40 and the days house usage will hardly have cost me anything.

If only every day was like this!

PS To set this up, all slots below 13p are pre-selected to charge. I simply went through turning off the ones where I wanted to export (generally the more expensive slots) until I could maximise all the charge slots. Then put these export slots into the scheduler (which then show up as the Red Arrows for confirmation I've set them correctly). Then I set my immersion heater to heat the water in the cheapest 6 slots. Took me about 15 minutes to set up.

Windy Miller Nice result

My Predbat plan for tonight and tomorrow looks much the same, overall will probably be a free day of electricity

geoffreycoan Amazing - your 10 discharge slots match mine so I must be doing what Predbat does with its algorithm. I have 2 more during the day which Predbat has selected as charge - with freeze charge in 3 slots instead.

Windy Miller 👍. For me Predbat is building the battery up to full or near-full before the Agile peak period as I will need all the stored energy to see me through the peak with the ASHP running. The 3rd column from the right is the projected half-hour load

I’ve decided to make a guest appearance back on Agile from IOG. Hoping this continues over the Xmas week.

BTW, it’s been confirmed there is no minimum waiting period jumping between smart tariffs. A few of the agile boys jumped to IOG for 4/5 days and then back and confirmed.

Hook BTW, it’s been confirmed there is no minimum waiting period jumping between smart tariffs. A few of the agile boys jumped to IOG for 4/5 days and then back and confirmed

Just because the software allows it, has it been confirmed by Octopus?

I am nervous about just jumping back and forth as it feels like a software loop hole and it might have negative consequences..

M_J It feels like a software loop hole and it might have negative consequences.

I agree.
Octopus offers us a lot of flexibility but I don't think the intention is for folk to hop backwards and forwards between tariffs on a daily basis.
Agile has its very good days (as now) and also bad days. My view is that I need to take the rough with the smooth.
Others may disagree.

The danger is that Octopus will tighten up on moving between tariffs.

Rob

M_J yes it was confirmed by customer services.

I can’t copy and paste from Reddit so I’ve attached screenshots.

Hook

Ok I stand corrected and thank you very much for that.

I will bear that in mind and it is a game changer between Agile and Go when we get becalmed.

I think if enough people play that game they will introduce restrictions but hey we will cross that bridge when they do..

Thanks...

Hook useful to know. I'm still on the December 23 Agile tariff so if I switch away say to Cosy and then back again, my standing charge will increase by 5p on the Agile April 24 tariff

geoffreycoan My Agile import tariff runs out on January 18th when I have agreed to pick up the 'same tariff' for the next 12 months (Octopus have emailed me about this already). The downside for me is that my SO will increase from 53p/unit to 68p/unit.
If I were to flip to another smart tariff now, i would pick up the increased SO now, 15p a day.

Hook Thanks for clarification.
Personally, I don't like daily swapping between tariffs and don't consider that it is the spirit of smart tariffs. I would be happier with say a 30 day rule but Octopus write the rules.

Rob

geoffreycoan useful to know. I'm still on the December 23 Agile tariff so if I switch away say to Cosy and then back again, my standing charge will increase by 5p on the Agile April 24 tariff

Edit, sorry, turns out the latest is now Agile October 24 so it’s a 7p/day standing order increase over my current December 23 tariff. Guess I will be faced with that at renewal time next year.

Looking at my consumption over the last month I could have saved between £3 and £6 a day by being on Cosy on those cold high-consumption days when Agile prices were high, but would have taken at least 2 changes to Cosy and back to Agile again (4 tariff changes in total) to take advantage of the best rates on each tariff. Most days Agile is about £3-£4 cheaper than Cosy for me.

Seems a lot of hassle for £20-30 saving, and doesn’t entirely feel in the spirit of things as @Rbor says

M_J I think if enough people play that game they will introduce restrictions but hey we will cross that bridge when they do..

I was under the impression that the 30 day rule had been introduced precisely because people were jumping in and out of agile on a daily basis based on the next days prices.

DD

Yep and I am surprised it seems to have been relaxed if the person from Octopus got it correct.

Certainly the software allows you to jump from Go to Agile in a day without checking if you have waited 30 days.

I am betting the bean counters will notice once folk in considerable numbers start playing that game...

M_J When the bean counters spot this, we must hope that switching between tariffs doesn't become more stringent that 30 days (which I judge as being fair). Perhaps questions will get asked when very strange multi-tariff monthly bills are generated.

I lurk on an Agile thread on facebook and several have been discussing their switching dates. One was earmarking Boxing day for 'switching back' from Agile to Go.

Still, I have stuck with Agile import since January this year and my last 7 days have cost me £4.19p (average 60p/day with an average import rate of 5.24p/unit).
Even over the last 28 days, containing many bad Agile days, my total import cost is £64.29p with an average import rate of 10.71p/unit.

Rob

Rbor

I agree with you Rob, sticking with Agile till April, where I can see one years worth of data compared to Flux.

It sounds like there are two types of themes, switch as much as possible. Not sure if this is money making or saving. (Would this also mean changing HA every time)?

Stick with it and you get an average bill. I am with Geoffrey on this, get credit in the summer, use it in the winter. Annual bill zero.

I wonder if those swapping have a DD of £1-£3?

Daveb01 It sounds like there are two types of themes, switch as much as possible. Not sure if this is money making or saving. (Would this also mean changing HA every time)?

There is you’ll be pleased to know no change required to HA/Predbat if you pick a new Octopus tariff, the new tariff rates and times come through automatically on the Octopus integration via the Octopus API’s and Predbat will adjust/plan automatically. I saw this when I moved from Flux to Agile in October 2023.

There is another pattern, those that have one summer tariff (often Flux or occasionally Intelligent Octopus Flux) and a winter tariff (Cosy/Go/Agile). Often people change tariff when the clocks change.

When I moved to Agile in winter last year it was with the intent of moving back to Flux for the summer to gain more from the summer export rates, but in the end I calculated that whilst Flux had a better summer export rate, the overnight import wasn’t as cheap as Agile and so the benefits would be marginal either way. So I stuck to Agile and will do through this winter. Maybe change next Spring but probably not.

Daveb01 I'm in the latter camp - stick with it. I've yet to go a full year, but currently from Mid April to end Nov I am well into credit, so am expecting after a full 12 months no nett bill for electric and a contribution towards the gas heatings costs - that works for me and keeps it all fairly simple

I came across one character who was monitoring the rates during the day.
I they didn't like the rates, they changed there and then to a more favourable tariff.

Octopus action any changes from the start of the same day.
They would repeat the exercise the following day ............

That way, they always had the best rates.
Rather like placing a bet, being able to see if your bet was correct, and being able to change your bet to the correct one.

Rob

Rbor Seems to me a waste of my time to do this. Changing and monitoring tariffs takes effort for a few pence gained. Actually using predbat and HA takes up most of my time as it is 🤣

Rbor I came across one character who was monitoring the rates during the day.
I they didn't like the rates, they changed there and then to a more favourable tariff.

Just came across a video on youtube advocating the same thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL4j34c1t30

DD Just watched this video.
Personally, I am speechless.

This isn't 'load shifting' but 'tariff shifting'.

I judge this as not being in the spirit of these smart tariffs.
If I was doing this, I certainly wouldn't publicise it.

I can see Octopus stamping on this practice and any tightening may be at the detriment of us all.

Rob

Rbor Personally I'm astonished that Octopus can keep track of the tariff changes and produce an accurate bill given they have a hard enough time doing that on our Agile bill 😉

Rbor

I am not going to watch it as I don't want the person to benefit from my engagement.

There are always some folk that are going to take the piss and it's personally not for me.

Octopus will take action as it's not a business model that can be supported if everyone did it ..

M_J I was thinking exactly the same, its not within the spirit of the smart tariffs and the more people do it, Octopus will respond by restricting the practice to the detriment of all of us.

With Agile you have to accept that there will be some bad days and some good days, that is the nature of the tariff and you have to be eyes open to the max £1 per kWh charge that could apply.
Until a few weeks ago I thought this was low risk as the highest I’d seen it before on the history graphs was soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and I took the view that a similar event was quite unlikely. In a year of being on Agile the highest I’d personally experienced was 66p I think so the recent high price days were quite a surprise, but the batteries took the sting out of it completely. Wouldn’t want to be on Agile without batteries mind.

Quite different Agile prices this Christmas compared to last year.

December 24th 2023, 4 hour power-up event 12-4pm, imported 25kWh in the free period (out of 69 for the day), total bill £0.62
December 25th 2023, another 4 hour power-up event 12-4pm, imported 31kWh free period (out of 76), total bill £0.69

More back to normal for the 26th onwards.

Looks like it will be just normal Agile pricing this year

geoffreycoan The ethos behind Agile is to encourage people to use electricity when in excess of demand resulting in less usage of electricity when in high demand.
The carrot is low prices when electricity was abundant (especially in the early hours) with a stick for higher prices during busy times (especially 4pm-7pm).

The video explains to people how they can exploit this money-making scheme.

To be fair, I did look at Cosy in early December but if I were to shift I would have stayed on Cosy for a month or two to see how it compared to Agile. I would be happy with a 30 day window within which you couldn't change tariff, but not a 1 day retrospective window.

Rob

Looking good for tonight into Tomorrow, New Year's day, this is what we live for on Agile:

I have a powerup event as well from 9-11:30 :-)

This is my data for the whole of 2024. I have been on Agile from 20th March before which I was on the flexible tariff with Shell Energy.

You can see that December turned out to be far better than November with Agile again being the best tariff if you don't have an EV or Heat Pumps. There were 6 plunge sessions in December as opposed to 2 in November which was largely grey and still. General unit pricing was better too. My costs now also include the subscription for WonderWatt. As in August and October, the December home usage was inflated by charging my son's Kia EV6 on his visits (costs around £15 for 250 miles).

My annual electricity costs for 2024 had I been on Agile for the whole year are £411 after taking off the £507 export. If I didn't have panels or batteries and were on the flexible tariff my costs would have been £1538. So the annual savings for me are £1127. My system cost £14800 (in 2022) giving me a payback period of 13 years.

Hopefully, those who have similar arrays can judge from this data the merits of the various non-intelligent smart tariffs from Octopus.

17 SW facing panels, 6KW Solaredge inverter, AC 3.0 inverter, 2x 5.2KW batteries, gas used for heating, Agile slots managed by WonderWatt (£15.99 for 3 months)

Windy Miller Great data, thanks for sharing. I’ve been updating my own spreadsheet and adding year to year comparisons, some quite interesting and very pleasing results.

I’m going to wait for my Octopus bill to arrive in the next few days to get the final figures and cost per kWh then I’ll share mine.

Daveb01 Nice summary.
Here's mine in similar format.
All energy costs electricity with PV, ASHP, low mileage EV in 1928 Detached. No gas.

Of note, Dec 2024 was £20 less than Nov 2024
Dec 2024 was £64.56 less than Dec 2023

Import: 6,745.69 kWh £ 678.26 @10.05p/unit (average)
Export: 6,637.76 kWh –£ 995.26 @15p/unit
Standing charges £ 197.45 @53.95p/day
Overall – £ 119.25
..... so a net profit for the year 🙂
Cosy: 1st Jan–17th Jan
Agile: 18th Jan–31st Dec
Predbat: 30th Jan–31st Dec

I think it will be harder to hit 'net zero' energy costs for 2025.
All tariff import rates will increase (in fact, they have already started).
Check out the new Jan 1st rates here: https://energy-stats.uk
My renewed Agile import tariff from 18th January increases SO from 53.95p to 66.26p/day 😕
I have 15p Agile Outgoing until mid November 2025.

Rob

Goodbye ice cap!
"On more general news; it was evident on Trump’s social media platform that his opinion on the UK’s investment into renewables to replace oil and gas in the North Sea is mostly negative. A recent post put out by the President-elect stated that the UK was ‘making a very big mistake’ – solidifying his position in general on gas and oil expansion projects."

Windy Miller
A little bit off topic but this follows on from my yearly analysis published a couple of days ago.

I generated 5058KWh from Solar, imported 5397KWh from the grid, put 3369KWh through the battery losing 10.7% in the process, exported 3076KWh and used 7018KWh in the house.

It is this last figure that I can expand upon especially as it has increased from 4500KWh since I fitted the panels.

The data comes from an Emporia system using 11 current clamps in the distribution board plus 13 smart plugs. I generated the data using the export CSV option, summed it up and combined it into groups for easier view. The data from the Emporia system is within 0.7% of that calculated by the Givenergy system (adjustment of just 52KWh) which I find quite astonishing for 2 independent systems to be so close to each other. However it doesn't get the totals for In and Out to the Grid correct and the Solar total is wrong as, mid year, I upgraded the Emporia software for bi-directional sensors which made the Solar energy to July look like it was spent energy rather than generated energy!

I don't use the Smart plugs on the high power appliances having seen some worrying pictures of burn-outs on this forum earlier this year (Givenergy Plugs likely from the same China source as the Emporia ones). Similarly I wasn't prepared to risk a few hundred quid of food going off in the Freezer should the smart plug fail/get turned off and I not notice.

So where did the extra 2500KWh usage come from? Well since I got the panels I started using Dehumidifiers, Aircons and EV's with some Immersion heating for the hot water. All enabled by the panels reducing my effective unit price down to just 6p. 😃

PS Thanks for all the likes/comments

Windy Miller I’d be interested to know how you modified your Emporia. I installed mine about 3 years ago to get an idea of my usage before embarking on the solar and battery journey but I’ve never modified it to read solar input or export. I also find it’s reading extremely close to Givenergy or Octopus metering so it does give confidence.

Goshiki2 Mine is a Vue2 model and it just needed a software update to be able to read bi-directionally. The clamps, cabling and inputs remained unchanged. When I updated the software I had to turn round the clamps for Solar and Battery to their 'new' standard but this means data stored on their servers from before this date shows as expended energy rather than generated energy for the solar and the battery now displays properly. I have to adjust the data in the CSV by changing the sign of the data for before that date.

I'd like a new Vue3 model but Amazon seems to have stopped stocking them.

Windy Miller Mine is a Vue 2. Did you add additional 50A CT’s for solar and battery ?

Goshiki2 I did yes. I had used the spare 200A clamps originally but found the software would only add them to the grid usage thus giving an incorrect reading.. I then purchased some 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapters and connected the 200A clamps to spare 50A channels with a gain of 4.0. This worked fine for the solar as the original software could be configured to recognise a solar input and invert the data in software as long as the clamp was fitted backwards. There was no solution for the battery so this remained disconnected. When they updated the software I turned both clamps round to make it work correctly. Since then I have purchased 2 new 50A clamps so no longer need to use the adapters, gain of 4.0 or the 200A clamps.

Windy Miller Excellent. Thanks for the info. Where did you buy the 50A clamps?

Goshiki2 Ebay!. I managed to get 8 extra clamps from someone who was selling them with the wrong hub. I recognised the box and the clamps. I think they found them in a cupboard a long time after they had installed their Vue2 only using the 200A clamps and thought they'd shift them on Ebay. £4 each so was well pleased.

My GivEnergy Solar inverters, batteries and panels were installed on 7th January 2023 so I’m almost at the 2 year anniversary.

I track my monthly and now annual figures in a spreadsheet as there’s different data sources, and I’m a spreadsheet guy so no graphs sorry.

Looking at 2024 and comparing it to 2023 I am in turn pleased, surprised and annoyed:

Looking at the annual figures gives better insight:

Some highlights:

• Solar generation in 2024 was almost the same as 2023
• House consumption down by about 15%
• Heat pump consumption 1/3 down, a dramatic improvement following my fiddling and tweaking the settings
• 2023 I was on a fixed tariff until June, then Flux, then Agile from October, giving an average import rate of 25.19p
• 2024 I have remained on Agile all year with an average import rate of 12.63p
• The Solar and batteries are giving me a saving on the house consumption of about £3,000 per year compared to the standard variable tariff, giving a total system payback of just under 7 years. It would be about 6 years but I had to replace the 9.5 battery (a sorry tale that I have yet to share)

And the low-light that I am annoyed about:

• Total consumption bill for the year (excluding standing charge), £10 🤬. Was expecting it to be zero or slightly negative

geoffreycoan Total consumption bill for the year (excluding standing charge), £10 🤬. Was expecting it to be zero or slightly negative

I would be pleased with this but of course there's that magic threshold of net zero. If I had used the 4500KWh I originally put into the calculator for sizing my system I might have spent just £80 on electric. I still have a £750 gas bill for the year though. Need to double the array. I suppose I could have put another 17 panels on the NE side of the house as it would work just as well in the winter months with the diffused light.

Just over two months on agile, averaging 10.4p/kWh, definitely worth switching away from intelligent flux even with a small battery.

Bit expensive at times, but the cheap moments so far have balanced it out.

Gas central heating though, so the main thing is to avoid heavy electric loads during the evening peak. I have used the oven, which means circa 400W import as the battery doesn't quite cover it, but the cost is minimal.

16 months on Agile, average actual import rate is 13.96p/kWh (inc 5% VAT).

Still missing the lower rate afternoon slots on Agile though, but they're never coming back 🙁

Vestas well, maybe they will, if the amount of solar continues to increase, then there'll be daytime surplus?

TX200 ...and following that train of thought to extremes (California) then nobody will be getting paid for exported energy in summer 😉

I've said it before - as EV and heatpump uptake increases then we'll end up seeing more uniformity in prices regardless of time. There's not much spare capacity to play with so tariffs like this are likely to become a historical curiosity in the next few years....

Vestas i can see EVs causing an increase in overnight prices

But will heat pumps make much of a difference? Thinking more sun in summer, presumably less heat pump usage on average then? Etc?

geoffreycoan Why have you got £2480 listed for a replacement 9.5kWh battery & fitting? I thought GE replaced it under warranty?

Vestas he's hinted before about the replacement battery story being for another day, it's almost like an author leaving a cliffhanger for the next episode 😄

Might be some cheap rates in the early hours of monday?

Robgy You are quite right, the replacement 9.5 is a story I have yet to tell…

More 99.99p slots tomorrow. Make sure you have plenty of charge to cope.

Windy Miller Yeah not nice tomorrow, I’m sure that wasn’t on the agile price predict.

I’ve only got two 99.9p slots, so not as bad as the last peak in prices we had, but looking at the Met Office its saying -3 at 8am rising to 2 degrees around lunchtime and then back to zero at 8pm so the heat pump is going to be chewing through the electricity.
And nack all solar generation forecast as well.

Wear an extra Wooly jumper tomorrow then

Looks like I have got off lightly!

But of course the trick is to use battery during this time.

My max temp today was 0.1C. And the 3rd day on the trot where I woke up to see all panels covered with snow again and helped out to clear the road (again!)

Rob

Rbor Interesting comparing, my rates seem to be between 2.5 and 4p/kWh more expensive in each slot.

Not a consistent difference though.

Have discussed with the wifey, told her to limit cooking tomorrow and I have relented for the tumble dryer on overnight tonight. We’re going to have the wood burner on all day tomorrow and hopefully that will cut the heat pump usage. Got plenty of wood, we should use it.

Slightly different topic, Tomato Energy’s “Agile” tariff called Tomato Smile. I mentioned it before but also that I couldn’t find any details of historic prices or future prices on their website so without more idea of how it compared to Octopus it wouldn’t be for me (and they don’t yet have an export tariff either).

But other conversation on here https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/5134-tomato-energy-tou-data-issues-mywatts-data-is-30mins-out/5 about Tomato getting publicly named and shamed for failure to settle half hour and non-half hour energy data in a timely manner, got me searching to see if I could find any more, and I came across the Tomato domestic tariff information https://www.tomato.energy/assets/documents/Tariff_Information.pdf

Turns out they highlight Elexon for historic rate tracking (Elexon are the ones naming them for having too high an error rate on energy settlement), and they also point to our old Agile friend Nord pool for future rates, in particular linking to https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/n2ex/prices?deliveryDate=latest&currency=GBP&aggregation=Hourly&deliveryAreas=UK

Tomorrow’s prices:

The Tomato tariff says its priced in MWh and £10MWh = £0.01p/kWh

So my read of this is that tomorrow’s peak on Tomato would be 34p/kWh.

Lowest slot is tonight 11pm at 7p/kWh. Octopus are 17.99p for me.

Have I read this wrong? It seems so incredibly different to the Octopus prices.

geoffreycoan How long are they going to be around?

Looking at Nordpool wholesale prices for tomorrow, even at £99.99, Octopus are subsiding us!

Rob

geoffreycoan I just realised from the above plan that Predbat is doing its stuff correctly, charging in the cheap rate at 15:00 tomorrow ahead of the peak rate prices

But ulp, that cheap rate charging is 48.51p. That’s normal peak-time discharge rate ☹️

Still sitting on 84% charge from overnight push to 100% by 9am. And, blow me down with a feather, the panels are currently covering the 600W house load with a small charge to the batteries. 9 hours to go.

Looks like they are so busy trying to stop the grid from collapsing they haven't issued tomorrow's Agile rates.

Windy Miller Yes I have noticed that as well.

On the Octopus Agile signup page https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/ it says “between 4 and 8pm, usually nearer 4pm we issue the prices”. I’m sure I read in the FAQ’s/ Ts and Cs when I renewed my Agile contract that it was up to 10pm, but can’t find it.

I remain confused by the Nord data future market pricing linked above from Tomato’s Agile tariff info, tomorrow is showing the morning peak around 7am will be £130MWh = £0.13p/kWh and the evening peak at £120MWh = £0.12p/kWh. We know Octopus apply a price premium in the evening peak, but bit mad that market rates are actually cheaper than the morning. I still can’t shake the calculation that Tomato (assuming they continue as a business) are significantly cheaper than Octopus

I don't understand the logic of Tomato's price conversion.
The SVT is 24.84 p/kWh https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-price-cap
All other provides have rates in this ball park.

Tomato's peak at £130MWh = £0.13p/kWh.

Nordpool must just be looking at wholesale costs. This chart shows uk breakdown. There are other similar charts available. This was from a quick Google search.
So Wholesale cost is about one-third of total. And Octopus has a formula for peak rates.

Either way, how is Tomato operating with such customer rates?

Rob

Rbor it's not so much "how is" but more "how long can they..." 🤣

Rbor The link to that specific page on nord data came from the Tomato tariff information document.

They also link https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/system-prices for giving historical prices. Yesterday for example was 12p/kWh for most of the day, no noticeable peak, and 8p in the evening.

Agree that wholesale is only part of the equation. But the Tomato tariff document linked above gives these links and says:

“ You’ll pay a fixed rate daily standing charge. The unit rates will change every 30 minutes based on
real-time wholesale prices. This can mean that your prices will rise and fall frequently. Prices may
surge during times of peak demand. During these periods, prices will be capped at the amount
specified at the time of switching. You will receive reasonable notice of any changes to this
capped price. You can track past wholesale electricity prices at Elexon and future estimated
prices at Nord. Prices displayed on these sites are in MWh – for reference, £10/MWh =
£0.01p/kWh”

It does say “based on wholesale prices” which isn’t specific, I assumed it was the prices on the linked websites, but there could be an unspecified uplift or formulae.
Likewise standing charge isn’t detailed either so that might be even worse than Octopus in Yorkshire.

I think I will fire Tomato an email and ask for clarity as to how they price this tariff

Tomorrow's tracker price is the highest I've ever seen. Looking like high prices tomorrow.

I presume there will be another saving session.

Hook Agile projections for tomorrow (Friday) from Octopus Watch.
Above 25p from 07:30 until 20:30.

Definitely need a DFS session tomorrow

At least I have had proper sun today which has finally melted snow from my sun-facing panels. But I still have 1/3rd of my panels snow-covered. Useful 8.7 kWh of PV though 😎
At 3:30 pm, temperature had risen to –1C from –5C last night.
Projected to go down close to –10C tonight. 🥶

Rob

Hook

Wow just looked and mine says 99p from 16:00 - 19:00, not seen that before either.

Let’s see what Predbat does after the update at 16:00 today. At the moment it’s says charge the battery before 08:00, even thought it says it’s going to be at 100% 😛

I am glad there is a cap at 100p at the moment as who knows what it could get to. Also glad the boss upstairs has given us some sun and batteries at 100% now.

Ouch!

I finally found how Octopus price Agile, knew I’d seen it somewhere

Be interesting to see what Tomato say as to their pricing. Looking at tomorrow’s norddata https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/n2ex/prices?deliveryDate=2025-01-10&currency=GBP&aggregation=DeliveryPeriod&deliveryAreas=UK wholesale peaks at £600MWh / 60p/kWh so the £1 cap is coming into effect

Tomorrow’s prices delayed again I see. Going to be another turn the heat pump off methinks

Is this the worst ever?

New rates are out and plan back to normal phew.

I also had a look at Octopus app again and did a compare, looks good going forward and DD from £50 to £5. Also credit on account is higher and will cover winter. Still on track for a zero cost and reducing the DD to £1.

(I did get another AIO and 3 more panels on the roof in September)