Programming the battery charging times

I'm looking for the best tariff for my panels, battery pack, air source heat pump and EV charger package.

1) Octopus has a 'cosy' tariff, with an assortment of tariffs throughout the day. To get the best out of it I'd need to progam the inverter to charge 3 times a times a day. How do I do that? Is it possible?

or
2) has anyone got any other tariff suggestions? We're retired, so there's always someone around during the day, and we can charge our car at any time, so a heat-pump friendly tariff would seem to be the best.

There are web base automations available with subscription
Wonderwatt https://www.wonderwatt.com/
Predbat https://predbat.com/

Octopus R&D labs has a free scheduler
https://smart-energy.octopushome.net/sign-in

Lots of people use HomeAssistant (free) , but you will need a small PC like a Raspberry Pi (free if your son goes to Uni and leaves it at home) with Prebat (free). Predbat is predictive battery and has recently been made availble as the web version above

This is a good tool and if you look in the menu (top right) there is a tariff comparison tool
https://www.octopriceuk.app/dashboard
https://www.octopriceuk.app/compare

noelc we have an ashp, ev, panels and a battery. We use IOG. Only ever charge the car at night unless octopus give us some extra slots. Last year was the first with the heat pump and our electric bill rose by £200 with pretty much the same usage, the whole house at 21c. Obviously we didn’t have to pay for oil so a noticeable saving. Car does about 10k. We left it all on IOG so we could do a direct comparison and we’re not seeing much point changing at the moment. We don’t use home assistant or any other aftermarket software just the basic stuff that comes with the various bits of kit.

noelc 1) Octopus has a 'cosy' tariff, with an assortment of tariffs throughout the day. To get the best out of it I'd need to progam the inverter to charge 3 times a times a day. How do I do that? Is it possible?

it depends on what type of inverter you have and battery size.

The original hybrid and AC coupled inverters have only 1 charging slot so you would need to use some form of external automation to program that slot at the appropriate times if on Cosy.

If you have sufficient battery storage then an EV tariff is best as the overnight rate is cheaper and its just a single charge.

noelc modern inverters have multiple charging slots, but older models have only one. So it depends on which system you have.
I have heat pump, EV, and 9.5kWh battery. I stayed on IOG last winter and obviously used some daytime import, but average unit price was around 12.5p, which was about cosy off-peak price in my region, so there was very little to choose between IOG and cosy. I've not yet decided which way to go this year.
If it was Go rather than IOG, or a smaller battery, that would probably swing it towards Cosy.

GE now have smart tariff support on the app/portal. That might be able to do multiple charges per day. (I've not tried it myself.)

DD

Thanks for this. There's a smart tariff option on the portal, and that looks like it will do the job nicely.

I have a 15kwh battery set up, btw.