Energy prices, what's your plan?

Spent the day sorting out my heating requirements for the next year.

Wood 3 by BA_13 posted 22 Sep 2022 at 21:04

Wood 2 by BA_13 posted 22 Sep 2022 at 21:04

Wood 1 by BA_13 posted 22 Sep 2022 at 21:04

Now to get the splitter and firewood processor from our farm co-operative next week and make these 1 metre sections slightly more manageable.

 

Good wood.

Sorry to be so familiar.

 

That's quite alright many people have admired my wood today.

 

Got this very handy summary of the new capped prices in October from Ovo. Based on my usage (Family of 4 in a 4 Bed Bungalow) the 'annual' increase is approx £600 from the April prices but more importantly is now £2800 duel fuel annually compared to my previous amount of ~£1200. My electric use is lower due to PVs on the roof (and they also pay me back hundreds a year) but partially offset by switching to induction hob vs gas hob. Also managed to reroof and insulate the back of the house last year and will insulate the bathroom floor in the next few weeks so should be much snugger. Only 1 bathroom and the hallway to go for insulation now (before external insulation goes on in a few years time). Shame it all costs so bloody much to retrofit!

 

Our estimated yearly usage is never anything like what we use which I find odd as we're on smart meters and have been with the same company for several years.

 

Made me double check, Electric looks about right but gas is lower than previous years. I assume they're basing it on year to date usage and factoring somehow. My usage over 3 years has varied a fair bit (up and down) but its complicated by lots of home improvements, building work, switching gas hobs/ovens to electric, new smart thermostat, adding a tumble dryer, wife taking up running and showering 300 times a day. Makes for a messy prediction in my case.

 

The following is taken from an email from Shell Energy, just two of us here in a small semi-detached bungalow, at least one of us home most of the time.

"How this affects your energy prices
Your electricity rates are changing from 28.408p to 33.859p per kWh and your standing charge per day is changing from 51.62p to 52.64p.
Your gas rates are changing from 7.476p to 10.425p per kWh and your standing charge per day is changing from 27.22p to 28.48p.
Annual Personal Projection
Your current tariff: Flexible 7 Direct Debit ebill £1,437
Your new tariff: Energy Price Guarantee Direct Debit £1,722
Increase in cost £285
Your rates and projections are outlined above. These include 5% VAT and are what we estimate you’ll pay over the next 12 months. This is based on your estimated energy consumption of 3,077 kWh of electricity and 3,686 kWh of gas and does not take into account any credit or debit balances you may have. How much you pay will depend on how much energy you use. This projection also doesn’t include government schemes to reduce the amount you’ll pay, such as the Energy Bills Support Scheme."

 

My email from Shell, for a detached bungalow, again with just 2 occupants with 1 WFH 4 days a week;

Your current tariff: Flexible 7 Direct Debit ebill £2,327
Your new tariff: Energy Price Guarantee Direct Debit £2,937
Increase in cost £610

Your rates and projections are outlined above. These include 5% VAT and are what we estimate you’ll pay over the next 12 months. This is based on your estimated energy consumption of 4,178 kWh of electricity and 12,053 kWh of gas and does not take into account any credit or debit balances you may have.

It shouldn't be as bad as that though, last year we had 2 young adults in the house 24/7, they're gone now, 2 fridges have been decommissioned, and I will not run the heating during daylight hours (weekdays) this year.

 

I'm in the process of setting up Home Assistant and some "smart" plugs that apparently support energy monitoring. You see some absolutely ridiculous figures quoted for the amount of power that devices use in standby, so I'm measuring it myself.

(Of course I can't do anything the easy way, so I've decided to flash them with custom firmware instead of just using the out of the box firmware and apps. I'm currently waiting for my TrueNAS Scale host to dd a Home Assistant boot image file to a zvol, and then I have to figure out which PCIe device to pass through because apparently you can't just pass through a single USB device, you have to pass through the entire USB controller...)

 

Our plan is to move somewhere warmer.

We've just had our offer on a nice French rural property in the Charentes accepted. Wish us luck (with typically bad timing, now is the time the Pound is tanking against the Euro).

 

Ooo rural France. Lovely dude. All the best ❤️

 

Cool, so that's two smart plugs up and running.



Interestingly, it's only reporting ~500W from my PC when running a simultaneous CPU&GPU stress test - CPU is a 5900X and the GPU is a 3070Ti:



Of course these are not calibrated precision measuring instruments, but at a rough idea is better than no idea.

I'm heading over to town shortly, but later today I'll flash the remaining sockets and hook them up.

 

I didn't get the other smart plugs up and running, but...

For reference, this is my current tariff for electricity:



Yes, I know, I'm sorry - we switched to a fixed tariff right before the sh*t started hitting the fan. Under any other circumstances this would be a terrible deal.

Since Saturday afternoon, my fridge has cost me a grand total of...



80p. Far far less than I thought it would do, given that it's such an old POS. I also can't replace it unless it dies or I want to pay for the landlord to have a new fridge... which I don't...

My PC's total is about half that, but what I'm more interested in for my PC is the amount of power it uses in standby.



Erm...

Not an awful lot. Between shutting down yesterday evening and starting up again first thing this morning was about 11hrs. Let's say it peaks at 3W usage at any given moment - 11hrs at 3W is 0.033kWh. So to have my PC in standby instead of fully powered off last night cost me... 0.77p. Let's say I use it for an average of 3hrs a day so it's on standby for 21hrs of the day, over the course of a year it would use 22.995kWh just in standby. At my current tarriff that's £5.44 a year. I think I can live with that.... Although it would be nice to bring down the idle power consumption - I do not need a 5900X and a 3070Ti to have a bunch of browser tabs open and maybe a YouTube video.

All of this, of course, assumes that these "smart" plugs I've got are in any way accurate. But the only way I can know for certain how accurate they are is to compare the measurements from these "smart" plugs to calibrated test equipment, and I'm afraid I don't have access to an electrical test lab! TBH they're probably about as accurate as any given "kill-a-watt" type meter, and that's more than enough for home usage.

 

I would say that my smart plugs aren't 100% accurate just good enough for indicator, I correlate the consumption with my smart meter and it's all in the right ballpark, your pc standby will depend on what you have plugged in as most modern thing will typically use <1w when off, I have a 4 port USB3.0 switch on mine and some controllers, that gives me ~6w standby on mine, rather than unplug the devices I just put my PC on a smart switch which drops it to 0+ <1w for the smart plug when not in use.

You've got a reasonable tariff so yeah it will be cheap obviously most concerns I think were related to when the cap got to the prices companies were buying it in at which was a lot higher. I think one cap was 52p and the next another 30%.

I have two saved BIOS profiles on my machine as my idle is high oc'ed, one profile in consume all the power game mode, the other drops all the clocks and caps the CPU etc.

I also have similar profiles for the GPU.

 

Inspired by you, I've ordered 2 Tapo P110 smart plugs. Already got non power monitoring plugs working with a custom Tapo integration. MOAH DATA!

Santander 123 tells me they are doubling cashback to 4% and max amount to £10 on energy DD. But Octopus just Emailed me saying they are reducing payment by government £67. I ain't missing out on those sweet cashback! So I've upped direct debit to £250, maximum cashback amount to £10. I consider energy company "in credit" like a bank account, so essentially instead of not earning much interest in my bank account, money goes into my account at Octopus with a £10 cashback transfer bonus.
After this 2 month special double cashback event, I estimate I'll be able to get away with something really low like £50 a month until mid summer.

 

Yeah exactly. I'm not relying on them as a predictor for my bills or anything like that, I just want to see why we're using so much power. Even before the market shat the bed, we were using a lot of power and paying quite a lot for energy. In terms of tariffs and monthly bills we're actually doing pretty well under the circumstances, but if there's something that's sucking down a ton of power in standby then I want to know about it. Like all the stuff on the TV cabinet, for example: am I paying £money++ just for the privilege of not having to wait for stuff to boot? (Spoiler alert: probably not.) There's not much in the house we can't measure, basically only the oven. The biggest power draw is going to come from our two PCs, but on an average week the amount of time each of those machines spends gaming is maybe 20-30hrs at the very most. Even then it's only going to be my PC that pulls down the big numbers - my other half only has a GTX 1060 with an i5-12400F.

Yeah we had the same email from Octopus earlier. We've said for a long time that we don't need this discount. Even if prices had gone to £insane per year as predicted then we could still afford it - don't get me wrong it would absolutely suck balls to pay that much and we'd have to put off quite a few plans, but we could still easily pay it. But that was my first reaction also: we already budget for not having the discount, so I'm more than happy to keep making the same payment per month in order to give us that bit of a buffer.

 

Whilst we don't need this discount as a household, and I suspect many on here also doesn't need it. It's probably the helping hand needed by many as cost of living rises. So it's good this is being done. Though I'm not sure about the mounting national spending, but that's above my pay grade.

However, what we, as a nation, really need is a revamp of the the broken electricity market. Prices shouldn't be pegged by the most expensive source of energy. Need more time-of-use tariff to enable more renewables and incentivise end user to adopt. Finally, need much less reliant on fossil fuel, things like re-enabling fracking sends the wrong message.

All of those seems to be exactly the things Octopus are working towards. So I'm happy to send them more money than necessary and put my account very in-credit.

 

I had thought they were means tested until quite recently (when reading up on the latest energy caps) so a nice surprise. I would guess the admin overhead of implementing means testing for a one-off payment, combined with it being applicable to households and not individuals, probably made it favourable to just give it to all.

Counting the days until our fixed deal runs out - as you say without the payment we weren't going to all be huddling round a single candle fortunately, but definitely helps to soften the transition into the new energy reality.

EDIT: I've also just noticed on our bills, they handily include a 12 month payment projection based on usage, which takes into account said fixed rate tariff running out. Handy thing, that. Even if the figure itself it is somewhat troubling.

 

How did you go about accessing the power usage of the Gosund plugs in Home Assistant, can't see any integration.