Energy prices, what's your plan?

Because a bill tripling as I had last year is far more devistating than halving, I can assure you! No one makes interest off anything, thats not how modern money works...

 

Pish and nonsense.
Over pay in the summer to pay for extra use during the winter without having fluctuating bills or unexpected higher bills.
Shell hate me, they keep putting my DD down to as low as they can only for me to bump it up and add £75 - 100 over and above my actual usage the next day, sure I run a £500+ credit balance during the summer, but come winter or prices raising again it'll have zero effect on me.
No surprises, no debt, no worrying about usage, no need for smart meters or monitoring apps, just common sense everyday budgeting.

 

We overpay even with a smart meter.

 

Same, much as others to spread the impact through the year, the smart meter is purely a tool that you can utilize to get lower rates, why would you not use one also helps to keep an eye on rogue consumers?

 

Personally, I only have on what I need to have on, knowing how much an hour the thing costs to run makes no difference to it needing to be on

 

I over paid too. I blame it on that Martin twunt getting me in a panic. Then I tried to reduce it, but it would only let me increase it.

So I may have £1200 in there now.

I am glad of it. It got reduced back to £5 (daft) but I put it back up to £50, where it was before all this scare mongering began. They have not offered any back (tbh a good lump of it was from the DWP) but then I wouldn't want it any way. I would rather a company owe me money than the other way around. I sleep better at night knowing I won't have to worry about it.

It has gone down twice since then. So hey, I can crank it this winter now that I am 6 stone lighter.

 

Our payment had been far too low for a while, but I didn't mind running up a big debt with an energy company, none of it's real. They noticed and hiked our payments expecting costs to increase but we stopped using the central heating, now we're paying £50 a month and using up all the credit we have with them.

I suppose I could have balanced it out and held the cash myself but it's not like my bank are giving me any interest right now and I can't be arsed with the phone conversation.

 

Using compatible EV to get more more cheap slots than standard overnight off-peak, combine with solar PV in summer, I managed to use only ~2 kWh per day on peak pricing.

 

On Sunday I got paid to use 40kWh of energy

 

Just as a note here to say that I recently discovered the tracker tariff for Gas is a thing on Octopus, its halved my unit rate on gas, wish I had known about this during last winter! I am on Agile for electricity, and am currently considering a storage battery, as I have the space now having cleared out the garage. - Need to look at getting an HA client setup on a spare raspberry Pi to make the most of the plunge pricing.... any tips?

 

Consider getting a battery system that is compatible with this Home Assistant integration, I've only read good things with this integration.
https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/#octopus-energy-integration

I've been using Vehicle-2-Home by making our Nissan Leaf function as home battery. In combination with solar PV, our average electricity price is just over 8p/kWh on the Octopus EV tariff.

In combination with Tracker tariff for gas, I am over £400 in credit and I kept reducing my monthly DD without making much dent reducing that. Currently set at £60 a month for 3 bed house with ~1200 EV miles per month.

 

That looks great, thanks I will have a dig around.
im assuming you need a specific chadmo/type1 home charger to enable that V2H? I have an outlander PHEV, so no luck there, and it doesnt seem like any of the newer EVs we might switch to next year or so have the V2H or V2G options.

 

I got on a V2H trial and had it installed for just £1600, I needed a second EV charger for 2 EV's, so it was easy decision. Unfortunately there's currently no off-the-shelf V2H options and currently only Nissan Leaf supports it via the obsolete Chademo plug.

VW ID 77 kWh models might support it, but it is unclear how well supported it will be. ID7 manual talks about 4000 hour limit on battery discharge, making it useless.

V2H for CCS plug is still not yet widely available.

Current best option is to get home battery, 0% VAT and recent developments mean they are not as expensive as they once were.

 

yeah - i was looking at the Fogstar, as I already have an inverter I got cheap with some DIY Solar PV cells that I havent put together yet https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collectio...e/products/fogstar-energy-15-5kwh-48v-battery

 

Installed an Eddi Solar Diverter for hot water (https://www.myenergi.com/product/eddi/) on Sunday. Dead simple to install and integrates seamlessly with the Zappi car charger I already had. Now when there isn't enough sun to charge the car (needs minimum 1.4kW of generation to be 100% green charging) I can dump the excess electric to my existing immersion heater automatically. I should be running on "free" hot water all summer long and hopefully knocks a good chunk of the hot water bill in the winter also. I reckon it should save circa £20-30 of gas usage each month during the summer giving this a payback of 1-2 years (being pesimistic)!