Just Joined the Intelligent Octopus Tariff

[nowty]

I have been debating over the past few days whether or not to change from my current Go Faster tariff at 5.5.p between 20:30 to 01:30 and 15p at other times. Having the cheap rate starting at 20:30 is a real benefit and the peak rate is lower than just about every standard peak rate on the market. But my contract is up in early Jan so I fear getting a far worse deal (or timeslot) if I simply wait for it to end.

Intelligent Octopus which mostly only works with a Tesla car gives a fixed 6 hour slot for 5p between 23:30 to 05:30 but the peak rate is now 24.14p which is the same as the standard Octopus Go. But having 6 hrs of cheap rate means my storage heaters can be fully utilised as the cost will be about the same for gas after the recent rises. And the extra hour makes it easier for me to charge 2 vehicles and my home battery overnight without overloading my grid connection.

So bit the bullet yesterday and signed up. Quite surprised how easy it was, first you need to answer several questions about your car model and charger model. If initially accepted, you need to do a 7 minute test charge using their APP in which you need to give your Tesla account username and password so Octopus can control the car charging. Strangely I got an error message suggesting I had incorrectly entered it, but the APP still went to the next step and did the test charge.

The test charge passed and this morning my account has been updated. So I get an extra hour of cheap rate for 10% less cost and I believe its fixed for another year.

And as its sunny today with home battery full and hot water full, I decided to do a "Bump" charge from the APP which allows a charge at anytime. But I did not want a full 32A charge rate and my APP for my Wallbox allowed me to reduce that down to 20A, so I still have full control over the charging in the peak periods so can still take advantage of charging from the Solar during the summer months.

[Tinbum]

Nowty, I've struggled to find anything for definite but is the time GMT or UTC?

[nowty]

Nowty, I've struggled to find anything for definite but is the time GMT or UTC?

Its whatever the UK time is, I believe you get an extra hour in the Autumn change and lose an hour in the Spring change. But I always avoid doing anything in those two time change periods just to be safe.

[Stinsy]

Technically it is a 9% reduction

Good tariff though. Go and Go-faster are now 24p peak rate for new signups which makes more sense, 15p has always been cheaper than standard rates on other non-ToU tariffs, even 24p is cheaper than market now everything has gone up and it means you "save" more by using the off-peak rate (I assume you don't intend to use the peak rate ever!).

I don't see why we can't all take advantage of it though. My understanding is that you get the fixed 6hrs plus the occasional additional hour of cheap rate. So you can still set-and-forget all of your timers but can also manually trigger an extra hour of battery charging / Storage heater charging / etc. if Octopus give you a bit of notice. If your car / EV charging point can do it automatically brilliant, but why can't we have the tariff without those?

Anyway, the morning slot is better for storage heaters, particularly if you have a log burner and the evening slot is better for batteries. So for someone who has both it is swings and roundabouts...

[nowty]

Technically it is a 9% reduction

Good tariff though. Go and Go-faster are now 24p peak rate for new signups which makes more sense, 15p has always been cheaper than standard rates on other non-ToU tariffs, even 24p is cheaper than market now everything has gone up and it means you "save" more by using the off-peak rate (I assume you don't intend to use the peak rate ever!).

I don't see why we can't all take advantage of it though. My understanding is that you get the fixed 6hrs plus the occasional additional hour of cheap rate. So you can still set-and-forget all of your timers but can also manually trigger an extra hour of battery charging / Storage heater charging / etc. if Octopus give you a bit of notice. If your car / EV charging point can do it automatically brilliant, but why can't we have the tariff without those?

Anyway, the morning slot is better for storage heaters, particularly if you have a log burner and the evening slot is better for batteries. So for someone who has both it is swings and roundabouts...

OK, actually 9.09% saving to two decimal places !

Also the standing change is almost a penny cheaper, although I notice standard Go and Agile has had their daily standing charges reduced to 18.35p from about 25p.

I use about 40kWh per year at peak which is just due to battery inverter time response so that's about £4 extra, but almost £3 cheaper on standing charge. If I use 8000 kWh at cheap rate over the winter that's about a £40 saving and when the Ripple wind turbine starts my bill will go negative.

As my gas is now around 4.2p /kWh, so seems as cheap or cheaper to run my storage heaters at full tilt on the cheap leccy and the overnight time slot should work better for them. Full heat first thing in the morning when its the coldest outside.

If you plug in your car after 5pm, the APP tells you what the charging regime will be so you can know in advance whether you get any extra half hour 5p time slots. But it ONLY gives you charging slots equal to what it thinks your car battery needs to get to your target SOC in the time available. For example, last night after the test charge, it gave me 4 sets of charging slots at various times overnight to get from 55% to 80%. But I did not want it to charge last night because I did not know if I was officially on the tariff or not. As the car was at 55% so I simply set the APP to charge to 50% and the APP cancelled the charging regime and showed a sleeping Octopus instead.

You still get the fixed 5p slots for 6 hours, its just that Octopus will choose which slots to charge the car to save themselves some cost.

The other thing you need to know is if you do sign up to it and have two EVs, don't add the second EV or else you will be refused, its not that they don't want to support two vehicles, they just cannot do it yet. As I have two car chargers, no problem for me to charge both cars simultaneously and I can turn the other charger to a lower charge rate.

[Tinbum]

How do you think the average Jo public is going to get on and understand all of this?

[nowty]

So tonight I am going to charge the car to 100%, I would not normally do this but I want to work out what size my actual battery is. I don't know if its a 75kWh or a 82kWh one. I've read about a way of working it out but you need a high charge of battery, then do say a 20min drive. Then I need to check some stats on the car and its then possible to do some calculations to work it out.

Anyway, decided to try the Intelligent Octopus for it tonight and I am also putting full boost into the storage heaters as it will be chilly overnight. So, set the Tesla and Octopus APP to 100% charge, plugged in, the charge initially started but then quickly stopped as it should do whilst it goes into standby.

Below is my charging schedule so you can see there are 3 half hour gaps in the charge over the 6 hour cheap rate period. What pees me off a bit is my meter has (or certainly had) a 3 minute error on the clock, so my cheap rate might not actually start until 11:33pm and it might finish at 5:33am. So looks like I might get stiffed for the first 3 mins.

Another thing I've noticed is my Smart Meter now won't let me shuttle through the registers anymore, so I cannot even access the clock on it.

[Countrypaul]

I thought nearly all meters were sightly off intentionally so that there is not a huge instantaneous spike at exactly midnight (or whatever chosen time), but rather a rapid increase over a period of a few minutes. This is based on the meter switching something on like the old E7 used to. With modern switching being outside control of the DNO and based on electronics this may no longer be relevant.

I don't know where I got that idea from, perhaps someone more knowledgeable on the subject can illuminate things further?

[Stinsy]

Mine seems bang on if I go by the clock on the wireless part of the smart meter and my phone. The clock on my inverter on the other hand I can find no way of checking/setting.

[nowty]

Mine seems bang on if I go by the clock on the wireless part of the smart meter and my phone. The clock on my inverter on the other hand I can find no way of checking/setting.

The clock on my wireless monitor is correct, but its the clock in the meter that counts.

Edit - Just managed to access the other registers on the meter again and its still 3mins slow so I have delayed the standby of my battery inverter by 4 mins to mostly offset any peak rate import.