Just Joined the Intelligent Octopus Tariff

[nowty]

The early evening cheap period goes against everything I thought I knew about wholesale energy prices!

I’d *LOVE* a split cheap rate period!

It was a night were there was some wind earlier and sod all overnight but also I note that you can sort of game it if you request you really need the car at a much earlier time, like 6am and you have a low battery when you plug it in.

[nowty]

And interestingly even if you don't start the charge in the first extra cheap slot, you still get the cheap tariff for that slot. So what I thought was a pain in the ass function of my webbox charger by autolocking after 60 mins, turns out to give me extra control. Also I note last night one of the gaps was several hours and it did not charge after that big gap. But if the gap is 0.5 hr or 1 hr it does manage to jump the gap. But I could have manually "bumped" the charge at 23:34 from the Octopus App and it would have still been at cheap rate.

Below shows I was offered extra hours cheap but the there was a half hour gap from 23:00 to 23:30 back at peak rate and I could not be bothered re-programming my battery inverter to suit, so I manually unlocked the charger at 23:34 for it to start. But the bill still shows the extra cheap period even though I did not use it.



Car currently at 48%, so tonight, I am going to be very naughty and say I want the car at 80% by 00:30 and see what the charging regime will be just after 17:00 when I plug it in (you only get the charging regime at 5pm).

[nowty]

Car currently at 48%, so tonight, I am going to be very naughty and say I want the car at 80% by 00:30 and see what the charging regime will be just after 17:00 when I plug it in (you only get the charging regime at 5pm).

Oh I am naughty, just plugged in and the charging (and cheap rate) regime will be ...............................................
And this is additional to the fixed 23:30 to 05:30 cheap slot.



EDIT - So to avoid me bankrupting the poor Octopus as that would not do any of us any favours, I refrained from taking advantage of the extra cheap hours I gamed from them by setting a false departure time this evening. I shall turn the charger on at 23:34 later so it will only charge for 25 mins or so and I will use the standard cheap hours to use what I need in the house. But I will keep the empty battery space in the car as I may need to game it for real on Monday / Tuesday when the solar here will be dire but wind resource should be good so we both win.

[Burble61]

is there something i'm mis-understanding here?

On the Octopus website it states "Plus your whole home gets six hours of super cheap rates every night, at just 5p/kWh from 11.30pm to 5.30am." To me that says the 2330-0530 period is always charged at the cheap rate - yet some of the screenshots that have been very helpfully posted show EV charging schedules which have gaps during that time?

I guess what could explain it is that the whole of the period is charged at cheap rate, just that Octopus control when the EV is charging during that time to get it to read SOC by the desired time?

Whilst having notice of "out of off-peak cheap slots" (if you see what I mean) via the app is useful, I suspect manually updating other schedules to take some advantage could get boring quickly. Any views on how to discover that automagically at this stage?

[nowty]

is there something i'm mis-understanding here?

On the Octopus website it states "Plus your whole home gets six hours of super cheap rates every night, at just 5p/kWh from 11.30pm to 5.30am." To me that says the 2330-0530 period is always charged at the cheap rate - yet some of the screenshots that have been very helpfully posted show EV charging schedules which have gaps during that time?

I guess what could explain it is that the whole of the period is charged at cheap rate, just that Octopus control when the EV is charging during that time to get it to read SOC by the desired time?

Whilst having notice of "out of off-peak cheap slots" (if you see what I mean) via the app is useful, I suspect manually updating other schedules to take some advantage could get boring quickly. Any views on how to discover that automagically at this stage?

Whatever happens, whether you plug your car in or not, your house gets 6 hours of 5p / kWh from 23:30 to 05:30 every day. So you could ignore the Octopus APP from its charging regime (with gaps) and manually "Bump" the charge from 23:30 every night and it would charge continuously for 6 hours at 5p / kWh. Most of the time I only do short journeys so that's how I will normally use it. "Bump" the charge is a way of overriding the APPs charge schedule if you need your car charging immediately, whether its in peak or off peak time.

So on Go Faster I got 5 hours at 5.5p, with this I get 6 hours at 5p and pay a slightly lower standing charge.

Now the bad side, you have to give the Octopus APP your Tesla username and password so the APP can control your Tesla car charging timer and know its location. When it detects that your car is away from home like at a Supercharger or at my parents it charges immediately as normal. If at home, Octopus will attempt to charge it at the cheapest wholesale price to reduce its costs (not yours). But sometimes the cheapest wholesale time might not be in the middle of the night so Octopus reserve the right to charge it at other times outside your cheap rate which could be earlier than 23:30 or later than 05:30. If Octopus decides to schedule your charge at those times your whole house gets extra cheap hours because the only way you get billed is through your smart meter and not the APP.

So if the gaps are within the 6 hour cheap period, then I don't care, but if they are at other times, that can cause me a problem because if I don't re-programme my battery inverter, the car will be pulling in 6kW from my home battery and not from the grid. However in the middle of winter I may want to take advantage of extra cheap hours to boost storage heaters, run heatpump, cook roast dinner, etc.

So there are some drawbacks but it depends on your home energy system and your needs. For me, that guaranteed cheap extra one hour slot is gold dust and tonight, I will probably just "Bump" the charge at 23:30 as I only want a 15% increase in car battery so that will take only about 1.5 hours, so well within the standard 6 hour cheap slot.

[Tinbum]

Nowty, slightly off topic but do with the GO tariff. I did a battery charge last night between 00.30 and 4.30 but my in house display is showing £4.04 usage but should be about £1.50. Is that normal? (24.55KWh plus standing charge)

[nowty]

Nowty, slightly off topic but do with the GO tariff. I did a battery charge last night between 00.30 and 4.30 but my in house display is showing £4.04 usage but should be about £1.50. Is that normal? (24.55KWh plus standing charge)

Yep, ignore the in house display, it can be meaningless if on these "Beta" tariffs.

Its the half hour readings from your actual smart meter that count, so check the readings the day after on your Octopus online account if not sure. Check the actual time on the smart meter itself (not the in house display) is correct or sync your import with it. Mine is out by 3.5 mins slow so I need to adjust my start and end time to 23:34 to 05:33.

This is mine from a few a couple of weeks back, my actual import at the time was around 2.7kW or £0.14 per hour. So it had a few decimal points wrong.

[Tinbum]

Great, thank you. Just checked the time on the meter and it to the second compared with my android phone.

[Burble61]

Thanks Nowty!

The whole explanation of what charger & EV can be used is not very precise either. I think they mean at the moment its (Tesla Charger OR Wallbox Pulsar Charger) AND Tesla EV, but it can be read as (Tesla Charger AND Tesla EV) OR Wallbox Pulsar Charger.

I'm guessing its the former - but they could make it clearer!

The Octopus offering are getting a bit a Tesla-centric aren't they!

[Burble61]

Sorry, Nowty, I forgot to add....

The SMETS2 specification for the meter clocks states that they should be "shall be capable of operating so as to be accurate to within 10 seconds of the UTC date and time under normal operating conditions".

Our leccy meter was 5 minutes out on installation...took some prodding but Octopus did eventually did the remote reset which worked. I did have to quote the specs to them though It is buried in the Smart Energy Code too so its a requirement that they provide equipment that operates to that spec.

HTH