Tonight, my electricity provider will be paying me to fully charge my car. I'm on the Octopus Agile tariff and due to all the wind and low demand, plunge pricing is in effect from 1am Sunday. It's only 1p/kWh I'll be getting but it's made my day. It won't happen very often, maybe 3 or 4 times a year but it's still great. I can thoroughly recommend Octopus, they've been most impressive so far in all aspects, not just price, but tech, data, communications, support... all of it top draw.
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Get paid to charge your Tesla....
- Thread starter S.Badger
- Start date
I worked out the actual yearly cost of Agile based on 2018 data they supply and over the year the electricity cost in the standard E7 period 'average' cost was 10.5p per kWh versus 8p per kWh for standard E7 from Bulb.
The peak time 'average' was also more expensive.
Similarly their GO tariff is only cheaper than E7 if only every charge in the 4hr period, which if you do large number of miles doesn't quite work. E7 with Bulb anyways also extends into 830am in summer time, covering a big chunk of waking up electricity use from Kettles/toasters etc.
Octopus has really nailed their marketing, as their 'cheap' headline rates grab the attention. But overall cost is very similar to standard E7 if not more expensive, however with more hassle.
For a true cost comparison I wonder if someone could upload their recent Octopus bill on Go or Agile that way we can get a true comparison versus standard E7?
Glan gluaisne
Active Member
Exactly the same for us. I've been tracking several tariffs in a spreadsheet and comparing the overall price for us (including the standing charge) based on our usage profile. I collect usage data every 6 minutes through the day, and log it, and have a few years worth of data now. The same data logger records temperatures around the place, humidity, CO2 etc, so I have a good feel for where the energy goes.
The major problem for most consumers with variable tariffs is not being able to see the relative impact of the wide range of price variation on their usage pattern. Agile would be, for us, about 20% more expensive than E7 with Bulb, which is a significant difference. I've no idea how customers who don't have access to a few years worth of usage data, on at least a half hourly basis, are going to be able to compare tariffs at all, let alone compare them easily. I'm not going to pretend that the spreadsheet I've been running is easy to use; it isn't at all, I've been doing it as much for fun as anything else. It still takes a lot of work to compare different tariffs on a like-for-like basis, which I guess is something those suppliers who want to introduce variable pricing are relying on.
I cannot quite work out if Octopus has managed to pull off a publicity stunt on par with FSD for Tesla or they genuinely think they are offering choice.
I've seen random recommendations for Go and now Agile appearing all over various social media platforms, most by real people, but as you say am not convinced anyone is actually saving money on these tariffs versus standard E7.
Plenty of people here must be on these traiffs, I would love to see some real bills with consumption figures to compare to normal E7.
My calculations suggest overall costs are at best on par with E7 at worst more expensive.
Glan gluaisne
Active Member
You have an interesting concept of “fun”
your setup sounds pretty bloody amazing, though.
Where do you sample the CO2? Outside? Inside? If inside, which room(s)? And what for?
Temperature is recorded from outside, in the middle of our concrete floor slab, in the ground under the floor slab, in the hall (pretty much dead centre of the house), at the heating buffer tank, at the heat pump flow pipe and at the hot water pre-heat heat exchanger. Humidity is recorded from outside and inside (again in the hall). CO2 is also measured inside, in the hall. Instantaneous power usage is metered on the meter tails, in both directions, and transmitted by a 433 MHz data link to the logger every 10 seconds. The logger has a GPS receiver to provide an accurate time and date, and as well as using this to store sampled data every 6 minutes, it also sends the date and time to a small display in the hall, which also contains the indoor temperature, humidity and CO2 sensors. There's a multi-drop serial data cable running around the house so that all of the data could be accessed at any point. I have a subset of the most useful day to day data displayed in the hall. This is a blurry snapshot taken a few minutes ago:
It depends on how much you charge at home and how far your typical mileage is. It will be different for everyone.
I’m a happy Go customer. This isn’t a sales pitch! I switched two months ago. Inherited SMETS1 transfered fine. Free electricity at work so 4h is fine for me.
If I had to charge at home for all of my charging and my commute was more than 30 miles I’d probably go for E7.
I’m a happy Go customer. This isn’t a sales pitch! I switched two months ago. Inherited SMETS1 transfered fine. Free electricity at work so 4h is fine for me.
If I had to charge at home for all of my charging and my commute was more than 30 miles I’d probably go for E7.
Glan gluaisne
Active Member
It also depends how much electricity is used charging the car versus how much is used running the house. In our case, our house uses ~4,000 kWh/year of paid-for electricity and the car uses about 1,600 kWh/year in total. Not all the car charging is at home, and not all of it when charging at home is paid-for, often in summer I can charge from self-generated electricity. At a guess, the car uses only about 1,000 kWh of paid-for electricity at home, and that's all during the off-peak E7 period, usually.
Our house doesn't need much heating, but even so our electric heating uses about 2,000 kWh/year of paid-for electricity. The other ~2,000 kWh of usage is hot water, cooking, ventilation, running the borehole water pump and treatment plant air pump, etc. This means that the house uses around four times more paid-for electricity than the car.
Ignoring car charging, E7 makes more sense for us, as we need the longer off-peak rate for heating, anyway. Being able to put up to about 50 kWh into the car overnight, on the E7 rate, if needed, is a bonus, and means that I can usually have the car sat fully charged (well, at 90%) most mornings. The latter point is key, and one reason I went for the M3 LR. With aged relatives living some distance away, I never know when I may have to make an urgent trip of a couple of hundred miles or so. I'd not want to have the car only half charged in the morning, so really need as long an overnight charging period as I can get.
Our house doesn't need much heating, but even so our electric heating uses about 2,000 kWh/year of paid-for electricity. The other ~2,000 kWh of usage is hot water, cooking, ventilation, running the borehole water pump and treatment plant air pump, etc. This means that the house uses around four times more paid-for electricity than the car.
Ignoring car charging, E7 makes more sense for us, as we need the longer off-peak rate for heating, anyway. Being able to put up to about 50 kWh into the car overnight, on the E7 rate, if needed, is a bonus, and means that I can usually have the car sat fully charged (well, at 90%) most mornings. The latter point is key, and one reason I went for the M3 LR. With aged relatives living some distance away, I never know when I may have to make an urgent trip of a couple of hundred miles or so. I'd not want to have the car only half charged in the morning, so really need as long an overnight charging period as I can get.
My take on these tariffs is that they perhaps shouldnt be expected to save money on one's current/historic usage patterns when compared with E7, unless the user is already very negatively correlated with the country's usage patterns as a whole. Rather they should give some financial benefit to the extent that they change our usage patterns, ie to the extent that the user contributes load balancing to the grid, either by changing their behaviour or installing some technology (battery, usually) to do it for them.
A nighttime charged EV is a bit of this but maybe not enough to make the decision more than marginal.
A nighttime charged EV is a bit of this but maybe not enough to make the decision more than marginal.
Glan gluaisne
Active Member
We've already load-shifted as much as we reasonably can to the E7 hours, which tend to be the same hours that the grid is pretty lightly loaded. Last time I checked I think our split was around 60% E7 vs 40% peak rate. We couldn't easily shift any more to the off-peak period without investing in battery storage (V2G won't work for us because of the need to have the car fully charged most of the time when we're home). The numbers just don't stack up for a home battery system; it will die of old age long before it's recovered the investment. Whether that changes in future depends on battery prices coming down and energy prices going up.
Right now, electricity wholesale prices have been on a downward trend for a while, probably because of the amount of, fairly cheap, renewable generation that's been installed over the past few years. That will almost certainly start to change from 2025, when gas heating is outlawed for new builds, as this is bound to give a small increase, year on year, in demand. Whether EVs start to have a measurable impact on grid demand is debatable, as there probably won't be that many around even in five years time to make up more than a tiny fraction of the present grid demand.
Right now, electricity wholesale prices have been on a downward trend for a while, probably because of the amount of, fairly cheap, renewable generation that's been installed over the past few years. That will almost certainly start to change from 2025, when gas heating is outlawed for new builds, as this is bound to give a small increase, year on year, in demand. Whether EVs start to have a measurable impact on grid demand is debatable, as there probably won't be that many around even in five years time to make up more than a tiny fraction of the present grid demand.
*Adam
Member
Ditto. When I had a PHEV consuming 9kWh/night, and ran the dishwasher/washing machine/tumble dried in the E7 period, too, our consumption was 50/50 E7 night/day. When we took a year out from E7 and just ran devices as and when we were ready to it was 10/90 night/day.
Now we have an M3 we're running consistently 75/25. And that's with charging at work some days of the week. My biggest challenge is that I leave home 5/6 hours into the E7 period, so don't get a full 7 hours of charging in and have to plan around it - sometimes using peak rate power.
The answer in our case is a smart meter with the 3 rates. It'll give me 7 hours of charging every night, and lower daytime rates (apart from the killer bit from 4pm to 7pm that we can work around easily enough!).
ACarneiro
Active Member
I generally leave home not long after 5am, so I’m the winter I have pretty much just 5 hours of E7 rate to use.
It’s just about enough for my needs. If occasionally I need some extra power, starting charge an hour earlier will cost me 42p extra.
I can live with that and prefer it to having a smart meter which, I’m pretty sure I have made clear, I detest with a passion.
It’s just about enough for my needs. If occasionally I need some extra power, starting charge an hour earlier will cost me 42p extra.
I can live with that and prefer it to having a smart meter which, I’m pretty sure I have made clear, I detest with a passion.
