I thought your were going to stick with GO. I estimated that if I bought 28kWh in the cheap period with a saving of 7p then that would cover 7kWh at 28p before the saving was wiped out. Therefore the days using more than 35kWh cost more in GO. Between 1 December and 31 January last year the average was 37kWh. Widening by a month either side it drops below 35kWh. This crude estimate ignores any solar/export potential which certainly exists in November and February. Certainly doesn’t look high risk.
Sorry, I confused things. I meant that this winter’s figures will be different to last year, because last year we used Cosy and this year we will use Go.
We have 18.8kWh of battery storage. I could add another 8.8 for £2,000, but it seems an awful lot to spend for a problem that will only arise for two or three months a year. The rest of the time we would have far more storage than we actually need.
I guess the extra storage might have some utility to also offset cloudy summer days. It so depends on your usage.
In our case our electricity usage is pretty flat over the whole year (we have LPG for heating/water). We do use a little more than our battery can provide each day during peak hours (7am to 12pm) so we rely on a top-up from Solar (~2kWh) to avoid drawing from the grid at peak rate. In the winter this is a challenge on wet/grey days, so extra storage for us might be useful. This summer (mid March to end August) we have very seldom used anything at peak rate. So extra storage would have only provided the ability to reduce our off-peak usage. Overall then, more storage is likely not worth the investment for us.
If we went down the EV or Heat Pump road things might be different.
We have no gas and everything is electric. The heat pump runs all day when it’s cold and while it’s really efficient, 18kWh doesn’t go that far, once the heated towel rail and other bits and bobs, not to mention cooking come into the equation.
I find Octopus to be quite incapable of estimating monthly payments. Their periodic changes seem to put us on a rate that’s much too high in summer, then drop it to a stupidly low rate in winter to wipe out the credit. It’s a good job you can set the rate yourself and override their ridiculous estimates.
To be fair we’ve been riding with a £500- £700 credit balance for a few years now so they are trying to give some of that back on a monthly basis. I did skip a couple of payments a while back to limit the amount they were holding.
In many ways it would be best for them to return the lot and recalculate our monthly payment but I’m quite happy having a cushion whilst rates are volatile and keep the montly payments close to what they should be.
As you say it’s easy to adjust the payment back yourself which is what I’ve done.
Indeed, we have built up a balance of £799.93 credit with Octopus and currently now pay £10 per month. and the payment predictor is suggesting something like -£12 per month which of course you can’t do on their DD system.
We have just fixed our E7 for another 12 months which unfortunately is about 11% more than the fantastic rate we secured last October… but assuming next year doesn’t have as sunny spring as this year.. we should be still be up about £150 net profit on the account for the year.
This is good news and far better than expected… and so at this rate we will pay off our PV battery inverter system in about half to two thirds of the time we anticipated.
The only thing I didn’t appreciate until I learned through experience is the importance of keeping the panels clean. Dust and bird droppings can diminish panel effectiveness. We have just been through harvest in the last month and the amount of dust in the air from the combines is significant… and the drop in performance until we had these recent heavy down pours in the last couple of weeks was noticeable.
I just pay Octopus whatever my balance is every month - I can’t see the benefit in giving them an interest free loan.
I guess the only reason to pay a regular amount would be if you were on a low income and needed help in budgeting, but I doubt that applies to many on here.
So far this year our bills have ranged from +£170 in January to -£120 in July. We thought about paying the actual amount but it would mean a big bill coming at Christmas, when everything is expensive anyway. It also makes setting the household monthly budget more difficult. As ex accountants Mrs HH and I do like our budget spreadsheet. So for us it’s easiest just to set the monthly DD at what we think it should be.
When we eventually have solar installed we will get them to remove the old tv serial. My neighbour did not and just about every seagull, pigeon in the area roosted and messed up his panels. He then had scaffolding up so a window cleaner could clean them…….except he still left the aerial up.
Yep, I took down the old vhf aerial and DAB aerial.. that helped.. however you will get droppings from all birds flying over or flying to perches nearby.. and nothing you can do about agricultural dust, however if the panels are on a steep roof pitch, not best for generation but easily cleaned by the rain.
Our south facing optimum angled panels on one of our flat roofs are more susceptible to gathering dirt, but easy to clean, and of course the rain cleans them but not quite as effectively as compared to the panels on the pitched roof.
We also got a long extendible window cleaner brush with water jets in the end of it.. so we can clean the panels manually on the pitched roof if needed.. but not really needed with the old aerials now removed
Being under a drought order cleaning our solar panels on our first storey pitched roof is not possible. We live in a rural area and I agree about the effect of agricultural dust. I haven’t tried to assess the impact though, it’s more of a strong suspicion based on comparing performance in the Netzero app which generates an estimate for each day based on the forecast.
I do t know where you are, but hopefully you have good rain over the last week or so that has helped clean them all up…it has helped here on the Suffolk coast.. though since spring our rainfall has been average to slightly above average in East Suffolk.. according to UK Gov.
We have a free electricity session from 2-3pm today. So battery charging happening and then an evening discharge as solar quite good until the rain started a few minutes ago.
Yes, quite spiky solar production today with sun and cloud.. but little or no haze I have noticed so when the sun is direct, production peaks right up for a few mins… doing a whole load of hot washes today.
I’ve never understood how to take advantage of this. Is it possible to import and export at the same time? We’ve been exporting at between 2,000W and 5,000W for the last hour. The batteries are full, the car doesn’t need charging, the washing was done overnight.
