David, that is what we decided, i have mentally written off the money and am happy with lower bills and resilience. I have decided to charge to 90% ( could do 100), and not to discharge to low either…….leaving a healthy 30% or more overnight in case of power cuts. I am not interested chasing the money via interactive tarrif…..at the moment.
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It looks like Octopus are offering IOG on a 12 month fix at 8p. As I am already on IOG I can’t test signing up.
As far as I am aware you can purchase E7 time of use tariff. That is what we use with our battery and Octopus. I have found it has worked better than so called smart tariffs for our usage, but we dont use an EV
Unfortunately Octopus E7 tariffs are currently unavailable, like all of their ‘time of use’ tariffs.
perhaps shop around?
There is EDF, Ovo and British Gas that also have good current E7 rates according to the web.
I would have thought if there was a general unavailability for new accounts it would have made the news - and it hasn’t as far as I am aware. All I can see in the media is some suppliers have pulled longer term rates at the cheaper end, citing volatility and subsidy restructuring.
Perhaps if none of the above are offering at least E7 then that should be news worthy. A lot of people in the UK are dependent on E7 that use electricity for direct heating.
isn’t it the other way around? If you get good solar generation you are isolated more from the peak rates.
Off peak can be used for charging the battery in winter and things like washing machines/ dishwashers etc as well as charging EVs, storage heaters etc
I’ve just called Octopus and asked what tariffs I could have if I were a new customer. Of the time of use tariffs, I could have Economy 7, Cosy, Go, Intelligent Go and possibly some others too. The difference compared to the previous situation is that all these, or certainly Cosy and the two Gos would be offered as fixed prices only. So it’s not the case that all time of use tariffs are suspended, if that helps others.
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When I spoke to Octopus yesterday they were very clear, and somewhat apologetic, that all of their time of use tariffs were currently unavailable. If you try to switch to one online you get this message, and you cannot proceed any further.
I’ve looked at other suppliers websites, and spoken to someone at Eon who knew nothing, but is in the process of investigating and will get back to me. It doesn’t help that all of them insist that you switch to one of their regular tariffs before you can access any time of use tariff, so checking out all of them would require several hours of call centre time. I’ll persist with Eon, but if I try all of them I’ll probably have a caffeine overdose before I get any further.
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When peoples energy collapsed we got dumped onto british gas. When i looked around at other companies when we got a plug in hybrid they want you to have full EV and an EV charger. Its not worth us paying £1k to charge a 14 kw battery quicker. So i was able to change to the british gas EV tarrif which is 7.9 p ( changes to 9p soon) from 12 until 5 am, and an export tariff of 15.1p. The export tariff has no limitation on what time of day you export. British gas say they might ask questions about you EV etc, but never did…….
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Hence my question a few days ago about how robust this view of batteries being economic actually is if you considered the likelihood of favorable tariffs not continuing over the life of the battery.
Well that doesn’t say you can’t join up - just says you need to be an octopus customer and have an appropriate smart meter.
I am in a couple of octopus groups on Facebook and several people have said this month “I can’t join a tou tariff” then someone pops up and says they joined yesterday, the OP comes back and says “oh I can!”
Once you are a customer with a smart meter then you can switch (at least that is my understanding)
Read the bit in blue at the bottom half of the page marked “Important” Tim!
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It says quite clearly that the tariff is “temporarily unavailable”. Normally you can switch to it online. Now you can’t.
Gazza do BG collect all metering information electronically - or do you need to manually provide export metering like with some providers. Also do export and import combine into a single account with BG.
I might be tempted to move from Octopus they seem to be struggling a bit at the moment with the volatility and they have cut their export rates blaming significant reduction in wholesale prices - and some other reasons such as low level domestic export doesn’t match when the demand is…. and then put up the import rates due to the increase in wholesale rates because of the US/Iran war.
To my mind they could have put up the export rates as well and reduced back down when some sort of normality on whole sale prices has returned.
In the news we see that in varying regions across the UK we may get free weekend domestic electricity on sunny/windy days.. as opposed to the occasional hours that some of us get now
For reference I have only ever once been able to switch tariffs with Octopus online - all other times it has required a telephone call to their service / sales desk, as I get messages saying online I am unable to switch tariff. I have mentioned this to them and been advised of system issues etc- but its been like that on my account for over a year now.
However when you speak to a person you can sometimes gain more beneficial terms compared to those listed online - or at least I have.
We applied for the British gas SEG export which is separate to our other BG account, we will get paid into our bank account every 3 months. They collect the data from our Smets2 meter themselves. You do not need to be with British gas to apply for a SEG tariff, but it is much quicker and you get paid much more. You also export when you want to, not at defined time slots.
We got our export licence in just under 3 weeks.
I didn’t realise SEG varies by so much - with Octopus, SEG is about 4p per kWh
The higher non SEG rates with Octopus are linked to buying an Octopus import tariff…..
Yes no complaints with our DNO and Octopus for our G99 - we got it in about 7 or 10 days from memory. Our designer and installer company is MCS certified so could self validate the install and provide certain key photographs with the G99 application - that might have sped things up… though from memory the key thing was the positioning and visibility of the safety and warning labels!!. (They mostly do large commercial/industrial and agricultural installations)
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We are now on day 3 of our install. The Solar panel mounts are all there and today they are supposed to be putting the panels on them and getting the wiring into the loft. Tomorrow the battery and expansion pack will be installed and everything should be connected up and switched on. The MCS inspector is apparently coming tomorrow too, although I find it hard to believe that everything will be completely finished by then.
But on the other hand the sun has just broken through the clouds a bit and so it’s not actually drizzling any more.
I’m on an Octopus fix at the moment. I will try tomorrow or Friday to change it to Octopus Go. If I can’t do that then I’ll leave it for a few weeks in the hope that things will resolve. I haven’t got the G99 yet so can’t do much on the export side for the time being.
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