Finally got around to switching to Octopus Flux, which gets us cheap electricity to charge the batteries during the night. Of course, the day it goes active we get glorious sunshine and now I have a full battery but nowhere to store the solar. shakes fist at sun#solar#solarpower#batterystorage#renewables
@johnl I find OctopusGo is better tariff for winter 4hrs overnight at 9p to charge battery and run washing machine etc 8p export - to be fair very little electricity is exported with hours of sunlight available. I switch back to Flux mid March
@gruff yeah that is definitely a much better deal but you need proof you have an electric car + charger to sign up and we currently don't have one (and no plans to change that atm). Seems weird to me - I wonder if they get some kind of kickback for encouraging electric car use?
@johnl That’s weird I didn’t need to give any proof - did it online twice now . I know you need to with Intelligent as it needs to interact with car software
@gruff how long ago did you sign up for it? apparently it was a recent change in the last couple of years - my neighbour (somewhat insanely!) put a (returnable) deposit down on an electric car that he didn't ever intend to buy, just so he could show some evidence (still wasn't enough!)
@johnl First signed up Nov 2022, swapped to Flux March 2023 then back to Go Oct 2023 As I said, never asked whether I had a car or not - I don’t. Maybe it’s to do with postcode? You could try in 30 days to see if you can swap over Anyhow Flux is better than standard tariff Have you signed up to Octoplus?
@gruff might give it a go then, but lots of reports in various forums of people having trouble signing up without a car - started happening around March 2022 from what I can gather.
Octoplus seemed like a waste of time - having to keep track of certain windows at random times to save 50p here and there. Is it more than that?
@kel very well - battery storage really makes solar so much more worthwhile. However, we're conservative with electricity usage so even with a smallish array, we've have ended up with a lot of excess that we don't get paid much for. It's going to take 10+ years to pay for itself at this rate. Will be able to do immersion heater by next year so might help. It'll be a different story if we go with a heat pump though!
@kel install cost £11.5k. ~4000kwh solar over the last 12m. Assuming everything is 100% efficient and that we used 100% of it ourselves then we saved max £1040 @ 26p/kwh. Reality is obv different. Battery was often full during the summer, so we exported ~1100kwh, at a cheaper rate (now ~10p/kwh). Next year we'll use some of that to heat water though instead of kerosene, but kerosene is only ~10p/kwh. Greener though! Spose worth noting that 26p saved is worth a bit more because tax. #solar
@kel however, one benefit we wanted from battery storage was emergency power supply. So given a power outage, the freezers keep running and we can charge our phones/laptops, so that is worth something itself (though actually yet to finish setting it up!).
A fancier tesla powerwall thing would allow whole house to be powered but +£££
I would love to, but my electricity usage is so low it's hard to make sense of the numbers.
Fridge/Freezer, Oven, Kettle, Coffee Machine, Lights, Telecoms, Computing and Synths is about it - no heating!
The power outage thing is what got me thinking about it, maybe there's a very cheap and cheerful option that will drive some 12v stuff, the fridge freezer is a concern obviously, but it's modern so safe for a good while if I don't open it.
@kel yeah I find myself in a weird position where our fridge is big and old and power hungry but upgrading it makes even less sense now! Works fine though, so one less thing in landfill at least.
There are high capacity backup power banks around the few hundred mark that will run laptops and phones for days.
Plus, house insurance does usually cover freezers affected by power outages, if your freezer happens to be packed with expensive food.
Living as I did for years I only had a tiny fridge, let alone a freezer!
So when I moved back into a normal dwelling, I bought a new fridge freezer - oh the luxury!! It's just a few years old and highly rated and I love it 😂 so convenient!!
Hmmm, could be worth it at a few ££ I will have a look. I literally need some LED lighting and to power router and laptop/phone to be able to continue as normal, which is kind of funny!
@revk ah nice, I was just writing a follow up toot as I should be able to do that with home assistant. I have it integrated with everything it needs to handle it, so just some rules to write!
@revk the main problem is deciding if it's worth forced discharge during the peak time - too difficult to take into account all the variables, including inverter efficiency and shortening lifetime of the batteries!
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