Free electricity with Octopus for the last year - well, almost

[bn8959]

That’s right. You tell it your energy plan (times and import/export rates) and it works it all out itself.

there is a way to force it to charge up, but no way to manually make it discharge. But if there is an energy saving session coming up, then you can plumb in the extreme export rate (eg £2/kwh) and it should then decide to charge up in advance and dump to the grid during that time automatically. It’s remarkably clever!

Take this example where it only charged up to around 30%. Discharged after 5:30am when the cheap rate ends. Sits idle while solar is powering everything, tops itself up a tiny bit during the day, and knows just how much to see us through the evening period when solar has wound down, but the 23:30 cheap rate hasn’t started:

Another example:

Sponsored

 

[Jin]

love reading this!

now you will enter a world of home automation/home assistant... where the aim is to try to get all the systems automated

the panacea of knowing when the car is charging, when you have a cheap rate, fill the battery if needed, if there's a savings session to then auto discharge for that period etc...

I'm sure it can be done.. just not sure by me!

 

[Nickj]

That’s right. You tell it your energy plan (times and import/export rates) and it works it all out itself.

there is a way to force it to charge up, but no way to manually make it discharge. But if there is an energy saving session coming up, then you can plumb in the extreme export rate (eg £2/kwh) and it should then decide to charge up in advance and dump to the grid during that time automatically. It’s remarkably clever!

Take this example where it only charged up to around 30%. Discharged after 5:30am when the cheap rate ends. Sits idle while solar is powering everything, tops itself up a tiny bit during the day, and knows just how much to see us through the evening period when solar has wound down, but the 23:30 cheap rate hasn’t started:

Another example:

Hi, Tesla PW specific q. For the week or so I had just the battery going it charged the PW every night up to the max, and then just ran of it during the day, happy days, no peak rate elec. Now the solar is live it’s stopped charging the battery overnight and been using the solar to top up the battery during the day. This has been fine but now my export rate has gone live today (15p) and I want to charge the battery to the max each night and then sell all solar ( double bubble profit!). How do you get the TPW to force charge the PW at cheap rate each night?

 

[bn8959]

Hi, Tesla PW specific q. For the week or so I had just the battery going it charged the PW every night up to the max, and then just ran of it during the day, happy days, no peak rate elec. Now the solar is live it’s stopped charging the battery overnight and been using the solar to top up the battery during the day. This has been fine but now my export rate has gone live today (15p) and I want to charge the battery to the max each night and then sell all solar ( double bubble profit!). How do you get the TPW to force charge the PW at cheap rate each night?

In theory it should work out if it’s profitable and decide for itself. You just have to set the import and export rates.

Mine are set:

However, mine doesn’t charge up to max and discharge to grid every day.
I suspect that these rates it’s working out that with a full charge and discharge cycle to grid is going to net around 50p, it’s thinking it’s not worth doing (given the potential wear it will cause). Which I think is fair - it’s just not worth it for such a tiny gain. You’d only need to run out of battery later in the evening and use 2kWh and it would negate all the gains.

Try adding changing ‘peak’ to ‘mid-peak’ and adding a new peak period 5pm to 7pm with an export rate of £2. I bet it will then charge to full overnight and discharge itself over that period. But again, I agree with its original logic and it’s not worth doing at these rates.

 

[Nickj]

So, after a bit of googling it seems some reduce the off peak sell price so I reduced it to zero, and the last 3 nights it’s discharged the battery to grid each evening, and literally to the last % before it went into peak rate, and the charged the battery to 100% on cheap charge each night. Exported max at 15p every day so clever stuff so far. Looks like my battery will def get its cycles!

 

[bn8959]

Very interesting. I’ve changed my off peak sell rate to zero as well - see if it changes behaviour - only difference to before was both peak and off-peak sell rates were £0.15 (which is technically correct).

Sponsored