Free Energy Wed 21/8 (13:00-14:00)

[johnb80]

For the lucky Octopus customer, free energy tomorrow - Wednesday 13:00 to 14:00 get ready to switch everything on !

 

[DaevM]

Currently charging the car at 94% on solar. Will have to go for 60 mile round trip for fish, chips and cider on the beach tonight to celebrate my wife's birthday, just to create a bit of available storage for tomorrow ??
( for that whole hour ?)

 

[Bam Bam]

25 or so miles for free - not to be sniffed at!

 

[johnb80]

25 or so miles for free - not to be sniffed at!

Aye x 2 for me (2 EV’s), washing machine, tumble drier.and immersion will all be on as well.

 

[Rolfe]

Hmm.

 

[johnb80]

Hmm.

??

 

[Rolfe]

What I was saying in the other thread that if it's sunny you can lose enough solar export (at 15p) to make the gains (assuming you'd have paid 7p to buy the same energy off peak) questionable.

I'm away from home anyway, so I'll follow how you guys get on.

 

[johnb80]

What I was saying in the other thread that if it's sunny you can lose enough solar export (at 15p) to make the gains (assuming you'd have paid 7p to buy the same energy off peak) questionable.

I'm away from home anyway, so I'll follow how you guys get on.

Now I'm confused, this thread is about free energy today for 1 hour, I didnt quite understand the Hmm response?

Probably me being slow on the uptake here.

 

[Rolfe]

I said. You have to factor in the loss of your solar export during that hour. If there is excess, that will be used before the free grid leccy comes into play.

 

[johnb80]

I said. You have to factor in the loss of your solar export during that hour. If there is excess, that will be used before the free grid leccy comes into play.

Told you, it was me being slow

How did your journey go?
I'm doing 190 miles tonight down to Bristol and back tomorrow with another EV in the back of our MG5

 

[Rolfe]

It's all detailed in another thread. Used electricity like there was no tomorrow in southern Scotland and northern England, till it became obvious that Forton was not a thing that was going to happen. Stopped at Tebay where I had a short wait to get on a charger but still made it on only three charges. 450 miles in ten and three quarter hours including a fair bit of pleasant eating.

Just heading 16 miles on only 14% battery, but ABRP says I should get there on 5%. I'll go slow. There are destination chargers there.

 

[DaevM]

6.5kWh again.
Car up to 100% from 94 and balanced (?!!?)
DHW up to 50° from 41
Dom battery 74-98% ( however solar contributing ).
Used 6.48kWh from the grid. It's a cloudy day so domestic battery may/may not have got to 100% by the end of the day and who needs 100% car battery on an LR battery when they're doing 50-100 miles a week at most - again, solar can cover it.
I get paid for solar fit whether I use it or hand it over but only 6p/kWh, so it doesn't matter whether I use the Octopus freebie or solar.

 

[Atworth196]

I got 55p as a credit for the 1 hours use ! Yipee.

 

[brianharries]

I said. You have to factor in the loss of your solar export during that hour. If there is excess, that will be used before the free grid leccy comes into play.

Unless………. You have a Tesla Wall2 house battery! You can then be charging the house battery (5KW); the Car (7KW); Immersion heater (3.5KW) Dishwasher and Washing Machine (up to 5KW variably); (Oven (3KW) and a few other appliances, rendering the few KW of Solar as rather insignificant! It’s not a how to, just what worked for me on this 1hr free Electric with Octopus.

 

[Rolfe]

I haven't figured out how to get the battery with space to accept charge at one in the afternoon. I did charge the car and run the immersion heater, but these would only have cost 7p a unit to do off peak. (I also ran the vacuum cleaner, but I didn't need any clothes or dishes washed right then.)

It happened to be very sunny during that hour and before taking any "free" electricity my car etc used the solar which I would otherwise have got 15p for. In the end it wasn't worth all the running around.

 

[Rolfe]

I see they're offering another hour tomorrow. I expect everyone with solar has figured out the catch by now, but I'll spell it out just in case anyone's new to this, with a worked example.

Here is tomorrow's weather forecast.

My panels will export a steady 4.8 kw in full sun, and on a day with a forecast like that I would expect to generate the full 4.8 kwh in that time. That's 72p in export credit. If I try this game, the first thing that will happen is that I'll lose all that export, because the house/charger will use the solar first before it draws anything from the grid. It's the laws o' physics, Cap'n. You can't import and export at the same time.

If I plug the car in for an hour it might draw 7.2 kw for the hour, if I'm extremely quick off the mark. So that's 7.2 kwh "free" that I'd otherwise have paid 7p/kwh for. That's 50.4p. So if that's all I do I've actually lost 21.6p. In order to get into profit I have to use another 3.2 kwh.

I could discharge my battery beforehand to make space for (in my case) 3.6 kwh in the hour, but what good would that do me? I'm already at my export limit from all that sunshine. I'm not going to get paid anything for what I dump from the battery to make room for "free" electricity, so that isn't going to work.

OK, put on the water heater, except it's unlikely to draw power for a full hour unless the tank was pretty cold at the beginning. Run the dishwasher, run the washing machine? Maybe, but these take more than an hour to complete a cycle, and what they take outwith the magic hour will also be robbed from the solar export. Power tools? I don't even have any. Once the car charger is running, the law of diminishing returns sets in quite quickly.

It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. You have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place, and if you want to go anywhere you have to run even faster. All that hassle to save a few pennies, if that.

It's not a coincidence that Octopus are doing this on very sunny days. They can read the forecast too. They know they'll have more solar than they know what to do with, so they're trying to get rid of it. If people who have solar export tariffs join in the party, so much the better, that's some solar they're not going to have to pay for. But if you have solar with an export tariff, think long and hard before you get into this one.

Last time I did the running around during the hour, and I made only a few pennies. The hot water tank happened to be almost cold at the time, by coincidence, so I turned on the Eddi then had a shower on the proceeds in the middle of the hour so I got as much hot water out of them as possible in the hour. That plus the car plus I vacuumed out the boot before I went for the shower put me slightly into profit, but only because the solar was reduced by a cloud coming over about half way through the magic hour. It doesn't look like that's going to happen tomorrow.

If you said to me, if you run around like a blue-arsed fly for an hour and have a shower in the middle of it all and I'll give you 10p (or whatever it was), I'd laugh in your face. Not playing that game, thank you Octopus.

If you don't have solar then you'll be in profit from the get-go. Knock yourself out. If a large black cloud decides to settle over your house at one in the afternoon tomorrow, go for it. But otherwise do some rough calculations before you leap at this "free offer".

 

[DaevM]

Wow, that's comprehensive ??.

I've got a different tariff which I'm paid based on 50% of what I generate regardless. It doesn't matter what I do, I could use 100% or 0, I get paid the same whether I export it or use it. As you say though, an hour = pence so not really worth the effort.
Also I've noticed I've taken part in 3 and been paid for two. The third was 9 days ago, plenty of time for them to have paid the third, although they do state upto 14 days. The worry about this is not so much having not been paid but if it isn't included as a freebie in my bill and charged at peak rate!! - we will see.

In the meantime, as I stated previously, I think it is more about them testing ways for the grid to accommodate renewables, which are generated on/off, rather than the ramp up/ ramp down of traditional generators. We allow them to effectively create a buffer and protect the grid, which wasn't designed for off on. Unfortunately, during renewables productive periods we're all full from our own solar generation anyway and can't provide any buffer space!

 

[Rolfe]

I don't actually know which tariffs are included in the offer, only that if you get the email you're eligible. If they're only offering it to people with export tariffs, that's pretty naughty. I did wonder about it being worth it if you're on a feed-in tariff, but I don't know if Octopus even offer such a tariff, let alone whether they've extended the offer to these customers (if they exist).

The half price car charging was worth doing, because my car was literally on 5% at the time, and it was a night-time effort so no solar to lose. I rammed as much as possible into the battery but I think I only saved about £1.85. People with bigger batteries would be able to get more of course, but many people wouldn't have come home almost on their last electron the day before, as I did, so wouldn't have room for so much. But it was a genuine offer.

The mid-day one is very much a two-edged sword if you have significant solar generation, and needs careful calculation as to whether it's really worth it taking into account the export payment that you're foregoing by taking part.

 

[mystreet]

I don't have solar or batteries but have registered and got the email to say free tomorrow.
I will probably plug the car in for the hour, if I remember.
That's about it, 25 miles (ish)

 

[Rolfe]

It's certainly worth it if you don't have solar. No export to lose, so even if it's not a huge gain, it's still a gain. But a lot of people don't realise that if they participate they're going to lose an hour's solar export until they see it being gobbled up by the car and the water heater and the dishwasher.