And now we go again...

PennysIntoPounds

Hooray to beer double discount! I actually managed to use one of the vouchers when meeting a friend the other day, only another eleventy million to go 😁🍻

Baileys_Babe

Beautiful photos, I'm much further north but only managed a small bit of pink in the sky 😞 hoping I will be more successful in the future. The sky hasn't been clear for the previous sighting this year.

I'm another who would be interested in which app you used as we are dithering about which tariff would work best for us.

themadvix

You inspired us to look again at our Octopod tariff - using an app to do the heavy lifting. We’ve made the switch to Intelligent Go as it reckons we could save 25% (because of the solar our bills are small with the exception of the car), so thank you for the nudge.

Cheery_Daff

Ooh, thanks for the app info all, I've just loaded it up. Basically everything is cheaper than what we're on 😂 For us, agile is cheapest, then tracker, then fixed, then the flexible on which we're on, but I haven't paid for the app so I can only see the last month. Seems to be suggesting agile is 8% cheaper for us (over the last month) but we actually don't use much so there's not much in it. 

Will investigate properly when I've got a piece of paper rather than trying to remember the numbers 😂

greenbee

Agile import is better than Flux for me, but I need to work out the impact of moving to fixed or Agile export. I suspect it would get complicated! At the moment I am just about being paid more for export than I pay for consumption, but still have standing charge costs. That’s likely to change over the next couple of months - even if I import at cheap rate and export my spare at the end of the day.

EssexHebridean

Morning all - I used the Octoprice website to do my comparisons, and am now using it to check on the half hourly prices too https://www.octopriceuk.app/agile You can also add your account details in there and then it gives you lots of options to compare things against current, which sounds similar to the app that greenbee mentioned too. I've only gone the route I have as I have s0d-all space on my phone for any more apps!   The one a lot of folk use is a chargeable one - at least on iOs - so I thought I would see how I got on with a free option first. It may be that we decide that a bit more ability to predict could be handy, although the Agile thread on here is a useful took for that, too. 

So far we're pretty pleased - we paid a fraction over 16p/kWh yesterday on average, and made use of some low cost timeslots to do various bits - a load of bedding through and pretty much dried overnight, and some cooking too... Today's average is higher but we're out for most of it so not an issue - I will want to be sure that any cooking tonight gets done outside of pricey times but I think I've worked out a tea that doesn't include any cooking anyway. It's definitely only suitable if you are prepared to engage with it and really think through your energy use, but as said, load-shifting isn't anything new to us, so all good there. Checking the following days pricing sometime after 4pm needs to become part of my routine! 

MSE Stuff:
- WM/Dryer and DW used on Saturday night/sunday morning in order to make them pretty much free to us thanks to a bit of negative pricing on Agile
- Free exercise by means of a walk round to one of our local c0-0ps yesterday morning to use vouchers for 25p off MrEH's newspaper and £1 off our shop...and as a result bought MrEH's milk and a punnet of YS'd mushrooms for a grand total of 90p (he has a subscriber voucher for the paper)
- Mushrooms chopped up and roasted as soon as we got back, along with all the currently ripe HG tomatoes. Toms are now in the freezer and mushies in the fridge ready for use probably tomorrow night. 
- MrEH timed making rolls yesterday to have the oven on at the same time I also wanted to prep lunch so the YS'd quiche (from the freezer) heated up alongside the rolls cooking and those roasted veggies...
- ....made even more use of the oven by throwing together a quick apple crumble - both apples and crumble topping from the freezer!
- we have been wanting a bird bath for the garden for ages. We don't get cats in our garden, so one at ground level is not an issue, but we've just not seen one we like for a price we were willing to pay. Suddenly realised a while back that a large glazed and frostproof plant saucer would work well, so acquired one for £13.99 yesterday in a glorious deep blue, lovely and FAR cheaper than a dedicated "bird bath"! It's lifted slightly off the ground using some of those tiles we "rescued" on a walk a few weeks ago in another "shopping from home" win! 
- Further batch cooking done yesterday evening - and the first slight irritation on the Agile thing meaning I had to wait until a bit later than ideal to do it. Of course what I should have done was got my act together to deal with it earlier in the day though, so..! Anyway, macaroni cheese with black pudding and bacon, 4 portions of, 2 now in the freezer and 2 will be eaten on Wednesday night! 
- Crumpets from the freezer eaten for tea last night - that's the last of them so I need to keep my eye out for YS's again!
- The freezer is actually starting to feel a bit more empty which is good - MrEH was saying we needed more sandwich fillings for lunches but I explored beneath the frozen veg and found several he'd forgotten about!
- our subscription to the gardening mag we like will be ending in the next few months so I am keeping eyes peeled for any decent deals to renew. 

I will keep my eye for suitable Agile pricing this week to enable a load of towels to be washed and (hopefully) dried too.

Tea this evening will be the rest of the quiche with some tatties I boiled yesterday, and whatever salad stuff I can rustle together as we need something super-quick as we have a meeting to go to this evening in the same town we were in on Saturday. It starts at 8.30 so we should have time to get there OK. 

greenbee

I'll be interested to see how you get on with Agile. Right now I don't think it's going to be worth me switching. Flux works well for me as peak rate is 4-7pm, which on weekdays is before the end of my working day so I'm sitting in my office surrounded by screens and everything else is off! I do think anyone able to shift main (cooked) meals to the middle of the day is likely to win. And working from home probably gives me some advantage given the ability to load shift laundry and the DW. The compare app current suggests marginal savings, but that could be because I've already adapted a lot. I might try your website too. Roll on the introduction of smart devices that can link to your tariff and stop/start at pre-set thresholds - fridges and freezers don't need to run compressors continuously, and washing machines and dishwashers can be set to 'finish in' and pause their cycles. 

ETA - that comparison was interesting. It estimates I'd save £150 on import BUT lose out by about £300 on export So now I know I can stay put. I suspect this is because I'm a fairly low user, so only really need the grid for flexibility and during the most miserable days in winter. 

EssexHebridean

From what I've seen that 4-7pm timeslot seems to be peak with Agile too which makes sense of course, and like you that mostly works OK for us - it might be a little less convenient at weekends, and may mean that I either have to take a breath and use it anyway, or delay cooking my tea on a Tuesday, but aside from that we just aren't generally in at that time.  I'm also pretty flexible about switching meals about as needed through the week too - this evening was going to be the re-heated Mac/black/cheese but having looked at the unit prices even just after 7pm we decided that a cold meal tonight would be fine, and the requirement to reheat something can just wait..! 

We already use the delay settings on our WM and DW a fair bit - again, a hangover from our old E7 days - and we've found ourselves consistently still tending to stick particularly the DW on overnight anyway just out of habit...  You're right though, if you have already load shifted a fair bit then the further savings from any change of tariff to another "smart" one is now likely to give relatively small gains - and I think we all have our "tolerance" on savings -v- the hassle of having to get used to something different don't we - rightly so! 

themadvix

I think we used a chargeable iOS app EH, but it offered a 30-day free trial when Mr MV downloaded. Clearly this isn't relevant for you now, but worth checking for anyone else who might be thinking of it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we're too lazy to load shift - we definitely do (and I think with solar, it's a given to some extent), but I don't want to be in the position of getting behind with things because I'm too tight/feel too guilty to use the power when necessary. So Octo Agile Go is great for us - but you have to have an EV and it has to be able to deal with charging times being set by the grid, not it. But it's giving us an extra hour of cheap rate leccy compared to straightforward Go - now 11.30pm to 5.30am, which means most of our DW load will be running under this now, as well as the car (and I'll get an extra hour of drying for the heated airer too).

Baileys_Babe

Thanks everyone for your comments on various tariffs and apps. This is something we want to review and your shared knowledge will help our discussion.