Cheery's path to fulfilment - finishing the DIY, looking after myself, appreciating the garden 🌻

Cheery_Daff

OK, results of yesterday's cooking extravaganza are in. Can you tell what time I had the oven, 2 hobs, and the washing machine on?? 😂



It seems I've missed the super cheap Agile prices, and on the whole it's not loads cheaper than the flexible tariff (April 2023 wss the most up to date one on the conparison app, but at the end of November I'll check the actual prices against our consumption to see what the actual costs would have been).

Consumption in the expensive bit was marginally more expensive than it would have been on Flexible, but not much.



But our consumption was pretty low at that point. 

I should probably compare it to the fixed tariff I'd probably have shifted to if we hadn't shifted to Agile...

Not going to have a cooking spree this morning, will do that over the weekend. Need to focus on work instead today. Not sure what we'll end up doing at tea time - might even end up actually cooking a stir fry or something to see what the damage is.

Cheery_Daff

Ah, interesting - so yesterday would have been cheaper on the fixed tariff, despite my load shifting. Will leave this as the direct comparison for now - fixed may well work out better over the winter.

CCW007

Delurking to talk energy!

I've got a feeling that Agile tends to be less competitive over winter due to less solar production, although wind seems to have a surprisingly large effect on pricing.  We hit the sweet spot with Agile and moved to it just after lock down when industrial use plummeted so prices were really low and we ended up with a lot of plunge pricing.  Had a reminder on my phone every day at 3.55pm to say "turn everything off!"

It is a really useful exercise to understand your usage and get used to load shifting - we are on Intelligent now as we have an EV and load shift 2/3 of our usage to cheap rate so our average unit price last bill was 13p.  We can also use the EV for Vehicle To Load (V2L) so it acts as a giant battery for anything which can be run from a 3-pin plug but that involves car being parked in the right place and having windows open for the cable which is not ideal when it gets cold. 

Cheery_Daff

Thank you, always welcome people debunking to talk energy (or anything else for that matter!)

Didn't realise you could use the car as a giant battery, how interesting! I remember popping to a neighbour's farm in a severe weather power cut a few years back and they had the tractor acting basically as a giant generator, powering the house 😂 Not a long term solution obviously but handy in an emergency! (They're a dairy farm so it was actually powering the cow sheds/milking equipment, the house was a side benefit 😂)

Will plough on with Agile for now - I don't want to fix now for 12 months and end up in the same situation at the start of next winter! 

Right, I really need to stop pontificating about energy and get some work done! 😱

Elisheba

I'm reading everyone's energy musings with interest! I currently have a 15 month fix with the sea creature company, and it would be interesting to see how that compared with their other offerings.  Oh, and well done on the winter coat charity shop win!  Nice coats tend to be priced quite high in CS's I've noticed, but still cheaper than buying new

themadvix

V2L doesn't work with all EVs, although it is coming - we can't do it with ours (I don't know about newer Model 3s). But we have the house battery so that helps.

@CCW007 that's a very impressive unit rate. We're on Intelligent too now (were on plain Go), but I can't see us getting to that - do you cook after 11.30?! (Perhaps you have an airfryer instead of an oven...)

CCW007

During a power cut we ran the router off the car so could carry on working - how diligent is that!  We use the air fryer as much as we can, only use the ovens when necessary.  Washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer (if necessary), car charging, hot water and under floor heating all go on during cheap rate so it's probably that we are heavy users during that time which contributes to average being so low!

~FlowerPot~

gosh all this energy talk is very interesting, as soon as im feeling more with it, im going to go back to unit counting and getting a better grip on what we are using as a starting point.

greenbee

I need to spend some time working out some automation for my battery (and possibly the electric bits of my heating) as rushing/being tired means I didn't charge at the cheapest time last night. In theory it SHOULD pick up the best slots from Agile automatically, but I need to get a better understanding of how this works. So far this week it's been 11p cheaper on Agile than it would have been on Flux - but I haven't been charging the battery. Over the month it is still working out quite a bit cheaper, but I only switched a week ago. I'll give it a bit longer before I decide whether to switch back. Flux is certainly easier, although building in some weather forecasting so I know how much I need to charge the battery would also be nice. 

themadvix

There are APIs for building weather forecasting into Home Assistant greenbee , but given it's cheaper for us to charge overnight than we get paid for export, in the winter the battery just charges to 100% regardless (and with an electric shower, there's often room in the battery by the time the sun has come up).