Help with solar tariffs

Shellyperth

We have just ordered 30 solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall 3.  We have a plugin hybrid car which will be replace by a fully EV in time. We had planned to go with octopus but the Eon Next Export Exclusive looks like a good deal but unlike Octopus they are rather vague regarding charging the battery from the grid using off peak and selling back during peak if you have spare capacity. Do any of you have experience of this. Looked at Eon forum and they are avoiding answering it would appear. 

Thank you in advance 

Reed_Richards

They will presumably get half-hourly readings of your export.  So if you discharge your battery to export during the hours of darkness they will know what you're doing but timed correctly during daylight hours it would be well-nigh impossible to distinguish solar from battery discharge.

Another angle, if you buy electricity when it's cheap for them to buy it and sell it when it's expensive for them to buy it then you're doing them a favour, using your battery so they don't have to invest in battery storage.   

Qyburn

I've just changed to Octopus Go for import, which gives five hours cheap rate at 8.5p/kWh. Fixed export at 15p/kWh.  Currently I charge to 80% overnight, then during the day charge only from clipped solar which would otherwise be wasted.

Reed_Richards

That was a mistake, @Qyburn.  If you had switched to Eon Next you could have got 7 hours cheap rate at 6.7p per kWh on their NextDrive tariff and fixed export at 16.5p per kWh.  That's better than Octopus in every respect.

Qyburn

Reed_Richards said:

That was a mistake, @Qyburn. 

Thanks. I'm kind of stuck with Octopus until the meter is fixed. Does EON require you to actually have an EV?

Officer_Dibble

The current version of EON Nextdrive explicitly allows solar without an EV (though not all the online info's up to date about this). The previous version explicitly didn't (though they didn't actually check)

EON's SEG payments are stuck in the dark ages and rely on photos of the meter rather than smart readings. Their Ts & Cs have a very vague "We reserve the right to reduce, withhold or recover SEG Export Payments if...we believe You may be abusing the SEG Tariff", but they'd only know you were deliberately cycling it if the export amount was suspiciously high. I don't do it personally as it's against the spirit of the tariff (and if everyone does it, it'll soon get worse) and at under 10p/kWh profit is it really worth reducing the battery life?

Screwdriva

Probably worth factoring in Eon's customer service into the equation when compared to Octopus. And then there's the highly lucrative Octopus Intelligent Flux tariff (which Tesla now qualifies for).