Here I go again ….

vienna28

Rosie, excellent news!  Keep all their chaotic emails in case they start to hassle you again in a few months. 👍

Probably best you remain on E10 because I didn't realise your E10 switches off on the 9 minute mark.  

Because with Octopus Snug there is one big flaw.  On Snug you would have likely switched off at 6:39am instead of 6:30am, also for the cheap afternoon hour you would have likely switched off at 5:09pm instead of 5pm.

The big flaw with Octopus snug is you would have been charged peak rate for those 9 minute overruns. 

So only a 1 or 2 minutes overrun on Snug maybe ok,  but 9 minute overruns into peak rate on snug would quickly prove costly.

So let's hope you can continue on E10 for many more years.  👍

Rosie1001

The meter is switching on my heaters etc , in the winter I switch them on and leave them until around march time weather depending 

they are not timer controlled ..they are old type ..

Does snug need timers etc … or is it the acls in the meter doing the timings ??

I still may switch as this E10 is just a variable so could prove expensive in comparison to snug 

Swipe

@vienna28 Is it possible to set Snug to switch the ACLS off an hour earlier and instead just turn your storage heater input dial up to compensate, so you don't get an overrun early morning? The afternoon boost hour I could set a reminder and do it manually on the wall plug. Would that work? My ACLS overruns by 6.5 mins.

vienna28

Swipe and Rosie, my storage heaters are over 30 years old and manual.  So I always prefer to turn on and off manually anyway.  So I personally can avoid overrunning into peak rate.

My E7 always came on 12:37am - 7:37am (hour later in the Summer).  So when I switched to snug it still came on and off on the 7 minute mark.  Likewise others who have switched to snug report whatever minute overrun it was on E7 is exactly the same on snug. 

There is snug settings (for overnight, not afternoon) where you can set the ALCS to control how long you want the storage heaters and hot water on for.  You can set from 0 hours, it goes up in half hour increments up to 6 hours.  It's not perfect but it's usually within half hour of accuracy.

Some people won't like this but if somebody set for example 3 hours overnight, let's say your storage heaters and hot water came on between 2am-5am.  Once it turned off at 5am you couldn't then have a change of plan and switch the storage heaters on for a couple of more hours that morning.  So if using snug settings choose the right amount because you won't get any more than you set for that morning.  Yes your plugs and everything else would still be off peak rate until 6:30am but no more storage heaters or hot water that morning.  In the afternoon you could still put your storage heaters or hot water on because that is not included in the snug settings.

So that's why I mostly prefer leaving the settings on 6 hours and then I can switch the storage heaters on and then off for how many hours I want.  And my hot water only takes around an hour to heat, so i also prefer to heat that manually. 

Though because my living room storage heater retains heat well throughout the day and I can usually get by on just 3 or so hours.  So come the winter I probably will occasionally revert to snug settings. 

I am probably advertising Octopus snug terribly but actually I do like it.  If people fully understand you can overrun a few minutes into peak then it is pretty easy to avoid.

Rosie1001

So if I leave my heaters on all the time , they would run into peak times ??

at the minute on my E10 , it doesn’t matter what time they come on and off as all my electric switches over to the cheap rate 

vienna28

Swipe said:

@vienna28 Is it possible to set Snug to switch the ACLS off an hour earlier and instead just turn your storage heater input dial up to compensate, so you don't get an overrun early morning? The afternoon boost hour I could set a reminder and do it manually on the wall plug. Would that work? My ACLS overruns by 6.5 mins.

Swipe I'm not sure my long-winded response answered you.  But yes you could do it how you say. 

The afternoon cheap hour is now 4pm to 5pm (an hour earlier when the clocks change).  So with your 6.5 minute overrun, all your plug cheap rate would still be from 4pm to 5pm but your hot water and storage heaters wouldn't come on until just gone 4:06pm and if you let them run they would switch off just gone 5:06pm. 

So I guess with you it would be 53.5 minutes off peak on storage heaters and hot water in the afternoon.  Of course you could run that extra 6.5 minutes but you would be charged at peak rate.  And on plugs you would get the full cheap rate hour between 4pm to 5pm.

vienna28

Rosie1001 said:

So if I leave my heaters on all the time , they would run into peak times ??

at the minute on my E10 , it doesn’t matter what time they come on and off as all my electric switches over to the cheap rate 

Yes Rosie unfortunately so. 

E10 is simple and like E7,  in that you know when hot water or storage heaters are on you are on cheap rate.  

With Snug I'm pretty certain if you did let them run all the time, then you'd go 9 minutes into peak rate in the morning and then 9 minutes into peak rate in the afternoon.

Rosie1001

I don’t understand thou , if the meter is controlling the heaters etc how they run over 

debitcardmayhem

Rosie1001 said:

I don’t understand thou , if the meter is controlling the heaters etc how they run over 

The meter doesn’t know when the rates change , only when it switches on for  7 hours and then switches off, e.g. your meter switches on the circuit at  0007 it switches off at 0707, but the supplier charges from 0000-0700 ergo you lose 7 mins at the start and then have 7 mins at peak

vienna28

Rosie1001 said:

I don’t understand thou , if the meter is controlling the heaters etc how they run over 

Rosie, please read the opening post from "Worlestone" who started a thread on the subject:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6575726/snug-octopus-economy-7-problems/p1

On page 4 on the same thread snug user "Sebtomato" talked about the overrun into peak topic:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6575726/snug-octopus-economy-7-problems/p4

In my early time on Snug I experienced a slight glitch when I reverted back to E7 timings.

Here was an email response from customer service:

I hope I'm not painting a bad picture of snug because I really like being on it.  Yes the overrun issue may be offputing to some but I rarely overrun because I know it exists.