Octopus Energy’s are famous for their innovative Agile tariff which sets prices half-hourly based on the market rates of electricity. It’s a great plan and you can read about our experience of using it in this blog: Our Agile Octopus electricity tariff blog
You may not have read about another of their tariffs, Octopus Go. Designed primarily for electric vehicle users, it’s a dual rate tariff which offers four hours of electricity at 5p per unit starting at half past midnight every day, and a low peak rate for the remaining 20 hours (in our area its currently 13.96p during peak times). As even the peak rate is cheaper than many standard tariffs it’s worth checking out even if you don’t have an electric vehicle or home battery system.
We have an electric car and a Tesla Powerwall home battery. Our house is also electrically heated by an air source heat pump, and during the months when we don’t need the heating on we mostly get by using our solar panels to charge the car and the Powerwall, heat the water cylinder, and still draw almost nothing from the electricity grid.
However, during the winter months we do use mains electricity. Our electricity consumption for the year 2020 was 3129kWh. The Octopus Go tariff therefore makes tremendous sense for us. We switched from the Agile tariff to Go in December. Octopus make this very easy and if you’re already with them you can do it via their website.
A cold week in January 2021
Let’s look at a couple of days during the previous week during which we were paid a visit from Storm Christoph and the horrible conditions he brought along. I’ve firstly chosen Tuesday because it was dark all day so we got almost no production from the solar panels. The bar graph on the Octopus dashboard shows the Powerwall charging during 00:30 and 04:30 and it’s not until 15:30 that the battery was depleted and we started to use grid electricity again. You can see from the Tesla screenshot that there was just 0.4kWh from the solar panels. This is an example of a worst case scenario:
It’s important to remember that our home is electrically heated. We’re using approximately 20kWh per day for space heating and hot water. In a house heated using gas, oil or solid fuel it’s likely that there would have been no grid import during peak times.
Switching to Octopus Go
If you have a battery storage system and you’re already with Octopus Energy, contact them and ask to switch to the Agile tariff. If you’re not with Octopus Energy then you can use the following link to switch your electricity supplier. There’s a £50 opening credit from them for you, and £50 applied to my account too.
Switch to Octopus Energy by clicking here and enjoy a £50 reward.
Battery storage systems
We install battery storage systems to all types of solar PV system in the North West of England, including adding batteries to existing systems. We only use excellent quality products that actually work, and include full monitoring so that you can see it in action. Give us a call for a chat.