Discount for using electricity away from peak times?

Yes, smart meter required plus a sign up before hand to get the payment for electricity saved (compared to recent average short term usage between 5 and 6 pm.)

If currently on a fixed price contract Brian will seriously have to consider his options when the contract has ended. As others have indicated, a Economy 7 tariff may now be more expensive than having all the electricity on a Standard Variable Rate contract.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Chris Hogg snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes

Heaven knows how we're ever going to fuel all those electrical vehicles!

Is it time for the two levels of price csap, and price guarantee to end, they're inhibiting cometition, virtuslly no suppliers are taking n new customers.

Time to let those who can't really compete since they're just # "box-shifters for energy bills" dissappear?

Even the highest spike of wholesale electricity this week has only been £0.88/kWh, so how do they think it's worthwhile paying nearly 4x that?

IIUC correctly, the initiative is costed more along the lines of encouraging a change in behaviour to both reduce consumption, and spread it around more evenly to help use feed-in from renewables.

In general, the colder it got the lower wind speed!

And the swap from gas to all electric central heating.

You could have a configuration that would act as a glorified UPS but it has to include complex load switching to isolate your house from the grid before it can fire up. The default behaviour is that when the mains grid goes down so do all the solar power inverters.

I doubt if it can respond in a couple of seconds so you are stuck with any short glitches.

It was local generation affecting net load shedding calculations that threw a spanner in the works when they had that big blackout one summer after a lightning strike took out a generator.

easy! use a wankel engine running on petrol to drive a 20 kW genny to recharge the battery.... euphumistically called a Range extender!

Does the smart meter provide a read-out of the supply voltage? I've a plug-in power meter socket that I use occasionally. It usually reports the expected 239-240 V, but mid-morning one day last week, and today, read 234-236 V. I think that persisted today through the afternoon, but was back to a steady 240 V by 5.30. At ?7.30 though it was actually reporting 242/243 V, which I don't remember seeing before. A couple of hours ago it was back to 240/241, but even now it's 242/243 V again.

All, I assume, within standard system tolerances: is there any consumer apparatus that is going to hiccup? More interesting were this evening's over-voltages. A consequence of limited flexibility / degrees of freedom in the system?

yup

no

The thought of a government that has removed the basic human right of access to reasonably priced energy from its citizens is the sort of problem Africa faces.

Not Britain.

Until the greens got the hands on the reins...

No one is reporting it. Far more excited about TERFS.

As far as I am aware, a small over-voltage (eg up to 260 V) is fine for PSUs in electronic equipment. The switched-mode power supply will just turn on for a smaller proportion of each of its high-frequency cycles, to ensure that the output remains within much tighter tolerances. Resistive equipment (electric fires, kettles) will run a little bit hotter and will use more power according to V^2/R. But they will heat the house a bit more or boil the kettle a bit quicker.

When I've checked, our mains varies between about 230 and 260 V: it's currently 246 V. I'm not sure how it varies as a function of time - whether it is lower at times of higher demand.

Frequency can be more of a problem since even modern mains-powered digital clocks tend to count mains cycles rather than use a high-frequency quartz crystal. But the frequency is constrained within tight tolerances (+/- 1 Hz, IIRC) and is guaranteed to average out to 50 Hz over a 24-hour period.

I heard someone on the radio describing a bunch of messing about that netted her £2.07, I can't see it catching on.

Just got the email...

Thanks for being part of our Saving Session on 19th January. Here’s a quick look at the difference your efforts made:

You saved 0.057kWh, which earned you 104 OctoPoints – worth £0.13.

The Martin Lewis brainwashed would say it's better than nothing, but it's no reward for sitting in the dark tor hours sipping from a flask!

Some idiots may do that - this household just puts off using the washing machine, kettle or electric oven for the published single hour for which payment is made for savings. Although the 19th Jan payment was 19p my average has been 60p for each hour with no real effort and without any hardship. The TV and central heating etc. were still on.

I would agree it makes near zero difference to me financially and the whole scheme is more of a publicity exercise. It's a pity they are not making more of the point that they only have to do it when green energy is turned off due to the lack of wind - and a time when the weather is at it's coldest! But, hey, the solution is to build more windmills and decommission all gas and coal power stations in the next few years.

depends what's in the flask

People seem to be taking it to extremes, or at least the ones the media are talking to.

Here:

That's it. If there was an API I could write something to do it automatically.

Made about a tenner so far, which is not massive but for basically zero work.

... later ...

Turns out Octopus have an API, so I wrote something to fetch the times: