Dumb tariff

I'm on Octopus Intelligent Go (their equivalent). My IHD displays the kWh usage, but cannot display an accurate cost, either spot of cumulative.

Remember, with both tariffs the 30 min slot charging (outside of the overnight block) are dynamic, and so the supplier has to wait 36-48 hours for the data from DCC (and your charger manf'r) to filter through, so the IHD becomes useless (for cost)

I did wonder if "stop working" meant not showing you actual price, which I'd sort-of understand, so long as it shows kWh and graphs etc.

I hardly ever look at it for costs anyway.

I've not got (and don't want) a smart charger, that does exclude some EV tariffs, and I presume that will be a growing trend ...

Possible excludes all of the best EV tariffs. There are various options from various suppliers but most(all) require a working smart meter. It can the difference of maybe paying full price per KWh and being charged quarter of that for home car charging overnight or when there is "surplus" of electricity.

Yes, and also requires either the charger or the car's API that can talk to your energy company

All EV tariffs require a smart meter, to know how much you used at the cheaper rate.

Basic EV tariffs have fixed times, eg it's always cheap between 1am and 5am. Any charger or car is suitable for those, and typically all your household consumption is charged at the lower rate in those hours.

'Intelligent' EV tariffs allow the supplier to shift the times every day, depending on when is cheapest for the grid. That means they must communicate with either the charger or the car, which limits you to certain models. Typically all the consumption during those hours is covered by that lower rate.

Other 'intelligent' tariffs use the metering in the charger or car to give you 'EV kWh' at a certain rate while billing a different rate for the rest of your household consumption. These can often be more flexible about when the lower rate is available.

Theo

It probably just means that they lack the ability to update the IHD with more than one tariff. It will still show consumption though in kWhr.

Tim

Depends on your definition of a “smart charger”. It used to just mean that you could program charge times with a phone app. Now it’s tending to be interpreted as one that your power company can control to provide more flexible charging times to match cheaper wholesale power prices.

Octopus can directly control some cars and some chargers. If they can control one or the other you can access a smarter tariff.

Tim

And that is the most important thing about a smart meter: the ability to see consumption in kWhr as a function of time. Everything else - costs per day, etc - are "nice but not part of the core purpose" IMHO. But other people may differ.

I wish energy companies would get their act together and publish consumption figures on their website or app with less of a lag. Maybe it's a case of managing expectations. I would tend to expect that a day's usage figures (midnight to midnight) would be available within a few minutes of midnight (for the day that has just ended), and ideally should give an hour-by-hour usage for the current day.

I'm with Octopus and I've found an Android App called geoHome which can give live usage (current and average so far for today) which is great, except that it had a glaring bug: during GMT timezone, the gas usage for each day is for the wrong day (rather akin to the Two Ronnies' "answering the question before" sketch about Mastermind) so today it reports usage for 7 February, giving readings for 6 Feb, and 6 Feb giving readings for 5 Feb, etc. So I have to wait for Octopus themselves to get their act together and report the real daily usage figures which can take until 16:00 on one day to see the usage for the previous day. It's only gas that is affected; electricity reading are fine. And during the summer when we change to BST, gas readings are fine. I've reported it to the support team for geoHome and they closed the bug saying "cannot reproduce" (*), even though I've offered to get whatever debug info they need. Very poor service :-(

I keep a spreadsheet of daily usage from which my wife performs various predictions of likely usage for the coming months based on readings for those months in previous years. I read my meters manually (well, using the IHD) at about 10:00 each day and estimate yesterday's gas usage from that, correcting the figures later that day for the real midnight-midnight figures once Octopus publishes them.

I wish there was a law which said that all Internet of Things devices had to have a simple web interface that gave access to information (eg gas/electricity meter usage, or for controlling Philips Hue lamps, or reading consumption from energy-monitoring mains sockets) in addition to any proprietary app that may be available - but only for smartphones and not for Windows/Linux.

(*) Which is one step away from patting me on the head and saying "you're imagining it".

Which I have, what I don't want is a tariff where the energyco controls my charger or my car, I can set scheduled charging.

I currently pay 26.89p per kWh all day, and I can see fixed time EV tariffs at 6.5p overnight and 28.16p the rest of the day.

That hardly needs a smart meter, Economy 7 meters have been doing it for decades.

As far as I'm aware our cheap tariff (which we had to have an EV to get) is for a fixed period every night. We had to ask the supplier the hours for which it is cheaper so we could 'program' the car charger to use electricity at the right times.

The supplier doesn't change the hours or tell the meter to do clever things.

If you are with Octopus request a (free) Octopus Mini. This is a small (approx 50 x 50 x 15mm) usb powered gizmo(they supply the wall wart) that communicates with your smart meter and is accessed via wifi. This updates Octopus (tin foil hat brigade look away) every 10 seconds. I find it very useful for remote load monitoring etc etc.

Economy 7 is not an EV tariff. There are no EV tariffs available without smart meters AFAIK. They are typically a lot cheaper than Economy 7, especially as they tend not to come with the punitive day rate.

That's a 'basic' EV tariff, with no comms to the car or charger. In that case they can't tell when went into the car, you just get everything at the cheaper rate during the fixed hours.

Theo

I didn't say it was, but you said "to know how much you used at the cheaper rate", Economy 7 works fine in telling the supplier (via the meter reading) how much electricity has been used at each rate.

Exactly!

As more people charge EVs overnight and with more people having to run their ASHP for more hours during the night/day the supplier may wish to elect when to supply at a cheap rate to balance loads rather than the customer setting their own specific times. With more intermittent energy sources that are very dependant on the weather suppliers may want to change the "off peak" times ona day to day basis. The old model of having cheap energy for the same fixed 12 hours every night may be disappearing in favour of having, say, 6 hours in a 14 hour period of "night time" hours and where the start and end times may vary day to day depending on how hard the wind is blowing at the time.

That's why I said "I presume that will be a growing trend" but while I have the choice, I'll take the option of using electricity when I want to ...

And why not. That seems like a good fixed time tariff. Personally I like the occasional extra hours that I get with Octopus, particularly any ones after the “normal” 5:30 finish time as it means I can delay discharging my home battery. (23:30 - 08:00 for me tonight/tomorrow).

Undoubtably things will change in the future and Octopus plan to limit EV smart charging to 6 hours a day but these may occur outside the regular

Tim

Which makes it all rather useless for 'real people' who have to commute in their car every day, or whatever.

I registered with EdF to receive similar "one-off" periods, such a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, but it's dependant on saving electricity compared to a normal week, I can see they're trying to incentivise saving power, but it ends up being "too complicated to bother".