Octopus ‘Free gas safety check’

Back in the late 60s early 70s when lengthy powercuts were common, a co-worker was proactive enought to buy and install a generator at home.

Cuts occurred. Their house had lights. The other houses were in darkness.

Several visits from... concerned neighbours... who were all aware that co-worker's wife worked for the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board).

They all seemed convinced that she was somehow getting special treatment and whilst all their supplies were 'switched off', her house was somehow exempted. The neighbours had to be shown the generator - and the receipt for the generator to prove that they had paid for it. I bet some of them were still not convinced.

Happy to hear we can rely on good old street riots to help keep the lights on.

P.S. Massive increase in electricity costs. Isn't that _exactly_ what happened in Texas, not too long ago?

So, for one half of the year you effectively pay nothing to your energy supplier, ad the other half of the year you pay a third of what most people pay?

Presumably you need to be grid connected, to even it out when it's dark cold and still? If everyone did that, I suspect the standing charges would be £2/day or more.

More or less.

Indeed, I use my grid connection to charge my home battery at cheap rate every night. As we now have a heat pump we’ll almost certainly be drawing power during peak times in the colder/darker months as our battery capacity isn’t enough to run the heating all day on an overnight charge. We might upgrade the battery but I think I need to see how much we’re “banking” in our account over the summer months when our power company effectively pays us.

I leave those sums to my power company. Octopus is one of the companies that’s most pro-active in encouraging the utilisation of smart tariffs and I assume they know what they’re doing.

Tim

You're with Octopus I assume?

It's a pain transferring to them - you have to sign up to their standard 'flexible' tariff and then 'wait for emails' relating to more adventurous tariffs such as solar export and battery import. No information about what you may/may not be able to apply for. IIUC.

And as it stands their flexible tariff is about 15% more than my present Eon deal.

As it's taken me 15 months of hectoring and prodding Octopus to come and replace my dumb Gas Meter with a Smart one (finally happening next week), I doubt they're trying to find an excuse to turn up !

But…but…they tell me they are installing smart meters in my area…LOL

They only depend on them being able to access half hourly data from your meter. Once that’s established you’re free to choose from the various options. Usually takes a couple of weeks. They can’t promise you access to a smart tariffs and I if they can’t access your smart data.

Not surprising. Swings and roundabouts etc.

Tim

Which they can. Or at least I can, currently. Wonder why they don't ask at the outset? I'd still have to start with their unfavourable tariff. Just feels like 'fingers crossed'.

Anyway, I've written to them to see if they can give me a litle more information.

Rob

Because they don’t do things on “trust”. Also, I then when migrating between suppliers there’s jiggery pokery that goes on with the DCC that means that there can be a delay in a new provider getting access to the data.

As I say, it’s generally only a couple of weeks.

Tim