Thank you Smart meter 2

[Tim+]

I know many folk are suspicious of the potential for remote control of their power supplies and potential for malicious hacking but having one does enable some interesting power tariffs.

I?m currently on Octopus Agile which bills you according to half-hourly electricity rates. Yesterday these rates varied from a peak of about 32p per kWhr between 4pm and 7pm to under a penny per kWhr through most of the night.

This tariff isn?t going to suit everyone by any means but if you have a significant amount of power consumption that you can time shift, you can make big gains by doing so. In my case, we ran our dishwashers and charged my car overnight for next to nothing.

Downside? Well, cooking the evening meal is the biggest issue as we have a fan oven but fortunately we haven?t ditched our gas hob yet so we can still cook. Judging by other Agile customers? comments, even if you do end up cooking at peak rates bills still seem to be lower due to the variable rates.

So, smart meters aren?t all bad. They do have their uses.

Tim

[Andy Burns]

How far in advance (if at all) do you know what the rate is going to be?

[Tim+]

From 4pm every day you can see what the rates will be for the next 24 hours. If we?d had a smart switch for our immersion heater we would have run that I think as the rate was zero for several hours last night.

Things get interesting when they occasionally go negative and you get paid for using power during the night.

Tim

[Mathew Newton]

Interesting! Does it happen often? What's the rationale? I can't see it being in their interest to encourage negative-rate consumption, but then I'm not familiar with how the whole system works.

I suppose 'smart' appliances will really help in this regard, but in the meantime it could make for a good project - Raspberry Pi scraping the next day's figures and then controlling devices via smart relays to turn on/off to suit. Wouldn't work for many electronic items of course, but maybe something like an immersion heater that tops up the hot water tank overnight if the rates go negative/cheap.

[Andy Burns]

Only when there's too much wind and it's cheaper to pay people to use it than to pay the windfarms to disconnect.

[Tim Streater]

So we could heat the HW water here on the immersion overnight and use no oil at all for 6 months. Mind you, usage is minimal anyway, CH is the main usage.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

I think this was the original idea, to attempt to spread loads so the peak times are not so much of a peak any more. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

I have economy 7, and in effect this is how one can afford to use storage heaters and yes although I can over ride the immersion heater any time its mostly on in the early hours. The heaters do not have over rides though, since their whole supply ring is a switched on in the meter itself. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Eventually though, if more used it, then they would have to start charging. Of course if we could crack a truly efficient power storage system, then the problem of variable rates would go away, and a uniform and lower tariff would be for all. Brian

[Jack Harry Teesdale]

It's not uncommom for the electro/mechanical E7 timeswitches to be out of sync with the real time of day after power outages.

[Jeff Layman]

I don't have a smart meter, so prior apologies if the comment below is made in ignorance.

Are you saying the next 24hrs rates (or even the immediate rates) are somehow displayed on the Smart Meter through something it accesses remotely at Octopus Agile? I see on their webpage at it says "This tariff relies on a smart meter to track the variable cost of your energy" and "If you?re not quite ready to make the leap to Agile but you have a smart meter that we?re capturing half-hour data for...".

So the meter is permanently connected to Octopus Agile and they can affect what it shows by changing the rates every half hour? Is that done via your broadband connection or some other way?

[Jeff Layman]

Just read "How do Smart meters communicate" at <https://octopus.energy/blog/smart-meters-are-coming/> and see they use a WAN.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Isn't life a bit short to have to arrange your day around what power costs at any particular time? ;-)

[Andy Burns]

Assuming the data is available via an API (or can be scraped anyway) you could have rules setup to charge the car to full, or bring the heating on early, or set the hot water a few degrees higher when it's dirt cheap.

[Tim+]

If this link works, this shows recent past, current and future rates for today (up to 4pm.)

Tim

[Tim+]

Nope. The current tariff isn?t visible on he meter or in house display. I don?t think the software to update the displays is up to the job yet. It is easy to see he hourly rate online or on a smart phone app so you always have easy access to the current charging period.

Even if you didn?t have access, the simple rule of ?avoid unnecessary power use between 4pm and 7pm? will help you to make significant savings,

The meter connects to its own network (this varies depending on where in the country you are), not via my broadband. The meter is logging my usage every half hour and uploading it to Octopus (no doubt through a number of intermediate steps).

Tim

[Tim+]

Well you obviously missed the important part of my message...

Scheduling a car charge overnight is very easy. I can do it on my phone. On a fixed rate tariff I would have been paying about 15p per kWhr. Last night I was paying less than 1p per kWhr for about 40 kWhr of leccy.

Tim

[Tim+]

Yep. Octopus customers get free use of IFTT services I believe. A few smart switch?s will then activate stuff when the power prices drop enough.

Tim

[Dave Plowman (News]

Obviously charging a car at night is the logical thing to do. But having water which is too cold when you want hot just to save money?

Rather the same with heating. Unless you have a superb storage system.

[Theo]

a handy website showing the current tariff.

Yep. A rough ballpark might be 30-40p in that period, and 5-10p the rest of the time, falling lower if there's a surplus of wind or solar.

I'm not on that tariff, but have got into the mindset of 'run the dishwasher after lunch when there's more solar' - it isn't hard.

This is of course where having a battery comes in - run your 4-7pm loads off the battery and top it up with cheap power at other times.

Do you know if the meter knows (displays) the current tariff, or it just uploads the readings and the backend works them out?

(Some people use smart meters for running tight budgets and keeping track their expenditure in real time - I suspect this is not the tariff for them)

Theo