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What difference does an Ohme charger and the Agile tariff make?

6K views 22 replies 12 participants last post by  Blanik 
#1 ·
I have just had my first quarterly bill from Octopus on the Agile tariff and I thought i would report on the result. This covers a short period before I had my smart meter installed and then eventually got onto Agile tariff a few days later. The whole report is 74 pages long (because the Agile tariff rate changes every 30 mins the report is one day per page.)

Here's the summary section of the report section for agile
137071

This shows that my average rater per day (day & night) is 8.42p/kWh for 1625.4 kWh of charge.
Including Standing Charge for 74 days @ 20.00p/day £14.80
Subtotal of charges before VAT £151.73
VAT @ 5.00% £7.59

Looking at the daily graphs it is very heartening to see how the Ohme charger, day after day, automatically charges to the cheapest rates. And given that, when charging, the EV costs dominate.

I copied my son in on our bill. He has just upgraded to the Ohme/Agile combination and from what he can see he is getting similar results. (He has a old Zoe and commutes daily 30-40 miles each way daily.) His previous energy supplier was Bulb and the plan he was on was 15p/kwh. So similar to me, he has halved his EV charge costs. The big one though is against what would cost him in petrol, of course - he reckons he is now saving £140 monthly.
 
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#13 ·
True on one given night. But we're in lockdown2 and there's little need to charge the car. So whereas normally I would bring the charge back to 80% at the moment I want to pick off the plunge pricing days so I've set the maximum price to 0p. So the car will only be able to charge when the grid has excess energy. Looking forward to stormy weather.
 
#6 ·
I was on Agile from May until mid September. A very cheap Spring, followed by a cheap Summer but prices were ever edging upwards.

So I moved to Go faster in mid September.

My last full month on Agile was at an average cost per kw 9.49p . My bill for the last 6 weeks arrived yesterday. The average cost per kw was 9.5p and with no daily worry about not using too much between 4pm and 7pm. Sadly in the South West region our power happens to be one of the more expensive regions

I am pretty sure that Go Faster will be there or thereabouts with Agile over the Winter so I will be sticking with that for the next 4 months

Then come mid March, once my panels start making decent amounts of power again and the heating is off, I am sure I will be back on Agile for the Spring and Summer again
 
#7 ·
Daft question. Is there a way of integrating a home battery into Agile as well as an EV? So that you can benefit from cheaper all round electricity for the day to day running of the home?

Would be great to use stored electricity from cheaper periods during the expensive times and completely avoid the high prices. This would presumably also take pressure off the grid?

I have a battery on order and a Zappi. EVs is usually away from the house during the main part of the day.
Just seems to be a sensible idea to me, to use Agile on all the batteries in the household at any time of the day
 
#9 ·
Daft question. Is there a way of integrating a home battery into Agile as well as an EV? So that you can benefit from cheaper all round electricity for the day to day running of the home?

Would be great to use stored electricity from cheaper periods during the expensive times and completely avoid the high prices. This would presumably also take pressure off the grid?

I have a battery on order and a Zappi. EVs is usually away from the house during the main part of the day.
Just seems to be a sensible idea to me, to use Agile on all the batteries in the household at any time of the day
Cool, are you starting a thread on this project? Would be a good read. Cheers
 
#8 ·
Yep, you can either do something yourself to manage the charge times of the battery or get a system that integrates with the Agile API, a few can. Octopus have recently launched a Works with Octopus thing where vendors can submit their products that are designed to take advantage of the Octopus API.

They're at great pains to underline that you shouldn't get a battery in order to take advantage of Agile. If you're getting home storage to fit in with solar, Agile can work with that for big wins but the payback for a storage battery, using Agile, is going to be a long time and Agile may not exist this time next year. I don't think they're suggesting there are plans to ditch it, just that you shouldn't make 10 year plans based on a tariff offered today.
 
#12 · (Edited)
This is good to know.
One thing that it strikes me that one might do one's own "super agile" tariff, as agile itself often isn't the cheapest. However, if you want to save every last penny, you can switch between Octopus tariffs, such that if you think a period of time (especially in winter) is going to be cheaper on (say) Go, then you could do that. Perhaps a little anal for me, though! ;-)
BTW, I'm probably going to be getting an Ohme cable to plug in to an EO Mini Pro.
 
#16 ·
@andyswarbs That's some serious electricity usage. I make it over 8000kWh per year, which is about three times my usage. How many EV miles do you do?

As for battery storage, I think I could only save around 1000kWh with a battery, so £125 on my current tariff. With some effort I could probably shift another 1000kWh to the 5p rate on Octopus Go and save another £25 (£75 less in unit charge but £50 more in standing charges).

That's only £1500 over 10 years, which is supposedly the usable life of a battery. A suitably sized battery would cost at least twice that.
 
#18 ·
Petriix, our total mileage in the kona since we got it in March is 8500: this is our only car. Obviously much of that is lockdown. Otherwise we've been doing upto 300 miles weekly looking after our grandson, a number of other days 150 mile round trips and 25 miles most other days. So we've been fully recharging and more weekly, and sometimes twice.
 
#22 ·
@Ohme EV Chargers is good but they are really dragging their feet making any user of data.
They have access to every single charge cycle. they in a few graphs / tables / stats. No they use a pain old list of charges.
Not only that they don't support balancing cycle even when user sets 100% SoC and no support for pre-heating yet.
 
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