The final piece in our fossil fuel puzzle is sorted today. We finally got an induction hob installed and the gas is ready to be disconnected. We still have a gas fireplace in the open plan kitchen living area, but doesn't get used other than on Christmas day. So happy to switch off gas supply permanently!

When I spoke to Octopus, they mentioned that they have forwarded the request to their engineering team and once they give the sign off they would schedule a visit to cap the supply. Is this just a stock response, or are there things they have to check before they give the approval. This is a freehold property and we are the homeowners, so hopefully they don't require any paperwork from the district council or anyone else. Has anyone here turned off their gas connection? I'd love to hear about your experience.

Looking at the RCBO in the image below labelled "Socket", can anyone confirm from the markings on this MCG RCBO if it is a Type A?

https://youtu.be/IvMor9aUfhE?si=jdHVsMr7gJ_Z99hC

Discuss! Toodles.

This prompted me to take another look at some of these services and in particular to see what if any gap there may be between what the marketing says and what I, the customer, might receive. I have to admit to my eyes being a lot wider open than they were.

When I looked at Havenwise, it was immediately obvious that there is nothing currently on their web site making any specific savings claims or promises. However, using the good old Wayback Machine, it seems the claim was 40% saving on bills, calculated as the average space heating costs for Havenwise users compared with the cost of delivering the same amount of energy by a typical gas boiler.

When I looked at Homely, they have an article on their web site referring to a study by the University of Salford. That university's article on the same study mentions a 20% cost saving for a Homely-managed heat pump and a home with an annual heat loss of about 12,000 kWh. Homely themselves claim a representative reduction of annual costs of up to £444.

When I looked at Melpump (admittedly a more targeted audience, just being for Mitsubishi heat pumps), they did claim users could save money, but their assertions are about better information and better control, which users could use to tweak their systems.

All sounds good on the face of it, but there were a few things that don't ring true in my rather world-weary and cynical eyes.

If I imagine when I had a fossil fuel boiler (oil, as it happens, rather than gas), I can see several key points where cost savings occurred:

1. Moving from fossil fuel boiler to heat pump, including the general plumbing improvements the installers carried out whether they were necessary for the heat pump or just standard good practice. I'm pretty sure no third party online service can remotely or virtually change a boiler into a heat pump, so I'd love to know why Havenwise was claiming any credit for it in their bill reduction estimate even if they have since removed that claim from their website.
2. Setting my heat pump up with standard best practice config in line with manufacturer's recommendations. This bit is more murky since whilst I'm well aware installers don't have the time to commission a heat pump fully optimised, I would expect the main points to be covered - a good first pass at radiator balancing and a weather compensation curve in place with reasonably sensible parameters - and that is what I did indeed receive in my install. If I'd been handed a system with a fixed flow temperature of 55 degrees all year round, I'd've been far less than happy, although I'm aware it does happen. Nonetheless, this is exactly the baseline Homely are comparing their system against, so I would question whether that is a reasonable and typical comparison to use and, when I asked the university that carried out the Homely study, they said that baseline was not a setup recommeded by the industry.
3. Getting the heat pump playing nicely with other kit and services, such as a time of use tariff, an array of solar panels and a home battery. To be clear, none of these third party services take solar panels and batteries into account; the closest any gets is Havenwise by having an operating mode that ignores your tariff and therefore expects a home-grown energy source to be there to take the strain.

Digging a little deeper, I found the Homely study was carried out over two 24-hour periods with and without Homely. I'm not sure whether that means two days with and two days without or two days in total but we've all seen how much heat pump performance can vary across a whole year so I'd suggest the study is great as a first pass indicator but far too limited to form a basis for any real world claims.

Nonetheless, the summary of that study that is published on the university's website says the results show cost savings of approximately 20%, and when I looked at the actual monetary figures published on Homely's web site that agrees exactly if you use the cheapest of the non-Homely scenarios as the baseline. That equates to a saving of £158, not £444. Not a shabby saving, but not the almost three times that claim Homely are making.

So I dug a bit deeper still. Homely provide their installers with various resources that help them sell Homely kit, and that includes both an "installer toolkit" and a "distributor toolkit" (which are also stored for posterity in the Wayback Machine). Each of these toolkits is a zip file of helpful PDFs including these two:

Certainly the £444 savings claim uses words like "can" and "up to", but I'll leave you to decide whether the wording implies that level of saving as realistic, often attainable or normal, and this is what installers and distributors are being trained to say to customers. No wonder there are several threads on this forum with people complaining about Homely actively standing in the way of them getting their own system's data - if I was Homely, I wouldn't want others to mark my homework independently either.

Of course, this is not just an issue with third party monitoring systems. We've seen threads about Aira obstructing customers' ability to see independently their system's stats and so verify or challenge Aira's own performance claims. We've seen @editor's podcast about real-world SCoP comparisons for Vaillant, Mitsubishi and Samsung and seen how claims and reality differ significantly It seems the industry is rife with spin and light on verifiable claims. Melpump was the only one of the monitoring systems that came out still smelling OK and that's because it didn't try to claim anything apart from better and more detailed information - which it does indeed provide.

For me, all this is important because it's standing in the way of customers making reasoned and informed decisions. I’m not even claiming these products aren’t any use - clearly, for some they do add value - so why the need for all the snake oil sales tactics?

I hasten to add that, despite being a mod here, these are my independent views; views of someone who’s sick and tired of the cynical misrepresentation that has been normalised in the industry.

Last night was different.

Storm Goretti knocked our power out at around 22:30. We woke up this morning to no electricity, but also to a steady stream of text message updates from Scottish Power, our DNO. This is our third outage due to storm damage, and historically we’ve never had much direct support beyond restoration updates, so this already felt like a shift.

I don’t know what’s changed internally, but Scottish Power seem to have gone from “meh” to ridiculously good at customer support, almost overnight. Alongside the regular outage updates, we received a text saying they’d hired a food truck and stationed it in a village about three miles away, offering hot breakfast and lunch for affected customers. My wife and I both thought that was genuinely thoughtful, even if we were quite happy at home in front of the fire.

Then another text came through. If we didn’t want to use the food truck, we could buy breakfast and lunch ourselves and they’d reimburse £20 per meal, £10 per person. Again, very decent, though we were still fine staying put.

Later in the afternoon, another message landed saying that if the house was too cold, Scottish Power would reimburse up to £200 for a hotel or B&B for the night. At that point it started to feel almost surreal. Not long after that, my wife received a phone call just to check we were OK. No scripts, no rushing her off the phone, just a genuine check-in.

During the call they asked whether we’d been to the food truck or out for food. We explained that we were staying at home because our lane was still snowed in, but that we were fine. The call handler then asked where we normally shopped, which seemed like an odd question at the time. We said mostly Tesco. About five minutes later, £60 worth of Tesco vouchers landed on my wife’s phone.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s happened. We seem to have gone from “we’ll restore your supply when we can” to something bordering on VIP treatment. I’m not complaining... just genuinely surprised.

The final text summed it up neatly an hour after our power was restored: “Your power cut was caused by a fuse failure on overhead equipment. We’ve now completed all necessary repairs, and your electricity supply should be fully restored. We don’t expect any further disruptions. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Quite frankly, we’ve been blown away by how Scottish Power have handled this outage compared to previous ones.

And now I’m really curious whether anyone else affected by Storm Goretti has experienced similar levels of support this time around from their DNOs or whether this was a one-off.

• We have x1 EV, which I estimate we ush about 1200kwh a year from home charging on (free charging at work). There is a chance we lose the free home charging though, which would mean home charging goes up to about 3600kwh p/year
• We are about to replace our gas boiler with a heat pump. Our gas demand for the year was c.16k kwh, so I expect our HP energy usage to be around 3800 kwh
• Cooking is all electric, so gas will be capped after install
• Non ev/heating usage in the home is around 4000 kwh p/year
• We try to load shift dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to the evening
• We are currently on Octopus Go and have an average £ p/kwh over the last year of £.215. I'd estimate our non-ev use to be about £.255
• When temperatures aren't too low (c.10c), I think that 90%+ of our heating+DHW needs can be met overnight. We have UFH with concrete floors and good-not-great insulation
• We have no battery storage or solar
• The odds of me convincing my wife to load shift anything other than things listed above (in particular cooking kids' tea) outside of 4-7pm is 0%
• When I ran a simulation of our current/historic usage on agile, it suggested we'd make a 5% saving.

I'm thinking by adding a HP we may be best going onto agile and use havenwise to optimise and then having our EV charger +appliances still set to run overnight, but manually adjust it on exceptional days - maybe introduce a bit of automation to cap/alert on high/low pricing.

However, part of me thinks that given we can get most heating need from off-peak periods on mild days, we might be better just going for an ev tariff. Also makes life simpler. When I run the numbers I struggle to see how a solar and/or battery storage solution adds up £ wise for us.

What would you do in my situation?

Particularly interested to hear from anyone with an ev+heat pump but no solar battery and people using havenwise with agile, as I'm very finger in the air on what to expect my heat pump's p/kwh to end up being.

I've listed Octopus tariffs as those are the ones I'm familiar with - if possible answer with your equivalent.

With 12 poll answers i may not have captured everything but hope the majority are included.

THE POLL ALLOWS YOU TO VOTE ON MULTIPLE OPTIONS. SELECT EVERYTHING THAT'S RELEVANT TO YOU!

Background 

Somerset based

Listed Grade 2 building with large modern extension. Approx 100sq m old building & 100 sq m modern, well insulated
LG Therma V 16kw ASHP Installed Aug 2020
Underfloor heating throughout downstairs + Rads Upstairs

Fixed flow first 2 years then changed to weather compensation in winter 2022. Reducing heat pump usage from circa 8000kWk/pa to 5800 - saving 27.5%

8.7kw pv solar (2.2kw on FIT 2015 south facing, 6.5kw installed 2021 on east facing, low pitch)
3 x 8.2kw GivEnergy batteries installed 2021
1 x GivEnergy Gen1 hybrid 5.0kw inverter. Important to note max charge/discharge rate 2.6kWh that limits ability to take full advantage of cheap charging etc.

Manual changeover EPS

MG4 EV From 2023 

WonderWatt used to help manage imports and exports

Comparisons

Comparisons are not easy due to changes  in usage as well as:

• we did not record previous oil usage or cost. At a guess 2500litres/pa
• Move to weather compensation ashp Dec 2022 from fixed flows 
• EV from 2023
• 2025 move to Intelligent Go meant batteries used more over summer to maximise cheap overnight imports and maximise exports

Rough numbers:

• ASHP uses 5800kWh/pa
• Solar prod 6500kWh/pa (7000kWh in exceptional 2025 and shading reduced)
• Exports prior to 2025 ~2500kWh/pa
• Exports 2025 ~7500kWh with forced emptying batteries. Income £1125 + FIT
• Imports therefore changed a lot to include additional battery filling at night for forced exports in summer + EV etc 
• EV charging at home ~2500kWh/pa

Fwiw the heat loss calcs for heat pump suggested

27597 kWh of which 23800 was heating & 3800 hot water

Actual usage of 8000kWh on fixed flows might suggest average SCOP of just over 3? Our heat pump does not record SCOP