I’m certainly on Agile for import, and happy with it. The important extra point to make, though, is that I’m using Home Assistant to squeeze the key benefits out of it.

In particular, whilst it’s not a daily occurrence, negative prices do happen more frequently than one might expect and HA will automatically use the opportunity to fill the battery and the car. Given the car’s capacity in particular, that’s a significant saving, and the automation bit means there’s no cost in my time having to oversee things.

That same ability to automate means I can navigate through more complex edge cases to benefit from other situations that would otherwise need careful and time consuming monitoring, and there, I suspect, lies the key; Agile’s variability is a bit like the Stock Market and needs to be worked to give the greatest benefits.

I’ve also seen Octopus are making tariff changes to several potential loss leaders such as retiring the fixed 15p/kWh export tariff and replacing with a market tracking tariff (that may well still give 15p at the moment). I suspect Agile import is still profitable to Octopus but perhaps giving a hint that some other currently attractive tariffs may be headed for a change.

I still monitor prices too, although mostly for interest, and agree with your analysis.

From my limited experience, I wonder if Agile is better during shoulder months in autumn and spring, where storms are likely. Wind dominates in the UK, and there is less wind in summer so less scope for very low Agile pricing. In winter, as ASHP owners we are more likely to use a tariff such as Cosy. That leaves the shoulder months between summer/winter as the most viable/interesting periods.

Then there is the consideration for battery owners of how to automate leverage of the cheap Agile slots which @majordennisbloodnok covers above.

For me, IOF delivers better financial outcomes day in day out over summer with zero effort from me. Agile wins on the occasional days there is negative or very low pricing but IOF is a financially better offering averaged over a month.

If you are just time shifting usage with no battery and no solar, then Agile is still an interesting tariff, IMHO. Before we got our battery, we were unable to leverage much of the cheap daytime pricing as solar covered our usage anyway and we had no way to import/store more.

Having moved from Agile in early Feb to Intelligent Go I've been surprised at how many extra slots I get at the cheap 7p rate. 

With 24kwh of batteries it's practical to fill them every night and then either use it (during heating season) or discharge to grid @ 15p. 

Using WonderWatt to help ensure I grab all the cheap slots as well as manage the discharges. So minimal manual intervention.

Inverter is max charge/discharge rate of 2.6kwh which limits my ability to maximise. 

Will see how it goes during heating season but Feb this year was fine.

Vast majority of imports at cheap rate mean imports average under 8p.

Potentially expecting to import circa 12k to 13k kwh including 

• Ashp 5800kwh
• Ev 2000kwh
• General usage 3000kwh
• Imports to later force discharge say 2000kwh

If I can keep cost around 8p then perhaps £1000 import cost (ex Standing charge).

Maximising my imports at 7p by heating the house at night (opposite to setback) so that daytime usage is reduced to a level that batteries can cope.

Exports likely to be 6000kwh plus this year. With exceptional pv solar and forced discharge.

With luck net balance is near zero. Far better than originally expected and transforms ROI. Very hard to know in advance as transformed by changes in behaviour & usage with tou tariff.

Last year I averaged Agile imports at about 12p using WonderWatt to manage. Very happy at that time! But exports far lower as it was less practical to import for later export with my inverter and pricing differences.

2024 imports approx 9500kwh cost £1300 (Jan on Tracker)

2024 exports approx 2600kwh @ 15p £400

So net cost circa £900

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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I’ve also seen Octopus are making tariff changes to several potential loss leaders such as retiring the fixed 15p/kWh export tariff and replacing with a market tracking tariff (that may well still give 15p at the moment). I suspect Agile import is still profitable to Octopus but perhaps giving a hint that some other currently attractive tariffs may be headed for a change.

Thank you Major, if changes are afoot, I suppose we will have to just wait for announcements. I should just regard myself as fortunate in having battery and solar installed already so am as ready as I might be for any changes that occur. Though I cannot help reflecting back on those statements at school in the late fifties and early sixties that ‘Energy will be so cheap, it won’t be worth metering it!’ Hah!🫢 Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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…

Though I cannot help reflecting back on those statements at school in the late fifties and early sixties that ‘Energy will be so cheap, it won’t be worth metering it!”

…

And the famous misquote that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”

I know it’s an urban legend but I still like it.

@majordennisbloodnok There is also a quote about the first telephone link up - that it was so successful the speaker could see that the day would come when there would be a telephone in every city!

Posted by: @toodles

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@majordennisbloodnok There is also a quote about the first telephone link up - that it was so successful the speaker could see that the day would come when there would be a telephone in every city!

Yes, but now try finding a working phone box….

I played 'stick' rather than 'twist' this summer. I would normally have flipped from Cosy to Agile, but to be honest I decided I 'CBA' to check the Agile 24hr lookahead each evening and make manual adjustments to my 13kWh BESS charging times via the oh-so-clunky Chinese Growatt App. Last year it got tedious after the novelty of it wore off. If I could easily automate this process with no capital investment I would be tempted, but Cosy + BESS saves us massively in the heating season, and we don't import much in the summer season. It might have saved me a tenner or two over the summer, maybe, possibly. I don't know, but I won't lose any sleep over it.

Posted by: @allyfish

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but to be honest I decided I 'CBA' to check the Agile 24hr lookahead each evening and make manual adjustments to my 13kWh BESS charging times via the oh-so-clunky Chinese Growatt App.

If I’d had to do the same, I’d’ve lost the will to live. That’s precisely why I said earlier that Agile requires some form of automation to get the best out of it. For me, that was the whole reason I went modbus with the Growatt inverter and slapped multiple automations into Home Assistant. Without that, I’m sure I’d be on a different tariff.

I went to Agile when I had solar installed July last year.

1. I then had heat pump installed in September and swapped to Cosy shortly after with the intention of switching back to Agile after winter, but looking at the rates I decided to stick with Cosy.
2. May this year I virtually stopped importing from grid, and have managed with 6.4kwh batteries topped up each day along with house usage and a good export from solar. So my only daily cost had been standing charge and the odd couple of pence usage.

I have been using Agile since last October. Like another poster here, I use Home Assistant to make the most of it, automatically heating my water at the optimum time every day, heating it to a higher temperature when the price is very low (so that the heat carries over to the next day) and even higher when prices are negative. In summer, I get good very export rates from my solar panels in the early evenings when the sun is shining and prices are high. 

So far, I have not paid any electricity bill since October 2024, and my account is about £27 in debit. On the sunnier side of the equinoxes, I am earning more in exports than I am paying in imports. 

I am currently considering whether to invest in batteries, but it is difficult to compute the likely return on investment.