@toodles Yes. That is a more pleasant metaphor than the one I had in my head. Of a medieval torture device that is positioned on the fleshy parts of the body or orifices and the anxiety that causes prior to tension being applied. 

I just saw another pink cephalopod innovation announced, they call it a charge pack. It seems to be some sort of demand flexibility service, similar to axel VPP. Not entirely sure if it works with flux or cosy and they say it will soon work with a PW. 

Posted by: @papahuhu

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@old_scientist

I will tell you how mine behaved today, all I did to set it up was input the tariff data. 
My problem is that I get impatient when it doesn’t immediately behave how I want and I start to tinker with the tariffs to exaggerate the buy/sell signal. This time I will sit on my hands for a week to see if it sorts it all out. 

Its 15.00 so far and it has maintained the battery at 100% and only dumped the excess, so far so good…

@papahuhu

Haha, you sound exactly like me!

We were out all day, so I've just signed up now (Sat). My account shows import switched to Flux, but export still showing as the old Octopus Outgoing tariff - will see if it's updated by morning.

I guess I'll just have to trust the battery to do the right thing overnight (2-5am) with respect to charging and/or leaving sufficient room to charge from solar. Maybe I will stay up and watch the football over the weekend, just so I can see what it does.

@old_scientist 

mine behaved in my best financial interests except one error. The battery discharged down to to my set limit of 5% during 4-7pm as expected, but I would have expected it to charge a little at the overnight rate, to give me some cheap power to cover breakfast. It didn’t charge at all.

At this point I’d normally start tweaking rates and times to force it to my will, but as an experiment I will leave it to “learn”. It’s only a few pence anyway. 

Don’t fret about the delay in setting up the export, I was always tariff flipping and in my experience OE backdates the billing process to the point of your instruction to change.

Posted by: @papahuhu

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@old_scientist 

mine behaved in my best financial interests except one error. The battery discharged down to to my set limit of 5% during 4-7pm as expected, but I would have expected it to charge a little at the overnight rate, to give me some cheap power to cover breakfast. It didn’t charge at all.

At this point I’d normally start tweaking rates and times to force it to my will, but as an experiment I will leave it to “learn”. It’s only a few pence anyway. 

Thank you for that.

I've received my email from Octopus - it says my import has been switched to Flus but may take up to 6 weeks to switch the export, so my account is still showing as Octopus outgoing (Fixed). How quickly did your export tariff take to switch over, and did you have to send MCS/DNO letters as I've previously been asked for each time we've switched (why Octopus can't just keep these on record once they've been provided once).

Anyway, the battery powered the house overnight and didn't attempt to import anything from the grid during the cheap rate. This morning the battery is currently charging in bright sunshine, but when I turned the kettle on for my morning cup of tea, it pulled 2kW from available solar and imported the remaining 1kW from the grid at 25p instead of using the battery. That seemed strange as the battery is 75% full and clearly we will be exporting later at a much lower rate than import currently is.

For now I've just switched it to self-consumption mode until we get confirmation the export tariff has been updated.

@old_scientist It’s happened to me before, they do backdate so be careful that in modifying your operational strategy you don’t get retrospectively penalised. 
The flux tariff is both import and export, so they cant decouple these 2 aspects when it comes to billing. Best way to be sure is to phone the call centre, I find the octopus email response a bit slow. 

I wasn’t asked for any MCS or DNO docs, I assume they had these on file. 

Posted by: @papahuhu

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@old_scientist It’s happened to me before, they do backdate so be careful that in modifying your operational strategy you don’t get retrospectively penalised. 
The flux tariff is both import and export, so they cant decouple these 2 aspects when it comes to billing. Best way to be sure is to phone the call centre, I find the octopus email response a bit slow. 

I wasn’t asked for any MCS or DNO docs, I assume they had these on file. 

OK, I wasn't sure whether to force export tonight 4-7pm or not. If I'm still being paid the SEG 12p for export, obviously I don't want to force export at 12p to later buy back at 25p, but it sounds like I'll be paid Flux export rates if they cannot decouple the two tariffs. Like you suggest, I'll give them a call to confirm. Thanks.

@old_scientist Just received an email from Octopus about ‘Charge Pack’, a scheme they will be introducing shortly. Sounds similar to Axel and they guarantee a minimum of £12 pm for having access to one’s battery. Tesla is not yet in the compatible list but I have expressed interest… Toodles.

@toodles it’s a big vague, other than a minimum of £12 month they don’t tell you by how much they will reimburse you. The axel scheme gives you a £25 joining sweetener, then £10 minimum even if no events in the month and then about £1 per kWh. There’s also a special cosy charge pack scheme coming soon, doesn't say what makes it different. 
I suspect octopus is edging towards a general agile type model, it makes business sense for them to do so as they can always ensure they make a cut. With IOF I felt some degree of gulit of fiscal rape.

I received the same email regarding the new 'Charge Pack'.

There is clearly financial benefit to Octopus of having control of someone's battery beyond just arbitrage of electricity pricing, presumably related to the financial rewards of demand balancing etc. Tariffs like IOF, and now Axle and Charge Packs seek to leverage that and reward the customer for allowing Octopus to use their equipment.

IOF was kind of unique in that you were being very well compensated regardless of whether there was an 'event' occurring on the grid that particular day, or not. These new schemes that only reward occasionally seem far less beneficial, but if they are being used as an addon in addition to an otherwise beneficial tariff such as an EV tariff then it opens up access to a whole other subset of battery owners/users that otherwise wouldn't have accessed such tariffs.

Are they also paving the way from what we can expect from the likes of Tesla Energy once it finally appears, and this does seem closer to their American model (from what I've read) whereby the consumer is on a more 'standard' type tariff but is additionally paid for participating in events.

I really hope this isn't (the beginning of) the death of IOF.

@papahuhu Yes, the Cosy pack is what I have enquired further of. As you say very vague at this stage. Toodles.

@old_scientist It was because I am not on an EV tariff that I wrote to Greg a few months ago; his ‘senior colleague’ who replied appeared to be taking note of my comments about relatively heavy consumers (I mean the amount of energy they consume, not a comment on their bodily structure!) with heat pumps and batteries possibly rating similar usage to some EV owners and might they consider a tariff for such consumers please. I noticed a distinct sympathy to my request in the reply - who knows? Rewards, Toodles.

@toodles The chap you were corresponding with wasn’t called HAL 9000 by any chance 😉

Near impossible to tell nowadays.