I’ve been signed up to intelligent Octopus for just one week. I do have an EV (so can’t help you there) but also have a Powerwall and it works just fine with IO and the Tesla app. The only issue with the Powerwall, which wouldn’t affect you without an EV, is that if the charging slots are outside the core 6 hours the Powerwall sees my EV charge as a house load and promptly discharges. 

Hi Toodles - I have not done this with OIG but this is exactly my strategy with EON Next Drive. They do not check if you have EV charging hardware or vehicle, and there is no sensing equipment that prevents your Powerwall app taking care of the optimal times to charge and discharge. Upsides are 7h of night charging at 9.5p per kwh (I fill my powerwall and blast my GSHP UFH overnight) and ability to sell back excess solar at 16.5p per kwh on their Next Export exclusive tariff.  I can run through most days from 7am to midnight on (14kwh) battery and solar, with the occasion to top up at full rate (33p) for a few kwh at the end of the day.  Ive been reading the threads on setbacks with great interest since i only run my GSHP for 12h per day, but seem to be able to retain acceptably good internal room temperatures throughout the important times of the day. Downsides are that EON appear to have no ability to display TOU measurements on their app or website (or even report export  readings at all), and their solar rebate is paid by cheque after 12 months (!!!!) rather than just offset monthly vs your import (aka Octopus). I made the switch from the excellent customer service and digital capabilities of Octopus (Tracker) to EON  with great trepidation and it was initially very messy - after much chasing it has now settled down and is working v well for me. My average per kwh of grid purchased electricity is 10p since Oct 25th ( this includes exported solar) which makes it all worthwhile. Hope this helps & best of luck - will be interesting to hear the experiences of others on this topic  

@toodles thats an interesting one.  octopus might be likely to say, if you're still driving a fossil car, tough, you can't have this tariff. But as you are physically unable to drive any car, there might well be grounds for a conversation with them there. And yes your usage profile with a large battery will be as near as makes no difference the same as an EV. the main difference is that the tesla app can only do specific times (which I set to match the 2330 - 0530 window) and cannot natively take advantage of any extra slots they give you. This can be worked around using automation tools such as home assistant to learn the extra slots from octopus and then send a config change to tesla to request a higher charge state during those slots, but its not trivial to do.

But that doesn't really matter. I used their intelligent charging for about 4 weeks, but it was very flaky with my car, so I went back to timed and have been ever since. People will tell you that they "check" or "require the intelligent charging to be done once a month". they don't. But the gate, that you can't get around, is that you have to do at least one "intelligent EV charge" to get admitted onto the tariff.

there are very strong benefits to doing this. I have similar battery and PV sizing , and have so far with 2 months of heating run entirely on PV and TOU electricity for the heat pump. zero peak import. Of course that will change in depths of winter.

Do you have a friend or family member with an EV that you might be able to use to work around this?

@iancalderbank Thank you Ian and everyone else who has replied; I am unsure what an intelligent EV charge might be! Is this something triggered by using an EV charging device (which I don’t have for my Powerwalls or heat pump? I know such devices can be ‘smart’ and send data and possibly handshake - but I don’t know or see how this would work on the grid network.

As an aside, OE have moved me from Agile to Cosy today (without any fuss about having to spend any period of time on a more expensive fixed tariff); of course this means that the Agile tariff will sink to all-time lows with plenty of plunge pricing now I have moved out!!! I am still interested in hearing of anyone moved or moving to OIG without any EV’s to charge. Regards, Toodles.

As @iancalderbank says above you have to complete one intelligent charge to sign up. To achieve this you must have an OE supported EV charger (I have a Zappi) and/or a supported EV. OE remotely manage the stop/start of the EV charge according to the availability of cheap electricity. This may be outside the core 6 hours. You plug your EV into your EV charger, OE take ‘control’, check remote access then you are good to go. My intelligent chargers seem to run from 2300 to 0530 so far without any problems. 

@davesoa Ah! Thank you Davesoa, in that case, Cosy is my best bet until all the tariffs come up for review / abolishing / remodelling or all being thrown up in the air due to gas prices hiking even further! Regards, Toodles.

@Toodles

i am not in the same position as you or a similar one in terms of wanting to make the most of battery storage by moving onto the EV tariff. i have night storage heaters and easily use more than an EV would use BUT only during the late autumn early spring periods. 

i also enjoy the benefits of a Feed in Tariff so dont want to commit to any scheme that impacts on those payments. 

My solution - which to be honest is a bit like flying a kite from my perspective, is to increase my battery storage and to charge the bollox out of it between 0030 and 0430 - hopefully charging it enough to last the whole day and provide electricity at @15p per kw. 

will it work - i am sure it will, is it going to be cost effective ...... thats where the doubts come in - am i spending @£2k+ to save £3 per day for 140 days of the year? is it really worth it?

the COSY option really doesnt work for night storage heaters as they charge 0030 until 0700 and most of their charge is for the first few hours and basically fully charged within the first four hours, though when writing this its made me consider whether i could get them to adjust my time clock - so the cosy option might work for me.

re your 27kw of battery storage and the 'wish' to charge it - have you considered a large inverter or adding another one so you can fully charge within the shorter time period? i changed from a 3.5 kw to a 5.5kw so i could achieve a higher charging capacity (perhaps i should have gone for an 8kw, but time will tell) 

i have sent an email this morning asking if my economy seven timeclock can be altered to the Cosy Octopus times, that way i can recharge my heating during the two time periods and also my storage battery - then when the peak period kicks in my battery will provide the power and i wont need to use any peak power 

it states that i need to have a heat pump installed under MCS, yet octopus have stated they no longer require MCS for solar panel? i actually do have a 'heat pump', but its an air to air type inverter - i wonder if that will count/qualify as a heat pump, after all, it works exactly the same way, extracting heat from the outside air?

not holding my breath, but if it is possible (and i dont see why not) then it could be the way forward, certainly for me!

@misterb Your night store system does rather tie you to certain hours, fortunately, the Powerwalls are not dictating times for charging and I am able to fully charge them in under three hours as they accept a 10 kW/h charge. I’ve only been on Cosy since Friday but, so far it has been cheaper than the cheapest half hour that Agile has offered. 😉 Regards, Toodles.

@toodles charge rate one of the best bits about powerwall, part of why I went for it over others. 5kw PER powerwall. I have 3 so can (and do) pull 15kw to grid charge them during off-peak. and that is enough to supply any sane house load peak (I've broken through 10kw briefly with everything on).

to show how you can make best use of them with the heat pump: Yesterday evening from 9pm to 1130pm was the first time I've had to buy any on-peak electricity at all since I went to a fully electric house in march last year. heat pump COP dropped due to it being brass-monkey weather , sub zero morning, and zero sun where we are.

@iancalderbank Thank you Ian, I am hoping to contain my needs within the 6 hours per day of the lowest tariff; as such, I have described the other time periods as ‘peak’ as I found that describing the middle tariff as anything less than peak allowed Tesla to start running from grid supply even though the battery had near full capacity at the time. My Daikin pump has consumed 24 kW/h on the coldest day so far and this has been spread across two charges so no deep discharges as yet. With 10kW/h going to Powerwalls plus 3 kW/h to supply the Sunamp Thermino and perhaps another 2 - 3 kW/h for the heat pump and general house load, my maximum load is something like 15 kW/h for a while each day during the lowest charge tariff. I have also seen the cube root of s*d all from the PV in the last month or two. :-(((. Regards, Toodles.