@mike-patrick, our new tariff is 19.5p/kWh, which makes our heat pump ridiculously expensive to run.

Received this email from Symbio this morning: 

We understand that we have sent you a renewal tariff on “1st August 2021” which will be effective from 1st September 2021, however, the UK has experienced an unprecedented increase in wholesale energy prices resulting in Ofgem allowing an increase in prices across the board for all energy companies. Unlike our contemporaries, we do not place customers on a Standard Variable Tariff (the highest tariff). On the contrary, we have absorbed as much of the cost of wholesale increases as possible. Your renewal tariff is lower than many if not all of our competitor’s renewal tariffs offered at this time.

We hope this is likely to be the last increase, in our humble opinion, we expect prices to start decreasing towards the beginning of 2022 and will pass these savings on. The current wholesale price of electricity is 100MWh (on average), while gas prices have reached a historic high. The impact of the pandemic is the driving force behind these price increases.

We appreciate your co-operation and support and we are pleased to inform you that we are still the Lowest-Priced Electricity Provider in the market, as we have been since 2019.

Our renewal tariffs are on average £350 - £400 cheaper than the ‘Big 6 Energy suppliers’ for high users. Enough for a short break or a PlayStation even.

Your New Electricity Tariff Details:

Meter Type: Single Rate

I signed up for octopus last month:

Octopus Price Promise July 2021 v1

Fixed term ends 30/09/2023

Tariff rate: 18p/kWh

Standing charge: 23.06p/day

Just checked again to see what the rates are if i switched today... OUCH

⚡ Electricity

Daily standing charge	24.11p /day
Unit rate	20.11p /kWh
Exit fee	£0

Hi,

I moved to Avro Energy 3 months ago with a fixed price tariff of 16.15p per unit and a standing charge of 17.85p per day.

@derek-m I am waiting for my Octopus Go smart meter so I can take advantage of their Go tariff. 5p for 4 hrs a night and 15p for the rest of the day. Amazingly that is still the tariff price. I am going to fill my 14kw batteries and use those to offset the higher power use of the ASHP.

Honestly for people with heat pumps the EV tariffs seem the best in the market.

I'm on the Octopus tariff but dont benefit from any export as still waiting for the smart meter to be installed and I literally ask every month for them to do the install. Im on the Octopus tracker tariff which is 23.99p per kWh and 22.17p service charge. I think its rather high but we pay stupid amounts up here in the highlands. Thankfully I have solar to offset the cost. It thinks that my next 12 month cost will be £314 which is fairly good considering I have electric shower which is used everyday by 4 people and electric oven/hob which is used everyday. have Oil for heating. So far since 1st Feb I've consumed 3291.4 kWh of power but only imported and paid for 1618.5 so far my total cost for my electric since solar was installed is £221.13p for an fairly large electrical use house I think thats not to bad considering. also I have Exported (with no fees payment as not got a smart meter) 1332.3 kWh which at the standard 5p would have given me £66.61 rebate. If I had a smart meter I could have it a lot more efficient with timing and battery storage top up at the cheaper amount. I will add an iboost to the hot water to decrease the cost for that. 

@boblochinver so far this year generated 6,700kw, we have used 4,227kw, but only purchased 836kw - battery supplied 1,391kw (33% of total demand).

FiT payment: £489

Energy cost saved: £610

Energy purchased: £150

@batalto your setup sounds like a solar power station ! haha I dont get any Fit Payment as I didnt apply as was going to use it for airsource which i have for the time being decided to postpone. My solar array produced 3.6 MWh (since first of Feb this year) 

@boblochinver I expect I have a bigger set of panels than you - 8.4kw of panels and I also had 7kwh of battery, which I expanded in July to 14.2kwh.

It will be very interesting to see how much power I can suck in using Octopus Go at 5p and how that works with the ASHP. When its running full bore on a cold winters day I dont think it will provide more than 2-3hrs of heating, but at least it will be 1/3 the price for those hours and I can also top up the house over those hours too - that should cover 8hrs of the 24hrs on go/battery tariff.

@derek-m, my rate with Avro is horrible.

Solar PV (which I have previously rejected) is now looking more attractive.

I love reading about the Starship Enterprise approach with ASHP, Solar PV, batteries and a control sysytem integrating them all together. But I've had it with further capital investment in our heating system and the inevitable difficulty of finding an installer who knows what they are doing. Right now I'm just pleased that on a YTD comparison with last year my ASHP is running on fewer kWh. The price increases will of course more than wipe out any benefit.

Mike

@mike-patrick honestly it's no work. The solar inverter controls everything for me. Excess power, diverts to battery then it just draws from battery before it draws from grid. When the battery is full it dumps anything excess into the hot water tank.

The inverter also has a setting designed to charge from grid, you just tell it what time of day to do it.

If you have solar, a hybrid inverter, batteries and solar diverter make sense. That said, if was to get batteries I'd just order the cheap LiFePO4 batteries on AliExpress and a BMS. You can build a 10kwh system for around £2k. They will keep 80% capacity for 4000 cycles and even at reduced capacity after that point they are cheap as. I'd probably just tank up to something stupid, like 30kwh of storage and abuse the cheap EV tariffs.