Not sure if I am allowed to tell about this but it's so amazing

[TheEponymousGrub]

Sorry for the crappy clickbaity title but this might be considered advertising so it could be pulled. We shall see, but in the meantime:

We recently got solar panels and they mentioned that even if you aren't getting panels, it's really worth getting the BATTERY installed, and changing to Economy 7 supply. Then, you charge the battery overnight at discount rate, and use it in the daytime, instead of buying power at full price.

Our battery cost £1200. Economy 7 power is 12p/unit at night whereas "normal" supply is 24p/unit (those prices are from SSE Airtricity today) so if your bill was £100/month, you'd save half of that and recoup the cost of the battery in 24 months. After that, your power is half price.

The lady who told me this knew I was after panels so this wasn't especially relevant to me, but I think she just wanted to tell everyone. I can understand that and here I am sharing it here!

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Updated by MNHQ
Landed on this page in search of solar panel advice? Find our guide to installing solar panels in your home in the UK. HTH!

oh poo. It's still pretty good though - cheaper than panels and pays for itself in less time.

I was excited for batteries that cheep 😁

A heads up though for anyone who has an electric car, you can also use it as a house battery. So you can charge it up every night on the cheep EV tariff, and then use it in the day for house power if you know you won’t be driving far that day.

You can, @useuser76541055773,but last time I looked the software and hardware for that was £5000.

How long will the batteries lasts though? I'm not sure it's the best money saving idea, especially after the update re the real cost!

That's cool.

There should be second hand ev car batteries coming online at some point.

We have solar plus battery and also an electric car.

Solar only - you will save money on daytime bills but only if you are a high user during this period. If you are out at work all day you’d need to have some heavy loads or you are just exporting it to the grid for a pittance.

Solar plus battery - during the summer we can fill the battery very quickly during the day and use the stored energy overnight. In the depths of winter the battery doesn’t get as full and you tend to use more energy to keep warm and lit overnight so a small change in your bills.

Solar plus battery plus special tariff (EV or economy 7 style) - you can fill the battery up on cheap rates so best of both worlds. Over summer probably not that useful but in winter it is. You need a high load like EV charging or storage heaters to make the sums add up.

A cheap use of solar energy and easy add on is to divert it to an immersion heater. The aim for us (on an older style FIT) is to use as much energy that we produce as we can. Then to use as much paid for energy at the lowest rate.

@d20 Do you also use tariff like intelligent octopus? 6 hours of 7.5p/kWh for the whole house overnight, including charging the car, battery etc.

They've now allowed people to use octopus fixed outgoing with it. So 15p/kWh export, which means that if you put too much charge into your battery overnight, at least you can export it back for a bit of a profit. There's generally around a 10% loss in efficiency doing this, so you don't make 7.5p/kWh back.

Doh. I just saw you are on an old FIT.

@OhYouBadBadKitten yeah it’s mind blowing trying to chose a tariff when you add in your own energy usage, one EV that’s compatible with intelligent and one that’s not, battery capacity, FIT, the weather lol.

I think as battery technology improves having a house battery will become common. It's not just that it saves money by storing the cheaper electricity, it would also be good for the grid by levelling out the demand. Currently we need to have the capacity to generate enough electricity to meet peak demand but the capacity isn't needed all the time, just for a few hours a day. If a lot of households and businesses had batteries then electricity could be generated at a much more constant rate, and therefore probably more efficiently.

Plus there is a huge advantage than in cases of loss of connection, eg storms, households would still have power while the grid was being repaired. If you store enough for one day's normal usage then you could probably get three or four days of careful usage out of it and you wouldn't lose the contents of your freezer etc.

I agree @BlackAmericanoNoSugar we've had solar and battery for a few months and it's really opened my eyes to how we use energy and the potential, especially as EV usage grows.

I can imagine D20. We've not got an EV yet, but getting one if we could manage it would enable us to run the whole house on stored cheap energy.