[stevelup]

Bear in mind with Eon Next Drive you only get the discount on the car charging. You don't benefit from other load shifting like you do with the Octopus tariffs. So it depends really how much you charge -vs- load shift.

It also really depends how much you actually need to charge each night. You get four hours on Octopus Go so you could be topping up your car with 28kWh every night. Is that not enough?

Octopus standing charge is lower than Eon Next Drive, as is the peak rate by about 3p.

 

[petey_b]

Bear in mind with Eon Next Drive you only get the discount on the car charging. You don't benefit from other load shifting like you do with the Octopus tariffs. So it depends really how much you charge -vs- load shift.

It also really depends how much you actually need to charge each night. You get four hours on Octopus Go so you could be topping up your car with 28kWh every night. Is that not enough?

Octopus standing charge is lower than Eon Next Drive, as is the peak rate by about 3p.

Thanks Stevelup - interested though how they know whether it's EV charging or other usage overnight? Apart from scheduling charging during the 7 hr off peak period, Eon next doesn't seem to require a particular charger or car model to benefit from the off peak rate and I can't seen anything in the T&C's. I had assumed it was the same as Octopus Go in that you can run anything during that cheap period and benefit from the lower rate?

 

[stevelup]

There can't be much science to it. I expect they just limit you to 7.2kWh per hour at the cheaper rate.

You could probably set your car to charge at 16A instead and then run the dishwasher / dryer etc at the same time

But then you would be back at the same number of effective 'hours' as Octopus.

 

[Troughtastic]

The 4hr rate isn't limited to EVs, we set the timers on the dishwasher, washing machine, tumble dryer and even the pyrolytic oven cleaning programme during these hours. The car still draws 7.2kW throughout.

 

[stevelup]

I'm talking about the Eon product.

 

[Icesingh]

@Icesingh Octopus don’t do any dodgy shenanigans. They are totally trustworthy, transparent and honest.

There must be an explanation or some kind of mistake or misunderstanding.

Not had any issues with them prior to this, and I’ve been with them since they bought out my old supplier engie. Always had great service and been very transparent. Just found it very strange that my home got renewed on same rates and my parents home which renewed 2 months later was more expensive, and the cheaper tariff wasn’t listed.

There probably was a mistake or an accident but I didn’t raise with octopus as I switched to intelligent and kept my rates and got 2hrs extra of off peak rate.

below is a screenshot of the renewal email quotes and the intelligent prices I’m paying. The daily standing charge is the same as the flex tariff.

@Icesingh Octopus don’t do any dodgy shenanigans. They are totally trustworthy, transparent and honest.

There must be an explanation or some kind of mistake or misunderstanding.

Not had any issues with them prior to this, and I’ve been with them since they bought out my old supplier engie. Always had great service and been very transparent. Just found it very strange that my home got renewed on same rates and my parents home which renewed 2 months later was more expensive, and the cheaper tariff wasn’t listed.

There probably was a mistake or an accident but I didn’t raise with octopus as I switched to intelligent and kept my rates and got 2hrs extra of off peak rate.

 

[stevelup]

You chopped a bit off the bottom of that screenshot. The Go estimate was based on your actual usage. The Flexible quote is based upon 'industry average'.

Flexible is way more expensive than Go.

3161x30.6 = 967.26
3107x9.5= 295.16
365x47.95 = 175.01

Total on go £1437 as per their quote. You can see the maths works.

Now put the same numbers into Flexible...

3161x38.27 = 1209.71
3107x15.92 = 494.63
365x48.05 = 175.38

Total: £1879 - nothing like the estimate of £1388

It's not their fault, it's mandatory to quote like this, but they should make it clearer that the two quotes cannot be compared.

 

[P0L35T4R3]

The Eon Next drive tariff needs a compatible charger, the off peak rate only applies to EV charging monitored by the charger. You will only find this out after you start the sign up process which asks you to download the specific tariff’s app. Within the app you specify your charger, not many are compatible. octopus intelligent talks to either the car or the charger, you need at least one to be compatible on that tariff.

 

[petey_b]

The Eon Next drive tariff needs a compatible charger, the off peak rate only applies to EV charging monitored by the charger. You will only find this out after you start the sign up process which asks you to download the specific tariff’s app. Within the app you specify your charger, not many are compatible. octopus intelligent talks to either the car or the charger, you need at least one to be compatible on that tariff.

Thanks - that's very helpful. I tried emailing Eon Next customer services but they responded to say they didn't know and I would just have to sign up and read the T&Cs!! 🤔 Looking like the advice to stick with Octopus, even at a slightly higher cost maybe the best way forward.

 

[DiscoSteve]

My experience of Eon Next (the old NPower offering) is - keep well away - everything about them stinks, I walked away from them in disgust when we moved house and they started proceedings against me because THEY had cancelled my Direct Debit to them while I still had an outstanding payment to make. Shower of sh*t. I've been on Octous ever since and am about to switch onto the Go Tariff as, I cant switch to Octopus Intelligent as everyone knows, they don't support the Polestar 2 directly (especially with my BP Pulse charger)

 

[lovepastrami]

I'm going to go with Intelligent Octopus as I'm having the Ohme Pro charger installed soon, but currently I'm an Eon Next customer and asked them about the Next Drive tariff last week, this was their answer:

Thank you for contacting E.ON Next! The off peak rate would apply to all usage during the window, so you would be able to queue up washing and drying during this time. This is made up by having a slightly higher day rate in the day time. The idea is that a customer would have a timer on their chargers to only charge during the off peak hours to make use of the lower rate.

 

[Sargnarg the Hardgeharg]

Interesting. That's changed then becasue they used to be very explicit that only the EV charger would be at the cheaper rate. I guess they realised they need to compete.

 

[stevelup]

More likely they never got the crazy and almost impossible task of separating the EV charging cost from the rest of the usage working in a meaningful manner.

 

[SA69-ev]

I have had an email from Octopus saying that my Zappi charger is now acceptable to the Octopus Intelligent Go tariff.
It appears from the limited descriptions on the website that they take control of the charger via their app and that my Myenergi App becomes redundant.
So I have a couple of questions - does the Octopus App have an over-ride to allow top-up charging at anytime, not just during the cheap overnight hours, and also will the App allow the excess solar to divert to the charger - both of which my current Zappi will do
Many thanks for any feedback

 

[stevelup]

Yes, you can bump charge from the Octopus app.

Yes, solar excess charging will still work but actually you’re better off disabling it. Better to charge car overnight at 7.5p and then get max export during the day at 15p.

If you allow the car to soak up solar, it’s costing you 7.5p/kWh

 

[SA69-ev]

Thanks @stevelup - re: solar, a good point 👍

 

[stevelup]

By the way, should you do this, there's a bit of a trick needed. The Zappi needs to be in Eco+ mode to work with Intelligent Octopus, which does of course mean it will export excess solar.

What you need to do on the Zappi is change the Export Margin to a number higher than the export limit set on your inverter. I've got an 8kW inverter so have my Zappi set to 8100W.

 

[KingArthur]

Correct about the Zappi being in Eco+ mode, but I think Octopus controls this because I don't recall setting it myself but it is in Eco+ mode. I've also never fiddled with the Export Margin but my system works ok - perhaps this parameter was already set as required, I'm not sure.

The only tweak I've needed is to set the in-car charging schedule to coincide with the 11:30-05:30 cheap rate. This is because Intelligent Go will sometimes provide the cheap rate outside of the fixed overnight 6-hour period and in such cases my house battery ends up helping to charge the car instead of just the house, which drains it quickly.

So, I limit the car to only charge during the cheap 6-hour period and also the house battery during the same period. Outside of thse 6 hours the house battery can discharge to the house and can just about last all day, even at this time of the year if it's a sunny-ish day, so that I draw very little power from the grid at the peak rate. This has more than halved my electricity cost, even over winter. I'm already starting to export surplus to the grid on sunny days so by the time summer arrives I'm anticipating using no peak rate grid power at all. As you rightly say, there's no point using excess solar to charge the car when you can sell it for 15p/kWh and then charge the car overnight for 7.5p/kWh.

I wonder if there's some way to prevent the house battery providing power to the Zappi, but the above workaround seems to be fine for the time being.

 

[stevelup]

Yes, they change the charge mode to Eco+ automatically.

The reason you haven't had to tweak anything is because you've set a schedule so your car can't charge during the day when it's sunny!

There are many ways of preventing the house battery powering the Zappi and they vary in complexity, and depends on your setup. Pretty sure this has already been extensively discussed elsewhere but a couple of options:-

- If your wiring arrangement permits it, position the inverter and Zappi CTs in a way that the inverter CT does not see the car charger as a load. This will only be possible if your charger is on a separate consumer unit to your house CU, and it's connected before the Solar CU. It's unlikely to be an option that wouldn't involve work by an electrician.

- Home Assistant etc... In my case, I monitor whether or not Octopus are 'dispatching' a cheap slot, and if they are automatically sets my house batteries to charge as well. This has the added benefit of shifting -all- overnight house consumption to the cheap rate and ensuring the house battery is completely full at the end of each charging window. This relies on your inverter having a workable API... many don't.

 

[KingArthur]

I wondered about changing the CTs but the Zappi is connected to the main house CU.

Your previous comments about HA have inspired me but I confess that I'm still getting to grips with it. I've got HA up and running on a 'Green' hub and it is working ok but I'm still on the learning curve and have limited myself to playing with some smart plugs and some Shelly devices to monitor the flows and returns temperatures in our somewhat complicated heating system (4 zones, heat store with gas boiler and multi-fuel boiler stove inputs).

I have to say I'm not finding HA particularly easy and can't really see it being widely adopted outside of the techie/nerdy community. Certainly looks powerful though and definitely better than wasting time watching the telly!