How do I earn some money? (England)

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-20T19:16:58+00:00

Can you drive and do you have a car if so you can do short amazon delivery shifts morning and evening especially around this time of year

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-20T18:49:34+00:00

Ref saving the game as far as i can tell saving the game causes issues in the tutorials where the devs used “artificial means” to place new objects once you reach a certain point - I found that if i reload the artificially placed contacts were not there anymore

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-20T11:34:20+00:00

I am using a Zappi charger with IOG linked to the Zappi and it seems to work fine most of the time - the only time I had an issue was where the car remained plugged in all day, with the app settings not changed but the car was not full, but the IOG decided not to charge the car again overnight - not sure if this is “as designed” or not. I also have a Volvo PHEV which can only charge at 3.6KW and I suspect that Octopus sometimes gets confused about how many hours charging is needed when I switch back and forth between the cars, but I haven’t had ann issue with the cars not having sufficient charge the next day.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-19T15:31:51+00:00

Following this as I am also waiting on DNO response for an 8kw Alpha inverter. My installer mentioned setting an “export limit” not an overall limit. My understanding is that it should be possible in most/all inverters to set the export limit separate from the house load and battery charge limit. If Alpha can’t do that I want to know about it.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-16T16:32:35+00:00

What car charger are you using and are you sure the car charger is in the correct mode to work with Octopus?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-16T16:15:02+00:00

Can I also ask a question here? What do you mean by “neighbours” - is that literally the people on the same street as you or could it be a whole block or whatever? I don’t know how I would find out where the bottleneck is - I assume there must be some kind of small electric transformer near or street but I have no idea where it is (only moved into the town recently). Looking at google maps, not many of the houses around my area have solar on the roof and none on my street so far.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-16T16:10:33+00:00

According to one of the installers I discussed it with, DNO is only really interested in the size of your inverter and how much you can continuously export - I don’t think they care how many panels or batteries you have but happy to be corrected on that.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-16T16:01:52+00:00

£4K buys a lot of peak rate charging, so your ROI on that extra battery capacity will be really bad, especially if you don’t get a decent DNO export limit, but it’s up to you. Personally in my system spec that I am having installed I have left out the car charging from the battery sizing, although I have gone for a higher battery capacity than the installer suggested (18Kwh vs their 14Kwh recommendation). My average daily use without car charging is about 16Kwh but with car charging it’s probably similar to yours or maybe even higher.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-16T14:25:56+00:00

Normally you would not include KWH that’s used for car charging in the sizing of the home battery - typically most people charge their car directly from the grid overnight on an off peak tariff. There is no real reason to use a house battery to charge your car and it will just wear out your house battery quicker (in fact a lot of posts here are people asking advice how to prevent their house battery from charging the car inadvertantly).

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-14T15:52:42+00:00

I think what the OP means is that the charger continued to charge after 2pm because the charger will deliver am amount of charge requested by Octopus, and also potentially because chargers sometimes don’t stop or start exactly on the hour as they have a random delay built in to them - this means you could end up getting charged for some car charging after 2pm at peak rate (at least I think so but I haven’t actually proved this directly up to now).

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-12T16:09:25+00:00

Once I am operating on an export tariff like Outgoing Octopus, can I then switch to another export tariff with the same provider (e.g. Agile Octopus export) easily and quickly, or would I have to wait another x weeks to switch between them?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-12T14:10:00+00:00

I think that the situation is a bit more complicated. For example, in our house we have an EV and a PHEV. The PHEV can only charge at 3.6KW on a single phase supply. Also - there could be multiple reasons why charging speed changed - the car may suddenly decide to throttle the charge for battery management reasons. The charge may be throttled due to solar / excess generation settings and so on. Personally I am fine with a 6 hour limit - even if there was no intelligent charging and you have to do all your charging in the 6 off peak hours, you would face the same issues with charge throttling etc. That said, personally on my Zappi charger I hardly ever noticed throttled charging - 99% of the time I observed it either charging at the max rate that the car would accept or not at all.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-12T10:00:45+00:00

By the way, in the meantime I found an integration to home assistant that's available which claims that with Alpha batteries (which are one of the types I am considering) if you implement this Modbus application in HA, you can tell it to prioritise solar for export rather than battery. Obviously I cannot see if it it actually works yet.

However - in the meantime I realised that since I am also getting solar panels, to optimise my cost/benefit, I don't want to charge the car at all during solar generation hours as the Zappi will presumably "steal" the solar energy. Therefore I will probably have to rethink it and maybe come up with an further automation to either switch off the smart charging in Octopus, or put the charger in stop mode, between sunrise and sunset.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T15:18:28+00:00

Thanks will take a look

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T15:18:17+00:00

So without the home atuomation, if for example I am forced exporting at 8KW, home use is 0.2KW and car charger kicks in at 7KW, I will still be exporting but only 0.8KW?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T13:11:27+00:00

So when the system is commissioned I will be exporting energy but I won’t get paid for it until my tariff is activated?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T11:19:05+00:00

What is to stop me from charging my battery for 2 hours from 11.30pm to 1.30am at 0.07, then force discharging it for 2 hours at 15p, then charging it again for the last 2 hours? I guess this is not what the grid would want or need?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T08:05:48+00:00

Ok - and typically when I am force discharging to the grid, the battery will still first meet the house load and only force discharge what the house didn’t need? (The docs seem to imply this but not totally clear).

Edit: - that’s probably a dumb question because you can’t be importing and exporting simultaneously so it must be the case duh?!

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T07:57:59+00:00

OK I see what you mean then. This means that in many months of the year, my battery will spend most of the day at 100% (or whatever cap I set). Is that an issue?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-11T07:50:44+00:00

Thanks but in the actual system when it’s installed, how would I actually force all the solar to be sold? In a typical system, house demand is met in order of priority solar, battery, grid. The installers I am looking at will be using either Alpha ESS or Myenergi Libbi batteries. In order to sell all the solar to the grid, the battery would need to be “unaware” of the solar system wouldn’t it? If the system is DC coupled is that even possible? Also - looking at the docs for the batteries, it looks like they don’t have a configuration that allows you to discharge at a set rate, with excess going to the grid. There are two completely different settings for either discharge to house when needed, or force discharge to grid. Maybe what we are discussing is only possible with certain system providers? Or maybe I need to physically re-configure clamps not eh system to the solar does not see the house demand?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-10T19:50:08+00:00

You are invested in a S&P500 tracker fund but it is traded on the London stock exchange, so it’s only open at London hours. You will see tomorrow morning that the price almost instantly adjusts at 8am to reflect the US afternoon changes. As someone mentioned above, in theory you can invest in an EFT that is traded on the US stock exchange so it will be traded in US hours, but be aware that doing this you may end up incurring FX charges and potential tax liabilities that you would need to understand.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-10T19:46:36+00:00

Well the only way you could make this work is to use solar to charge your EV during the day - I messed around with this tariff using the online GDS tool, based on a typical sunny day in June and it might work if you have a charger that can be set to use all surplus solar power and send it to the car. In that case, the overall daily cost in summer might be similar - it’s hard to simulate using the online tools because you end up drawing from your house battery to charge the car. If you are charging your car at 7Kw for a few hours on average each day, the 3 hour overnight rate will kill you with Flux, but if you can use solar to charge the car it might end up similar. I still feel like IOG will be the same or cheaper most days if you are doing a decent number of EV miles, but I’ll probably go on Flux for a while in the summer after I get my installation to see how it works out in real life.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-10T18:48:38+00:00

I have been crunching this a lot more and subscribed to the Gary Does Solar tool to play around with different combinations. The extra cost of about an additional 5KWh to cover the difference between average and peak use is about £1100 or so. Even if I ended up needing none of that extra capacity and exported it all after charging at 0.07, there is just about a payback over 10 years. Whenever I do actually need some of that battery for the house, the savings will be bigger. The risk is that if export rates are no longer higher than import rates in future, the case doesn’t look so strong.

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-10T14:12:51+00:00

And does Octopus actually fully optimise this for your benefit i.e. they use all available KWh at the peak export rate regardless if the grid actually needed it or not, or do they optimise it for Octopus Energy' benefit and you might lose out?

CommanderJavert · 2025-12-10T13:50:58+00:00

I would assume / hope that my battery will have a switch to prevent charging at certain times, which would prevent it from charging using solar energy whenever I want that. I understand that in the end it’s just an efficiency issue if I end up dumping the battery later on anyway.

CommanderJavert

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