So Octopus Energy have revised their Octopus Cosy tariff from the 5th of July 2024 and it going to be a game changer for those of you that are using solar panels and home battery storage systems, especially the latter.
No Octopus Cosy is supposed to be a tariff reserved for people with heat pumps but if you can get on it then it is a fantastic all year round tariff which did feature double dip pricing, but now its even better with the introduction of triple dip pricing, and if your not sure what I am on about and why this is so relevant let me explain.
Octopus Cosy was traditionally a reasonably good tariff which gave double dip pricing (so two points in the day when you could charge your batteries or run your heat pump on super cheap electricity), now these times were 04:00 – 07:00 in the morning and 13:00 to 16:00 in the afternoon (see below), meaning if you had a solar battery system you could top up your batteries on the cheap in the morning and then again in the afternoon before the evening peak (the afternoon slot not being that relevant in summer as you would be charging from your solar panels anyway).
Well no this tariff has changed and its changed for the better with the introduction of triple dip pricing for three cheap rate electricity periods which you can utilise to charge your batteries (see below).
So what does this mean? Well to see why this third period is really significant you need to look at the rates but not old the Octopus Cosy rates but also the available feed in tariff rates.
The above combination of Cosy Octopus and Cosy Flux will allow you to charge your battery first thing in the morning (between 4am and 7am), run from solar during the day selling your excess, recharge the battery if needed (between 1pm and 4pm), then sell a chunk of your stored power at a higher rate (between 4pm and 7pm) then run from the remainder of your battery until 10pm at which point you can top up your battery again using that third charging period, instead of having to reserve all your power to get you through until 4am the next day.
Of course you are selling your excess during the day at 14.49 p/kwh (you buy power at 10.74 p/kwh during the three charging periods) and then during the peak period you cal sell at 21.81 p/kwh pretty much doubling your money on any bought energy.
Using this charge-run-charge-sell-charge system you should be able to reduce you electricity usage to zero or even as i am run it at a profit, even in winter…
I have annotated below my charging schedule so you can create you own.
The above schedule suits my own system which 14 * 450w solar panels with a 14.4kw battery storage system.
The three cosy octopus standard rate periods (shown in blue) are set as self-use so we are taking our power from the battery 1st and the mains if that runs out (meaning 20% left in the battery, the Min SOC on grid), which it generally doesn’t.
Then you have the three Cosy dip pricing periods during these periods we are charging the battery up to 100% (Max SOC).
And then during the peak rate period between 16:00 and 19:00 we sell back to the grid (shown in the red line) from the battery making us 10 p/kwh on each kwh we sell, we are only running the inverter at 2200W (50% of its capacity) when selling back to the grid, and only allowing the battery to go down to 50% (Forced Discharge SOC) we need something left in the battery to get us through until 10pm.
This schedule or something similar should allow you to reduce your electricity bills to zero and even cover your standing charges as-well. if not even have you making a little money each day.
I am hoping the above makes sense, but if you have any questions or want me to clarify anything please please please get in touch,
And if you are looking at moving your supplier over to Octopus Energy then please click this link and i will get a little something when you join up.
