Energy bills, government ‘help’ and the like

[phantasmagoriana]

Because the price cap SC you quote is an average and you're in Scotland, I suspect
See here for regional rates
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/what-are-the-price-cap-unit-rates-/#unitrates

So it is! I hadn't realised. That's a bit rubbish.

[Mrs Pingu]

Yes, one of the many shit things about the standing charge.

[felstedrider]

There’s a couple of people quoting one year fixes but they’re very close to the current cap.

The cap goes up in Jan as wholesale prices bumped up at the end of the assessment window.  They have largely retreated since then and we’re then into the Summer season.  I can’t see the incentive to fix unless customers think prices will roof again.  The start up supplier I met earlier in the week is only offering variable rates.

[Mrs Pingu]

I fixed gas last month but mainly because I don't trust Pootin or some other head case/tyrant/whatever not to kick off something even more bonkers next year.

[felstedrider]

I fixed gas last month but mainly because I don't trust Pootin or some other head case/tyrant/whatever not to kick off something even more bonkers next year.

In general the gas market has had most of the bad news it’s likely to get.  Storage is at healthy levels.

The risk for the rest of this Winter is just around weather.  Sustained cold would cause a problem as there’s not that much slack.  Longer term the risk is around LNG flows.  If demand and prices in Asia pick up then the movement could go that way instead of to Europe.

[Mr Larrington]

Just had a letter from Ovo saying they’re sorry I'm leaving and can we have £42 please.  Since I've never bought electricity, or indeed anything else, from them I'm a bit puzzled.

[felstedrider]

Just had a letter from Ovo saying they’re sorry I'm leaving and can we have £42 please.  Since I've never bought electricity, or indeed anything else, from them I'm a bit puzzled.

Erroneous transfers are all too common.  Check the supply address and the meter references (MPAN/MPRN).  They could have accidentally transferred you in and out and sent a bill based on estimates.

[Mr Larrington]

Their missive only has an account number, which is pretty meaningless.  I suppose I'll have to ring them and be subjected to terrible hold music because my call is important to them but not important enough to make them employ more people to answer the bloody phone

[Kim]

The Reassuringly Expensive Packet-Pushing Company of Bracknell, GREAT BRITAIN have an anti-slamming setting to prevent the broadbean equivalent of this sort of thing.  Something the energy suppliers could really do with, given that it seems to be a far bigger problem there.  (BTDT had no gas supplier for a couple of years.)

[felstedrider]

On the rare times I change supplier I ask them to confirm the meter IDs.   The response is usually 'oh don't worry we have picked them up from your address'.

Yeah, I just want to be doubly sure so how about you read them out to me ?

An old boss of mine had this happen and he was passed to 'the erroneous transfers team'.   I recall him talking about when a thing happened so often as to need a team to tidy it up.

[Auntie Helen]

Hive tells me that the indoor temperature fell from 19.3 deg C to 16.1 deg C between 0000 and 0600, when it was between -1 and 1 outside.  That's pretty average for a UK home.  But we are the worst in Europe.  It wouldn't be much over a 1 degree drop in Germany.  However, Germany is colder in winter so it's always been more important to insulate well.  Also, their housing stock is much newer, partly because of us   

Housing stock is also newer because new houses are considered good here (because of the insulation). My chap’s former house was from the 1970s which was a bit old, he said. My previous house had been from 1871 so that was good, I told him newer houses in the UK have walls made of cheese. It’s a weird mental switch I have to make to think new=good

[Cudzoziemiec]

Hive tells me that the indoor temperature fell from 19.3 deg C to 16.1 deg C between 0000 and 0600, when it was between -1 and 1 outside.  That's pretty average for a UK home.  But we are the worst in Europe.  It wouldn't be much over a 1 degree drop in Germany.  However, Germany is colder in winter so it's always been more important to insulate well.  Also, their housing stock is much newer, partly because of us   

Housing stock is also newer because new houses are considered good here (because of the insulation). My chap’s former house was from the 1970s which was a bit old, he said. My previous house had been from 1871 so that was good, I told him newer houses in the UK have walls made of cheese. It’s a weird mental switch I have to make to think new=good

Could this be an illustration of "progress"? I probably wouldn't know, I've been in Britain too long~

[Mrs Pingu]

Scot Gov have released a consultation on heating buildings for the future, which is interesting.
https://consult.gov.scot/energy-and-climate-change-directorate/proposals-for-a-heat-in-buildings-bill

[felstedrider]

Latest forecasts for the rest of the year :-

https://www.cornwall-insight.com/predictions-and-insights-into-the-default-tariff-cap/

Unit rates are now very slightly below the 3yr fix I took out at the end of 2021.   Standing charges remain higher, though.   It's marginal and there's exit fees on my deal, but I think it means we won't see step up in costs at the end of the contract.

[jsabine]

Thanks for that snippet - we were offered a 3 year fix at I guess much the same time, so have been slightly dreading what our post-October bills were going to look like.

[Jasmine]

"Good news, energy prices are going down on 1 April"
What that fails to say is that the standing charge is going up, again. North Wales daily charge is now 62.2p a day. For me, that's over a third of the bill. All the fixed deals have super high standing charges, so penalise low energy users.

[Lightning Phil]

Indeed, the standing charge ought to be lower, to reward low energy users.

[Mrs Pingu]

This has just reminded me to look up my Octopus bills, and indeed although my usage is visible in their app (suggesting they can read the meter) they don't appear to have billed me for electricity since November, which is when I asked them to put the gas on a fixed tariff...

[Wombat]

"Good news, energy prices are going down on 1 April"
What that fails to say is that the standing charge is going up, again. North Wales daily charge is now 62.2p a day. For me, that's over a third of the bill. All the fixed deals have super high standing charges, so penalise low energy users.

In my case I think its over half the bill, certainly in the summer.  In summer we normally use between 0.5 and 1 kWh, on account of the solar PV and the battery storage.  And this is in a house with electrically pumped water supply, and no gas.  It seems a lot to pay, for the privilege of being able to send them the electricity I generate but don't use.  At least since the battery installation there is less export, but previously we exported over twice what we actually used.  Thanks to the resistance to allowing the battery to actually power the house in a power cut, we were without, for a couple of hours today, as some twat mangled a power pole a little way away.

It does rather peeve me, losing generation because we are disconnected during a power cut.  I must investigate what it takes to allow it acting as backup, but it certainly won't be by the cretins who installed the battery system.

[HTFB]

You need significantly fancier kit to let you fail over to battery-only supply, as the house AC and the mains AC need to be exactly synchronised if ever they are connected together. I think our battery and inverter are "just another" circuit in the fusebox consumer unit, alongside the kitchen sockets and whatnot. A system that keeps going during a power cut would also need a chunky great off-switch relay on the mains side of the consumer unit, so that once the house has been separated from the mains there is no chance at all of the two coming back together until the appropriate gubbins has done its wizardry to bring them back in phase.

Or I suppose you could have two inverters, connecting mains->DC and DC->house, so you need never be synchronised at all.

[Mrs Pingu]

I read it explained as a sort of non return valve for electrons, so that people working on the supply side don't get zapped.

[aidan.f]

Incoming isolation prevents you trying to supply the 'ole neighbourhood with your weebly 3KW inverter.

Another gotcha is putting essential circuits onto your spangly new battery inverter without some sorta manual bypass back to mainz if your spangly battery inverter fails or you simply want to service it.

[grams]

Some of the fancier portable lithium/solar battery pack things have mains inputs and outputs, and act as passthroughs when mains is present and if the mains input disappear immediately switch on the inverter. If the mains returns the inverter will gradually change its frequency until they are in sync again, then it switches back to pass through mode.

Most of them aren't specced for powering a whole house, or easy to integrate.

[Kim]

I'd have thought a ker-chunk-ker-chunk changeover (interrupting the supply for the time it takes the contactor to do its thing, rather than trying to synchronise with the grid in island mode) would be perfectly sufficient for domestic purposes, on the basis that most electronics can cope with a dropout of a decent fraction of a second, and if you care that much about power cuts, you'd have the critical stuff on a UPS^[1].


_{[1] I have a UPS that operates as described by grams; does AC->DC->AC until the supply is in spec, then throws a relay to bypass mode to improve efficiency.}

[mrcharly-YHT]

I'm a bit astounded that this isn't standard.

For years, we lived on a boat connected to shore power. Power fed an inverter/charger, which charged batteries and supplied 240AC to the boat circuit. If the incoming supply failed, it simply switched over.

The switchover was so smooth, we didn't even notice that the mains power had gone one evening. Computers were running at the time and didn't glitch.

We had a 1200W version of one of these: https://www.victronenergy.com/inverters-chargers/multiplus-12v-24v-48v-800va-3kva

That Victron could take mains input, generator input or DC (from alternator, turbine or PV)