Smart Tariff Unit Rates

Anyone checked or done the sums what is the best going rate at the moment for smart meters? My contract finishes in couple weeks so I started looking around. Since I have no EV but do have batteries I would like to avail of cheap night charging.

So how is it supposed to know if you are charging an EV or running the dishwasher? How smart is it? or are we saying it cant differentiate?

An effective 4.6c night rate is good!

Has anyone on the standard 24 hr rate seen any savings switching to a smart plan? Bar the usual fridge stuff nothing is used during the day

Thankfully there is no fair usage with this bord gais plan. Their "free" sat/sun plan used to have a cap but not sure now since they changed the plans recently but this ev one doesn't have one.

3 hours comfortably charges 10kw of batteries and their day plan is 18c which beats many of the standard and 24 HR plans day rates so happy enough with this if stays at this price.

Noticed in the energia ev plan too it says you don't need to own an ev to avail of it

Had some time today and started doing my calculations. Since I have detailed stats, I can see how much I use at any time through the day. I took BordGais EV plan to see how it would work for me. Here are my numbers:

I import ~3000kWh a year, the rest comes from PV. On a standard 24h rate this would be ~€554.7 + standing charge per year. My day patterns are 13% Night rate, 69% Day rate, 12% Peak rate, 6% EV rate. On EV plan this would come to €552.17 per year. This looks close but standing charge for EV plan is €112 more than standard plan, so I actually losing money. I have 10kWh battery so I could use cheap EV rate to charge it. But to break even I would need to shift ~800kWh/40% from day rate to EV rate. Since I cannot fully discharge the battery and also there will be charging/discharging losses I will get 8kWh out of it a day. This means that I need to charge it 100days. To see minimal savings, I estimate I would need to shift 50% of day rate to EV rate. I am really struggling to see financial sense in getting EV plan. I hope someone can find some holes in my math.

Changing behavior is not a problem and my house is already streamlined and automated to save as much as possible. There is so much you can do during night. I have looked at dishwasher and washing machine and these account to ~300kWh a year and normally I run them when it is sunny. The highest users are hob and oven and these are not going to move to EV/night rate. During cooking multiple appliances are used and that usually goes above 3kW that my inverter can take from battery. Some savings can be achieved but not much. The goal is not to break even but to save and with current "smart" pricing it is hard target to achieve.

A lot of that oven and hob usage would be at the peak rate. The EV rate does not seem to make sense for you.

Electric Ireland told me this over the phone too that once moved to a smart plan configuration in the system you can't go back to standard plans

Same story here with Electric Ireland but I haven’t moved to a smart plan - hoping when contract is up that other providers will offer to help if I switch to them

Indeed. From what I can see, they're alone in having such an offer. On the surface, it's preferable to the equivalent traditional 24 hr tariff (due to the additional data it makes available), but not really if opting for it forever locks you into smart plans. Obviously their offer price will cease after a year, so then or would become a case of picking from the smart plans with inflated day/night/peak prices from other suppliers.

I just talked to them earlier today (after first having the connection dropped 8 times due to issues on their side), and cancelled my switch. They confirmed that once I go smart, I can't go back, but failed to explain how that makes any sense. They also seemed to think people would opt for their smart plans because they give them the ability to select the billing day-of-the-month. As if that's worth paying a premium for...

I'll probably pick their equivalent trading tariff now instead, but apparently I have to wait 24 hours now before I can sign up again after cancelling the initial switch...

So I went with 'smart' plan and started adjusting my usage, it is still work in progress but here are the stats. This is just for one day but usage patterns should be the similar.

As can be seen in charts below. 54% comes from cheapest EV rate 2-5 for battery charging and the batteries are then used through the day to minimize usage of other tariffs. Then comes Day rate and most of this is used after 19:00 with TVs, cup of tea, PCs etc. The amount of electricity coming from sun is the one that I have no control of. I was able to lower down the peak usage to minimum but if there is cooking going on, I cannot avoid this even with charged batteries as I can only pull 3kW max. out of them. The night usage is very low but this is because 5-8am the batteries are used since I can only have one schedule on inverter for charging. I think I have it sorted now with automation but need testing.

The interesting thing is how charts are different from cost perspective.

Compared to single tariff rate I am saving 45% a day but there is massive standing charge for 'smart' tariff. Think I should break even in 100 days if all goes well 🤞