Best Electricity Plan for new EV Owners

They don't work. You'd honestly need to be doing very little milage to make it work. We have two EVs and the reality is that they both need to be charged for up to 8 hours every second night.

When I worked it out it was cheaper to be on a 20c night rate than a 4 hour EV rate where I was paying a premium for the rest of the time the car was plugged in.

Yes, I think the unpredictability of weekends and longer trips makes the 4 hour plan hard to manage. I felt like we were constantly adjusting timers in each of the cars and some days one car might run a little too low as a result of a narrow charging window the night before. Even with one car sitting idle for a few days and the second car plugged in every second or third night, I couldn't get it to work.

The 19.6c night rate for 9 hours on Energias Smart Data plan is the best I could find. I think ive a small discount on that too making it around 18.5c. I think Bord Gais had something decent too around the time I changed. The better rates tend to move around between suppliers. Last year everyone was on an SSE plan but they started price gouging customers back in August and their feed in system is also a bit dodgy because they only pay out twice a year. Im still waiting on them to pay me for feed in from May-September 2023. My old account shows no sign of them doing this without ringing them.

I was tricking around on the BG site last night. In the discount drop down menu for 24hr electricity you can select 40% discount giving a rate of 24c, you can't go above 20% discount on any of the other plans, I'm sorry now I didn't go ahead and sign up, they probably wouldn't give it to me.

Yes the low rate for a few hours is made to look attractive but you would need to be quite disciplined to maximise on it.

We use a lot of showers and appliances from about 7am before the PV starts to kick in which would be at high rates if we went for the ultra low cost for a few hours.

We swap cars every second night on the same charger. One of the cars has a 77kwh battery and charges relatively fast. The other car with a 67kwh battery is relatively slow at charging, also affected by the brand of car. I average about 600km per week in the car with the smaller battery. My wife averages around 300km per week, her week varying more than mine.

Yes I have actually! I was just talking to them today about it. I recently switched to the EV Drive Plan and couldn't understand why I was seeing a "peak" time usage so I asked them about it. They said their usage section shows the data as collected by ESBN. So while you see 4 tariff bands on usage, you are only charged for the applicable usage as per your plan. It's a work in progress apparently. Very poor UI.

I had another gander using the phone. Select the menu on the left, our tariffs explained, then you can select the discount from the drop down menu, I think it's only there to torment me, sorry about that I thought I had gotten lucky there.

The Smart EV rates also don't suit early risers! I leave for work at 4:45am so, a smart meter is not an option for EV Charging. DN meter works best for me

Intrigued also, we have 2EV’s, Andersen A2 charger, the E Niro charges at a max of 6.8kw, and my i3 charges at a max of 7.1 kw, and its not load balancing, its always been like this, but thats a relatively small <5% difference, which i have always put down to better German engineering !

I think some EVs are limited to 30A so that would be the 6.8kW.

Others would charge at 31A or 32A but you’d hardly notice the difference between those because, as you said, it’s only 5% difference. Ndos mentions it being “relatively slow” so it must be much slower to notice it.

Just wondering if anyone can help on this? The Energia 8c 4 hour plan is limited to 500kw a month? So 500kw, assuming what, 17kw per 100km(???) for city type driving gives you a little under 3,000km a month? Would that be correct?

Does anyone then know if you use more than the 500kw what the rate is? I find their website very difficult to understand.....

Which isn't bad in fairness, I'm strongly thinking of going for it, the standing charge is good too.

I'm using about 35-40Kw a week in the car I'd never come near the 500Kw limit.

Even if I could persuade the missus to set the dishwasher for the window and in the summer use the immersion to heat the water instead of using the oil I'd be sorted.