Time of Use vs Flat Rate Electricity – which is cheaper?

Electricity retailers sometimes give the choice of paying a flat rate for electricity, or so called Time of Use (ToU) rate. Time of use pricing usually has peak, off-peak and shoulder prices. This can also vary by time of year and also weekend or weekday.

For the consumer, Time of Use pricing may be beneficial if consumption can be shifted to off-peak hours, but this is potentially offset by more expensive rates during peak times.

Assuming a retailer gives the ability to choose – which one is cheaper?

Solution

This web calculator gives the ability to simulate costs based on historical meter data usage and configurable pricing and peak/off-peak definition:

https://niftimus.github.io/EnergyAnalyser/

Energy Analyser – Screenshot

Note: Beta only. Default prices may be different depending on the retailer or electricity plan, but the sliders allow adjustment to configure unit prices to match any real plan for comparison.

Features

• Calculate costs, potential savings and get a recommendation:
  
• Fully client-side, JavaScript and HTML – no server upload required
• Ability to drag-and-drop upload a Victorian Energy Compare formatted CSV:
  
• Focus on a particular date range within the uploaded meter data:
  
• Ability to configure time of use definitions (i.e. peak, off-peak and shoulder times):
  

Potential future improvements

The following future improvements could make the solution more useful:

• Cope with different data formats (different States’ data)
• Ability to compare two (or n) different plans
• Automatic comparison of available plans from multiple retailers (pulling prices automatically)
• Inclusion of solar feed-in tariff as a comparison point
• Provide recommendations for changing energy usage behaviour
• Simulate the impact of having a home battery

Creating a virtual solar PV plug for EV charging – Part 2

In Part 1 we explored the idea of using a Smart Plug as well as home solar monitoring to save money when charging a plug in hybrid car.

This post details a technical approach so the plug only turns on when excess solar is available.

The code

See here for the code on GitHub:

https://github.com/niftimus/SmartPlugAutomate

Notes:

• The code is experimental and proof of concept only – it has not been fully tested
• The code runs as a Linux service
• It features a web UI
• It checks home energy consumption and decides whether to turn the plug on or off based on a threshold

The logic

For each check interval the code checks the current state of the plug and decides whether to:

• Do nothing
• Leave on
• Leave off
• Turn on
• Turn off

Here’s a flowchart showing the decision-making process:

The Web UI

The features

• Ability to disable / enable automatic control
  • This is useful where the plug needs to be manually controlled via its physical button
• Configurable Min power threshold
  • This is useful where it’s acceptable to use some grid power as well as solar (e.g. partly cloudy weekends with cheaper electricity rates)
• Minimum on / off buffer periods to reduce switching (e.g. for devices which do not benefit from being powered on and off continually)
• Monitoring messages to see how many times the switch has been controlled and its last state
• Overall net ( W )
  • Useful for seeing current net household energy consumption
• Automatic recovery if the plug, solar monitoring API or Wifi network goes offline temporarily

The result

So far this solution works great.

On a partially cloudy day, the plug automatically turns on or off once excess solar drops below the min power threshold. Similarly, the plug will turn off when household consumption is high – for example, during the heating cycle of a washing machine / dishwasher or when an electric kettle is used.

We got an interesting email from our electricity retailer after setting up this solution:

Email from our electricity retailer

The message indicates we have successfully boosted our self-consumption – i.e. more solar energy is being self-consumed rather than being exported to the grid, giving the appearance to the retailer that the solar PV system is underperforming. Success!

Conclusion

This is not quite as good as having a home battery or a dedicated (and much more refined) device like the Zappi, however it comes close. It is a great way to boost self-consumption of excess solar PV energy using software and a low-cost smart plug. With around a year of weekly charging, this solution can pay for the cost of the smart plug by reducing the effective cost of electricity.